Will Harris's late start help or hurt her in the general election?

When the 2024 nomination process kicked off this past winter, Democrats knew that their nominee would be President Joe Biden. After all, the incumbent faced only token opposition in the primaries. Not until after Biden's poor showing in a late June debate did the prospect of a change become remotely feasible — and even then, it initially seemed unlikely. Then, in the span of barely two weeks, Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination, Democratic party leaders rapidly coalesced around Harris, the Democratic National Committee announced their procedures for formally selecting a nominee, and Democratic delegates voted virtually to officially make Harris the party's choice.

Although Biden isn't the first president to drop a reelection bid, the whirlwind series of events surrounding his departure and Harris's rise are unparalleled in recent political history. The fact that this all happened so quickly and close to the November election has raised questions about whether Harris can mount an effective campaign. Between introducing themselves to the public, waging a sometimes-lengthy fight for their party's nomination, campaigning across the country and defining a policy platform — not to mention fundraising — there's a reason candidates typically begin their presidential bids years in advance.

But within the modern presidential nomination process, which dates back to the 1970s, it is actually not unprecedented for a candidate to clinch a party presidential nomination this late. Highly competitive primaries have in a few instances extended nomination clashes all the way to the national convention. While such delays might be used to explain the general election defeats of some late-clinching nominees, that story is complicated by each cycle's specific electoral circumstances. With that in mind, we took a look at recent election history to place Harris's nomination timing in historical context and examine what it might mean for her general election chances.

Others have clinched a nomination in July or August

The exact date that Harris clinched her party's nomination is open to debate. A majority of Democratic convention delegates told the Associated Press on July 23 that they supported her nomination. By that reckoning, Harris secured a delegate majority 105 days before the Nov. 5 election. Alternatively, we could use Aug. 2 (95 days out), when Harris garnered a majority of votes cast virtually by national delegates, or Aug. 6 (91 days out), when the Democratic National Committee certified Harris's majority. Any of these measures puts Harris behind only President Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican race for the shortest time before the general election that a candidate clinched a nomination.

During a typical presidential primary, the campaigns and media track the accumulation of delegates largely based on primary election results or, in fewer cases, the revealed preferences of individual delegates. In that sense, then, the July 23 date better mirrors how the delegate count — and determinations of when a candidate clinches the nomination — works in a typical campaign. This also more closely resembles the approach that Caitlin Jewitt employed in her book "The Primary Rules," which examines how party rules governing delegate allocation and the election calendar affect the nomination process, and which we use as the starting point for this historical analysis.

Now, a candidate only officially becomes the nominee after convention delegates cast their ballots at their party's national convention (up until this year), which these days happens in July or August. However, a candidate becomes the party's presumptive nominee once he or she has secured support from a majority of those delegates, which more often than not happens before the end of the primary season. That's because most convention delegates are allocated or selected by the results of party primaries and caucuses, and are then "bound" (Republican) or "pledged" (Democratic) to back a candidate during the convention vote. This obligation can really only change if something dramatic happens — for instance, a presumptive nominee drops out (see: Biden) or it takes multiple ballots for the convention to choose a nominee, which last happened in 1952.

Sometimes a contender secures a delegate majority very early on in the process — like in mid-March for both Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000. However, if we consider the 21 competitive nominations in the modern era (i.e., those that did not feature an incumbent president running mostly uncontested), nine of those — plus Harris's — weren't settled until June or later.

Of the two candidates who clinched at or around the time of their party conventions, Ford holds the record for the shortest time span, becoming the GOP nominee 76 days before the general election. Headed into the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, the Republicans did not have a presumptive nominee. After a long, contentious nomination fight between incumbent Ford and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Ford was less than 100 delegates ahead of Reagan when the convention began. With neither candidate having sewed up a majority of delegates, the race came down to the undecided delegates. In the convention's floor vote, Ford won by 117 delegates to clinch the nomination.

Like Ford, former Vice President Walter Mondale fully secured the 1984 Democratic nomination at the party convention. After an exceptionally competitive primary contest against Colorado Sen. Gary Hart and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Mondale appeared to have an extremely narrow delegate majority headed into the convention. However, his position rested on the reported support of the party's superdelegates — a category of delegates that made its debut that same year, consisting of party leaders and elected officials who are not pledged through the results of primary contests and are free to support the candidate of their choice. Because Hart continued to fight for delegate support until the convention, it wasn't until the formal roll call vote that Mondale's majority was confirmed. (Superdelegates are still a part of the Democratic nominating process today, but the party reduced their influence ahead of the 2020 election.)

