“Senator, have you officially endorsed Harris for President yet?” another said.
“Of course I have,” Welch said. “You think I just fell out of a coconut tree?”
Back in his office, Welch talked on speakerphone with Elaine Kamarck, the D.N.C. leader. He had planned to ask her what might happen if there was an open Convention. But that was now academic: none of Harris’s potential opponents showed any interest in challenging her. “We’ll still find something to fight about,” Welch said.
“You remember ’80, don’t you, Peter?” Kamarck asked. “What a mess.” In 1980, when President Jimmy Carter ran for reëlection, Senator Ted Kennedy ran against him in the primary, lost, and took his challenge to the Convention, hoping to persuade delegates to switch to his side. This failed, because of the robot rule. After 1980, that rule was quietly replaced by Rule 13(J), which states that delegates “shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” It’s not clear what this means, because it has never been tested, but it seems to provide some wiggle room. If Biden had refused to bow out, and delegates decided that their “good conscience” required them to nominate someone else, could Party insiders have overpowered a President? “We’ve never had to find out,” Kamarck said. “So far, anyway.”
The special cocktails at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund party, on the first night of this year’s Democratic Convention, were the Madam President (vodka and muddled blackberries), the Brat (Midori sour), and the Coconuts for Kamala (coconut tequila, mint, and lime). The speakers were Sophia Bush (“Is she, like, a Bush Bush?” “No, she’s from ‘One Tree Hill’ ”) and Maura Healey (“What show is she from?” “She’s the governor of Massachusetts”). “We are not dangerous,” an m.c. said, introducing a lineup of drag performers. “We are love. We are America. But don’t mess with a drag queen, honey, or we will stomp you with our stiletto heels.”
Debra Cleaver, the founder of VoteAmerica and Vote.org, wore a button-down shirt and a Zabar’s baseball cap. “I can’t believe they’re letting straights in here,” she joked. “I think you should have to be at least ten per cent queer to enter.” She was with a straight friend, a woman wearing a jumpsuit, who did not take offense. After the Convention, the friend planned to go to Burning Man, where she had always wanted to run a voter-registration drive. She and Cleaver compared “playa names,” Burning Man monikers that carry over from year to year. “Mine is Rainbow,” Cleaver admitted. Her friend laughed and said, “Mine is Nancy Pelosi.”
The prime-time speeches and roll-call votes took place in the United Center, the arena where the Bulls play, but there were Convention-themed events across the city. The InterContinental hotel hosted nightly “Float While They Vote” happy hours in the pool, where civic-minded swimmers could keep up with a live stream of the proceedings while sipping “patriotic cocktails.” In Union Park, a few thousand pro-Palestinian protesters gathered for a March on the D.N.C., chanting about “Genocide Joe” and “Killer Kamala.” The Chicago History Museum hosted a walking tour, visiting the sites of Chicago Conventions from 1860 to 1968. In 1968, Welch was in Chicago, on leave from college, working as a housing organizer. “The protests then felt existential,” he told me. “The protesters now have reasonable demands, but it doesn’t feel like the end of the Party.”
The Pennsylvania delegation hosted a breakfast in a hotel ballroom where the first speaker, already a bit hoarse at seven in the morning, was Governor Josh Shapiro. “ ‘The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’ has a whole lot of letters in it, but we really live by three letters,” he told the delegates, and the TV cameras behind them. “G.S.D.: gettin’ stuff done.” Then came a procession of folksy Midwestern governors—J. B. Pritzker, of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, and the one who was recently named Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, of Minnesota. Walz tried to pander to the western Pennsylvanians by alluding to the beloved convenience-store chain Sheetz; this just annoyed the eastern Pennsylvanians, who heckled him with cries of “Wawa!” Rookie mistake.
During the day, the D.N.C. hosted panels and exhibitions in a vast convention center. There was an election-tech pavilion sponsored by Microsoft, a panel called “Go Dox Yourself” sponsored by Yahoo, and a display of Presidential footwear sponsored by a shoe company. One exhibit, called “The Coconut Club,” had three fake-brick walls with colorful signage. (Creed No. 1: “Be yourself and do you.”) I walked around to the open end, curious if there would be something on the inside—a café, or maybe a place to sit—but it was just an empty shell.
