But Ford still won enough votes on the first ballot in order to receive a majority. Now, parties aim to avoid a contested convention because a floor fight can leave their nominee bloodied and support splintered going into the general election. The last time a contested convention produced a winning U. Roosevelt in We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. Robert Taft held deeply different positions on international and domestic policies.
Yet the majority of Republicans respected the two men. Neither Eisenhower nor Taft used crude, bigoted language in public as Trump has done. Ideology divided the convention. Barry Goldwater and his movement conservatives defeated the Eastern establishment moderates. Despite Goldwater's well-known "extremism in the defense of liberty" words in his acceptance speech, he was liked as an individual and was not a Trump-style provocateur.
President Gerald Ford and California Gov. Ronald Reagan did not use bigoted and fascist rhetoric to inflame the convention. Heated battles were fought over issues. The majority of delegates respected both candidates even as most took sides on the platform. Trump has upended the Republican Party's institutional foundations, civil processes, and procedures and has degraded acceptable political language.
He has opened a Pandora's box containing suppressed hatred, anxieties, and fear, and is following in the tradition of George Wallace and Joe McCarthy.
Trump's backlash policies toward immigrants, people of color, women, and Muslims are being debated in Republican county and state meetings where convention delegates are being selected. What happens at the convention is anybody's guess. The campaigns make their judgments about which delegates will be the most steadfast weeks before the convention opens. Traditionally candidates have tried to predict a potential delegate's loyalty by the quality of his or her participation in the party.
Devotion to the Republican Party and its ability to win in the fall may remain the significant criteria for Kasich. But in Trump's case, potential delegates must exhibit a steadfastness to Trump the person, regardless of Trump's policies. For example, the delegate may disagree with Trump on keeping most Muslims out of the country but will ignore that personal disagreement and vote the way Trump's campaign dictates.
Of the three candidates, Cruz's delegates will be the most ideologically in sync with their candidate's policies. Cruz delegates will be nearly the opposite from Trump's in that while they back their man, it is positions on issues they support that will keep them loyal. This year's conflict resembles the convention fight between Eisenhower's forces — led by New York Gov.
Thomas E. Dewey — and those for Taft. Eisenhower and Taft were reasonable men, and their calm personalities played an important part in keeping their convention from ending in disaster. Trump's volatile personality will have the opposite effect. Bad blood existed between the supporters of Taft and Eisenhower, like the acidity developing between Trump and his opponents. Taft was a three-time loser beaten for the Republican nomination in ,, and The floor of the Republican Convention.
Many Republicans disliked Dewey, who had been the Republican candidate in and , for losing in to President Harry Truman.
Some Taft Republicans hated Dewey. When the Republican convention opened in Chicago on July 7, , Taft's forces controlled its machinery.
Taft led in committed delegates but not enough to be nominated. Some 70 were in dispute. Rules and credentials were the center of the struggle even as policy issues fueled intense emotion. There was even a bitter two-hour debate over which rules the convention should follow. I was on the floor of the convention during this debate. My father was a Utah Taft delegate. I was a volunteer teenager for Taft along with Yvonne Romney, the young daughter of the Taft western regional chairman; the campaign gave us signs reading, "Utah Bees Buzz For Taft.
As we innocently paraded in front of Dewey and his delegates, Illinois Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, in a booming voice from the podium, roused the Taft delegates and pointed his finger down at Dewey, shouting: "We followed you before, and you took us down the road to defeat. Don't do this to us. The convention erupted. Delegates booed, rising to their feet and screaming epithets at Dewey. Republicans' pent-up bitterness over the loss overflowed, resulting in long, heartrending screeching.
I too was overwhelmed and vehemently waved my sign at the New Yorkers. A man, at least a foot taller than my 5 feet, leaped out of the New York delegation, yelling, "Hey, girlie, how much did they pay you for that? Conventions move so quickly that losing campaigns usually don't take legal action when a "bound" delegate votes against the wishes of the campaign that sent her there I was furious. The idea that anyone would pay me to do my patriotic duty was more than I could stand.
I hit him with the sign, shouting something about how dare you say such things. My Taft buddies and a security guard escorted me gently off the floor. I was okay, more angry than frightened. Not until later when I learned of other violent incidents — less modest than mine — did I realize how dangerous the convention floor had become. At the end of the first ballot, Eisenhower was nine votes short of the required number for nomination.
Ford won and the party was unified. But, you know, to say — I have more than you, therefore I should get it? Go out and earn it! Go get what you need to be the legitimate winner! Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error.
Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. Bush Bill Clinton George H. Have you subscribed yet? There have been 15 multi-ballot Democratic national conventions. Only six resulted in a nominee that won the general election. Of the nine Republican presidential nominees selected at multi-ballot conventions, five went on to win the presidency.
The longest multi-ballot convention occurred in when the Democrats took ballots to nominate diplomat John Davis. He lost in the general election to Calvin Coolidge. National Party Conventions: Washington, D.
He was running, however, against sitting president William Howard Taft. Taft and his vice president, James Sherman, had used the relatively new technology of the telephone to strategize about how they would defeat Roosevelt at the convention. Roosevelt used the phone extensively as well, receiving updates on what was happening at the convention both from his home in Oyster Bay and from offices in New York City, before taking the unusual step in those days of going to Chicago to continue to follow the action.
