What role will California's delegation play at the DNC?

President Biden stands in front of a row of American flags, waving his right hand

Published July 16, 2024 Updated July 17, 2024 2:10 PM PT

As more Democrats call for President Biden to step aside before the Democratic National Convention, the 81-year-old president has responded with a clear message: “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I beat him once, and I will beat him again,” Biden said of former President Trump at a news conference in Washington last week.

For the record:

10:44 a.m. July 16, 2024A previous version of this story described California’s statewide elected officials and labor leaders as automatic delegates, more commonly known as super delegates, to the Democratic National Convention. In fact, those delegates are pledged to Biden.

And in a call to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Monday, the president responded to his skeptics, saying: “Run against me. Go ahead. Announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”

Biden’s grip on the Democratic Party nomination is ironclad if he wants it, experts say. But if he were to step aside before mid-August and open the floor to a contested convention, California’s 496-person delegation — the largest in the country — would play a pivotal role.

Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine, said the sheer size of the delegation ensures California would have an “undue amount of influence” in selecting a replacement for Biden. The Golden State delegates also hail from one of the country’s most liberal states, meaning the delegation could “lean further left than might be the case for delegations from a lot of swing states,” Schnur said.

“A very large and very progressive group of California Democrats could have an immense impact on the selection of the nominee,” he said.

How do California’s delegates feel?

Three Democratic members of California’s congressional delegation have publicly called on Biden to abandon his reelection bid.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank, who is heavily favored to win California’s U.S. Senate election in November, cited “serious concerns” on Wednesday about whether Biden can beat Trump, and called for him to drop out of the race.

“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the President can defeat Donald Trump in November,” Schiff said in a statement to The Times.

Rep. Mike Levin of San Diego, who is in a reelection fight in the 49th Congressional District, said Friday that “the time has come for President Biden to pass the torch.” Democrats, Levin said, have to prioritize the “incalculable threat Donald Trump poses to the American institutions of freedom and democracy.”

And Rep. Mark Takano of Riverside was one of four members who, in a private call with other senior House Democrats earlier this month, said Biden should withdraw from the race. Takano’s office declined an interview request.

How the convention works

To win the Democratic Party nomination, a presidential candidate must secure more than half of the party’s 3,939 delegates. Biden has already won about 99% through the state primaries.

A full list of delegates has not been released, but in some states — including Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Florida and Ohio — delegates’ names have been published on Democratic Party websites.

California’s Democratic Party has published the names of the state’s 277 elected delegates, but not its full delegation list. The 42 Democrats in Congress each have a spot, as does Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Christian Grose, a professor of political science and public policy at USC, said that California’s delegates are powerful not only because of the group’s overall size but because the DNC has reduced the number of automatic delegates, previously known as superdelegates. Those officials don’t vote in the first ballot, meaning the elected delegates from each state hold most of the power.

Anyone hoping to shift delegates away from Biden, Grose said, “would really have to move the California delegation.”

California also has 55 delegates drawn from a pool of statewide elected officials, labor leaders and big-city mayors. All of the state’s top Democrats are delegates, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, according to a copy of the list the state Democratic Party shared with The Times.

Mayors serving as delegates are Los Angeles’ Karen Bass, San Francisco‘s London Breed and San Diego‘s Todd Gloria.

Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, head of the California Labor Federation; civil rights activist Dolores Huerta; and the heads of local and statewide unions representing firefighters, utility workers, teachers and construction workers will also be delegates.

The list also includes Yvette Martinez, executive director of the California Democratic Party; Mark Gonzalez, former head of the L.A. County Democratic Party; and Mona Pasquil Rogers, who worked in the administrations of Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown and is now Meta’s state public policy director.

Do Democratic delegates have to vote for Biden?

Biden said last week that delegates are “free to do whatever they want” at the upcoming convention, including nominate another candidate. Then he said, in a mock whisper: “It’s not going to happen.”

“Barring another performance like the debate, if Biden wants to be the nominee, he’s going to be the nominee,” Schnur said.

That tracks with members of California’s convention delegation, many of whom have said that a contested convention or a floor fight seems very unlikely. The vast majority of convention delegates, who were vetted and approved by the Biden campaign, wouldn’t switch horses without Biden’s permission.

There is “a world where that isn’t the case,” Gloria said, “but I really don’t see that happening.”

Rep. Brad Sherman of Porter Ranch said that he is carefully watching the president’s public appearances, but that Biden’s nomination is most likely “a foregone conclusion.” And Long Beach’s Rep. Robert Garcia, a Biden surrogate, said that “by the time our convention rolls around, this party will be unified.”

Still, “there is no pain-free way to have a nominee,” Sherman said. “The most pain-free way is to go with Biden — and that’s still painful because we’ve gone through two weeks of self-flagellation and wondering.”

California law requires that convention delegates cast their votes on the first ballot based on who won the primaries. Sherman, who has not called on Biden to step aside, believes that law is unconstitutional.

He cited a 2016 federal court case in which a Virginia delegate to the Republican National Convention filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn a law that required delegates to vote on the first convention ballot for the winner of the primary election. Violating the law was a misdemeanor offense. The delegate argued in court that he could vote his conscience on the first ballot. A federal judge sided with him and tossed out Virginia’s law.

Overturning California’s law would probably require a similar lawsuit, experts said. Whether that would matter at the convention is another question.

National conventions aren’t bound by state laws, and can set their own rules. This year, the Democrats’ convention rules state: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

Voters who cast ballots for Biden in the primary wanted the version of the president that “we saw for three years and three months,” Sherman said — not the off-his-game Biden who appeared at the June 27 debate. The question for delegates, he said, is how to reflect that shift on the convention floor.

“Nobody voted for June 27 Joe,” he said. “That’s not even a Joe that Joe Biden likes.”