I have some personal knowledge of contested Conventions, the last being the Democratic Convention in the 1952 election year. This has to go down as the only advantage to my age. I grew up in a liberal democratic family. My parents were poor dirt farmers on a subsistence farm. When they referred to farm equipment horsepower, it was in reference to real horses. To them, the depression years were not kind, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a God.
Naturally, we sat transfixed in front of our first TV set, a black and white picture. You could cut the drama with a dull knife as the favorite, Estes Kefauver went down to defeat, losing to Adlai Stevenson.
*From Wikipedia:
The
1952 Democratic presidential primaries were the selection process by which voters of the
Democratic Party chose its nominee for
President of the United States in the
1952 U.S. presidential election. These proved inconclusive and the
1952 Democratic National Convention held from July 21 to July 26, 1952, in
Chicago,
Illinois, was forced to go multiballot.
[1]
The expected candidate for the
Democratic nomination was incumbent President
Harry S. Truman. But Truman entered 1952 with his popularity plummeting, according to polls. The bloody and indecisive
Korean War was dragging into its third year, Senator
Joseph McCarthy's
anti-Communist crusade was stirring public fears of an encroaching “Red
Menace”, and the disclosure of widespread corruption among federal
employees (including some high-level members of Truman's administration)
left Truman at a low political ebb.
Truman's main opponent was populist
Tennessee Senator
Estes Kefauver,
who had chaired a nationally televised investigation of organized crime
in 1951 and was known as a crusader against crime and corruption. The
Gallup poll of February 15 showed Truman's weakness: nationally Truman
was the choice of only 36% of Democrats, compared with 21% for Kefauver.
Among independent voters, however, Truman had only 18% while Kefauver
led with 36%. In the
New Hampshire primary
Kefauver upset Truman, winning 19,800 votes to Truman's 15,927 and
capturing all eight delegates. Kefauver graciously said that he did not
consider his victory "a repudiation of Administration policies, but a
desire...for new ideas and personalities." Stung by this setback, Truman
soon announced that he would not seek re-election (however, Truman
insisted in his memoirs that he had decided not to run for re-election
well before his defeat by Kefauver).
When President Harry S. Truman declined the Democratic
renomination in 1952, the party had its first open convention since
1932. Negotiations over the various nominees, debates over delegate
credentials, and fights over the party loyalty oath resulted in a
six-day convention, the longest in post-World War II history. Although
ten Democrats were nominated, convention delegates drafted a favorite
son--Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. President Truman not only endorsed
Stevenson but flew to Chicago to ensure his nomination. Backroom
negotiations at the Congress Hotel neutralized a "Stop Stevenson"
movement, and his supporters clinched his nomination on the third
ballot.
*End Wikipedia
Well, the Democrats of 1952 went down to defeat, since war hero, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president and werved 2 terms. But the Democrats survived, and so will the Republican Party. I survived my brain washing and became a Goldwater advocate followed by my involvement with Ronald Reagan in 1965.