It was to no avail, however. Though convention chairman Elihu Root had served as Roosevelt's secretary of war, he nevertheless presided over a decision that the rules of the convention would disallow the bulk of the Roosevelt delegates.
Absent his delegates, Roosevelt lost on the first ballot and would go on to run an unsuccessful third-party "Bull Moose" candidacy that ended up dragging down Taft in the fall election as well. He and his wife, Edith, were supposed to be relaxing while there, but it was to no avail, as Wilson ally William McAdoo kept the governor constantly updated by phone.
Wilson was even more actively involved once the Democratic convention began a few days later in Baltimore. Here, too, the eventual winner did not enter with the most delegates. Speaker of the House Champ Clark, a Missouri Democrat, not only started with the most delegates but managed to secure the majority of delegates on the 10th ballot.
Wilson was informed of this development over the phone by campaign manager William McCombs, who foolishly advised him to release his delegates at that point. At that time, a candidate needed two-thirds of the vote for the nomination, but every Democrat since who had secured a majority eventually won the nomination.
Wilson remarked unhappily, "so you think it is hopeless," and then acceded to the request. You have sold him out! Wilson then countermanded the order over the phone, and eventually went on to win the nomination on the 46th ballot. The technology of the time did not allow the convention to be broadcast live, but Wilson's speech accepting the nomination was captured on both film and phonograph.
As these incidents show, the expanded use of the telephone allowed candidates to engage in more active management of convention efforts than did telegraph messages such as Lincoln's pithy "Make no contracts that will bind me.
A major change in the use of technology at conventions, and therefore in the role of conventions themselves, took place in This would be the first year in which conventions would be covered live over the radio; approximately 20 stations broadcast the Cleveland Republican convention, mostly from the Northeast. This development accelerated a change in the fundamental purpose of conventions, from internal meetings designed to determine who would be the party standard-bearer to advertising opportunities for the party and its designee.
It may not have been fully apparent at the time, but the ability of conventions to project outward, and with it the ability of the American people to follow the ups and downs of conventions in a real-time, unfiltered way, was the most important factor in conventions becoming the foregone-conclusion spectacles that they have for the most part been since One of the first politicians to recognize the opportunity that radio brought with it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In many ways he was a politician designed for radio. Wheelchair bound, radio let Roosevelt communicate without anyone seeing that he could not walk or stand on his own. Roosevelt also understood how to use radio, which became apparent in that Madison Square Garden get-together. Radio highlighted the differences between old-style podium speakers, men like William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette, and those who understood the new medium.
But in doing so, the microphones failed to pick up his voice, and many of his words were therefore not broadcast over the radio. Roosevelt, in contrast, was a stationary speaker, in part because of his physical limitations, but also because he understood that he was speaking not just to the crowd in the hall but also to those in the radio audience.
With the home audience in mind, Roosevelt gave a well-received speech putting forth New York governor Al Smith's name for the nomination. This speech became famous for introducing the phrase "happy warrior" into the American political lexicon, a phrase that almost failed to make the speech's final cut.
It dates back to an William Wordsworth poem: "Who is the happy Warrior? Bush, and John Edwards. Roosevelt, however, was the first to use it in the political context, albeit somewhat reluctantly. New York lawyer Joseph Proskauer, Smith's campaign manager and the author of Roosevelt's draft address, inserted the phrase. Roosevelt, however, balked at using the "happy warrior" construction, claiming, "You can't give poetry to a political convention.
The speech struck a chord. Arthur Van Rensselaer heard the speech over the radio and wrote to Roosevelt, "You proved yourself to be quite the hero of the convention. The "happy warrior" phrase lived on in part because of radio's reach, and its ability to make convention rhetoric part of the national vocabulary.
Radio could elevate Roosevelt, but it could not resolve the problem of a divided Democratic Party. With little room for compromise, the balloting went on for 16 days, until the delegates eventually backed compromise candidate John W.
Davis, a former congressman from West Virginia and U. Davis actually had some understanding of the importance of radio. He argued that "the radio will completely change campaign methods I believe it will make the long speech impossible or inadvisable, and that the short speech will be the vogue.
Otherwise your audience might tune out on you without your knowing it. It's just a matter of turning a knob. Radio would be even more important in the less contentious convention of , which nominated Smith without all of the drama of At the event, Roosevelt gave an even better speech, and this time the convention was broadcast from coast to coast.
This constituted the third and last time Roosevelt would put forth Smith's name for the Democratic nomination, and the first time he would be successful in doing so. FDR tailored the nominating speech to cater to the radio audience, rather than just those listening in the convention hall. With this in mind, Roosevelt's speech was interspersed with more staccato pauses than one would typically employ in a recitation to the true believers.
Roosevelt told the attendees that Smith had "that quality of soul which makes a man loved As Time put it, "Compared to the common run of nominating effusions, Mr. Roosevelt's speech was as homo sapiens to the gibbering banderlog. It was only 12 years later that another new technology would again reshape the political convention.
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