Democrats Don’t Have a Nominee Until Delegates Say So

Democrats across the party are worried that they have failed to choose the candidate most likely to defeat Donald Trump, and that it’s too late to do anything about it. But they need to grasp a critical point: Joe Biden is not yet the nominee of the Democratic Party.

The nominee is chosen at the national convention (this year, it’s in Chicago in mid-August). The path to an alternative nominee remains open, and a look at party rules, and the reasons for their adoption, offers a road map to how such a shift could happen.

As the party’s charter explains, “The national convention shall be the highest authority of the Democratic Party.” Under party rules, a nominee must win an absolute majority of delegates on a given presidential ballot at the convention. Now, with democracy in the balance, the convention can return to its old role of actually choosing the nominee. The party can still decide.

But it must decide alongside Mr. Biden. He has been a successful president, liked by progressives and moderates alike. An open rebellion against a president determined at all costs to run again will not succeed. Yet if, as seems likely, intraparty rancor persists into the convention, or if anything else about his capacity to run changes, Mr. Biden will have a clear opportunity to make a historic and selfless decision for the party he has loyally served for so long. And he must seize it, allowing the party to select a new nominee.

Core to Mr. Biden’s claim that he is the only person who can beat Mr. Trump is the false notion that the die has been cast. At times, Mr. Biden suggests that he is already the nominee. At other times, he suggests that to change now would be, as he wrote on Monday, to “say this process didn’t matter.”

The first point is simply incorrect. The second point rests on an understanding of the convention as a coronation. But the point of a nomination process is to choose the best nominee for November. No solemn contract with voters is broken when delegates, taking into account circumstances that have changed since the primaries, choose a different nominee. On the contrary, the party’s rules have evolved specifically to consider just such a situation of changing circumstances — and after the disastrous June 27 debate, that is the situation Democrats are in.