The last person I met at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund party was Dwayne Bensing, a lawyer from Delaware and one of the state’s nineteen delegates. Biden won all of Delaware’s Democratic delegates, of course—Joe Biden is Delaware politics—but, the day after the debate, Bensing started to have doubts. “I know I’m pledged to Biden, but fifty million people just saw what I saw,” Bensing recalled thinking. “Doesn’t the Party have to say something, for our own credibility?” On a Signal chat that included all of the Delaware delegates, he shared a piece by the Times editorial board calling on Biden to step aside, quoting a sentence that urged Democrats to “find the courage to speak plain truths.” The response in the chat was not enthusiastic. “The majority of the press are bought into optics over substance,” one delegate wrote. Bensing reread the rules, especially Rule 13(J). “I asked the people in charge, ‘If “all good conscience” doesn’t apply here, when would it apply?’ But they shut down that line of questioning pretty quick.” In the Signal chat, he posted polling data showing that most Democratic voters wanted Biden out of the race, but the other delegates dismissed the polls. Bensing told me, “If we’re not even going to be the ‘We believe in facts’ party, then what are we, exactly?”
In a sense, the apprehension about Biden’s renomination started before 2024. Thirteen years earlier, when Biden was Vice-President of the United States, he visited Minneapolis for a fund-raiser at the home of Dean Phillips, a moderate Democratic donor and an heir to a liquor fortune. “He was charming, in command—really impressive,” Phillips recalled recently. “He spent time with my kids, made them feel like they were the only people in the room.” Five years later, the morning after Donald Trump was elected, Phillips promised his teen-age daughters, as they wept at the breakfast table, that he would do something for what was being called the resistance. He ran for Congress, and won, flipping his suburban district from red to blue for the first time since 1960. During the 2020 Presidential campaign, when Biden said that he viewed himself as “a bridge” to the next generation of Party leaders, Phillips was reassured: “I thought, O.K., his age makes me a bit nervous, but he’ll make a fine one-term President.”
In 2021, Phillips watched Biden address the Democratic House caucus for half an hour, to ask for support for an infrastructure bill. “He was disjointed, wandering off script—it was really jarring,” Phillips recalled. “At the end, Pelosi went to the podium, looking frustrated, and said something like ‘If the President isn’t going to make his pitch, then I guess I’ll have to.’ It was sort of played off as a joke, but I did not find it funny.” (Andrew Bates, a White House staffer who was in the room, told me that the President did not go off message.)
Two years later, when Biden announced his reëlection campaign, Phillips said that, in private, most Democrats in Congress were “surprised, and quite disappointed.” (Other congressional Democrats told me that they had no reason to worry about Biden’s capacities at that point.) “It felt like we were sleepwalking into another 2016 disaster, only this time we knew it,” Phillips continued. He tried to encourage either Whitmer or Pritzker to run against Biden in the primary, but, he says, they wouldn’t even return his calls. He also contacted several Democratic consultants, some of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity, for fear of being blacklisted. “Their sense was, Yeah, we’re in big trouble, but it’s too late,” Phillips said. We were talking in Phillips’s tony town house, a few blocks from the Capitol—Edison bulbs, fresh white orchids, an original George McGovern campaign poster printed by Alexander Calder. Some members of Congress sleep on cots in their offices or room together, like middle-aged frat boys, but Phillips has the means, and the temperament, to live alone.
In October, 2023, Phillips announced that he would run for President himself. During our interview, he vacillated between framing his candidacy as purely symbolic (“I was less George Washington than Paul Revere, trying to sound the alarm”) and as an unlikely but genuine attempt to win. He didn’t come close, of course. He blames informal collusion—“a culture of silence” pervading the Democratic Party and its allies in the media, the consultancies, and the rest of the blob. “I couldn’t in good conscience ask my colleagues in Congress to support me—they’d be destroying their own careers,” he said. “I had a network of donors who could have financially supported the campaign, but most of them were too scared to touch it. If you want to maintain your access to power, you have every incentive not to speak up.”
When Phillips ran for President, he decided not to run for reëlection in the House. He’ll retire from politics in January. If he is aggrieved, he doesn’t show it. For the most part, he seems faintly embarrassed about the position he finds himself in: a literal conspiracy theorist, albeit one who plaintively insists that the conspiracy he’s disclosing is not only real but an open secret. “I don’t have direct evidence of coördination between the White House and MSNBC, for instance,” he told me. “But I have no doubt, if you just connect the dots, that there’s a lot of that sort of thing going on.” His campaign consultants were alumni from the John McCain, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders campaigns. “When I saw how hard the Democratic establishment was working to freeze me out, I tweeted an apology to Bernie,” Phillips told me. “The gist was, When you complained about Democratic collusion, I dismissed you as a sore loser, but you were absolutely right.”