Seven other Democratic nomination races also didn't have a presumptive nominee until early June, around 150 days before the general election. In 1976, a crowded field of more than a dozen Democratic candidates vied for the nomination, and former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter was not able to acquire the necessary delegates until June 8, the day of the final primary contests. The next time around in 1980, Carter was again unable to capture a majority of delegates until the final day of primary voting because Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy stayed in the race and racked up delegates.

The Democratic contests in 1988 and 1992 also wrapped up on the last day of primary voting. In 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis duked it out with Tennessee Sen. Al Gore and Jackson, who was mounting his second presidential bid, while in 1992 Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton faced off against former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas and former California Gov. Jerry Brown. The 2008 Democratic contest between Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York was even closer: Obama effectively won as the last primaries were taking place thanks to garnering enough superdelegate support to become the presumptive nominee; unlike Hart in 1984, Clinton suspended her campaign shortly thereafter.

Also on this list is Hillary Clinton's second presidential bid in 2016, which secured a majority of Democratic delegates just shy of the conclusion of the primary season due to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's unexpectedly competitive showing. (At odds with some of the rhetoric from Sanders's supporters, Clinton would've won based on a vote of only the pledged delegates, meaning her overwhelming superdelegate support wasn't decisive.) Finally, the 2020 Democratic race also lasted until June, but it comes with an asterisk: The COVID-19 pandemic caused the delay of many primaries just as Biden was taking control of the race, so he would have almost certainly clinched victory much earlier using the original calendar, especially given that Sanders suspended his campaign on April 8, leaving an uncontested path for Biden.

The 2020 campaign notwithstanding, it is not a coincidence that presumptive Democratic nominees tend to emerge later in the season than presumptive Republican nominees. Instead, this is a byproduct of the parties' respective delegate allocation rules. Since the 1980s, the Democratic Party has mandated that states use some form of proportional representation to allocate delegates based on the results of the primaries and caucuses. This means that candidates who stay in the race can meaningfully slow down the leader's accumulation of delegates by picking up delegates even if they don't win any states outright. The Republican Party, on the other hand, gives states much more leeway in how they allocate delegates. Several states use winner-take-all rules, meaning that the winner can pick up delegates at a much quicker pace, whereas the non-winners are left with no delegates.

What could a later nomination mean for Harris?

Of course, each party's goal in settling on a nominee is to win the ensuing general election, and it's an open question as to whether a nomination clinched later affects a party's chances in November. After all, Ford narrowly lost the 1976 race, while Mondale lost badly in 1984. The conventional wisdom, which the GOP has often subscribed to, is that a short nomination battle (and longer general election campaign) allows the party and its voters time to heal wounds from the nomination fight and rally around the nominee well in advance of November. However, there is also a school of thought that long, competitive nomination contests like the 2008 Democratic primary can energize the party base, generate excitement and enthusiasm, and help the eventual candidate create campaign infrastructure across the states.

Harris's campaign, with its unusual circumstances, may still feature aspects of both a short and long nomination fight. Not unlike past nominees who secured their spots after lengthy primary campaigns, Harris has had to quickly pivot to a general election campaign relatively late in the election calendar. Yet the 2024 cycle for Democrats actually had many trappings of a short nomination battle, exemplified by the party's efforts to rally to Biden and a lack of serious opposition to him in the primaries and even the fact that Democrats were already looking to speed up the vote to confirm Biden as the nominee when his candidacy began to come apart after his poor showing in the June 27 debate.

Although Biden's roughly two-week ouster was unprecedented and certainly prompted some high-profile intraparty strife, Democrats' moves to unify quickly behind Harris ensured that it did not result in the type of prolonged infighting sometimes characteristic of lengthier primary races. The party even set a new precedent to confirm Harris as quickly as possible — though the Democratic convention doesn't begin until next week, Harris has already officially become the party's nominee, by virtue of a virtual vote of delegates to nominate a candidate. This expedited timeline — prompted in part by concerns about ballot access laws in a few states, the time needed to vet a vice presidential candidate, and guarding against Republican legal challenges — also likely insulated Harris from other challengers materializing.

The unprecedented early virtual vote meant that Harris actually became the party's official nominee historically early, even while becoming the presumptive nominee relatively late in the election cycle. It also builds on the party's virtual nomination of Biden in 2020 (at a virtual party convention) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing that the party is free to break from tradition and change its rules for selecting its nominee: The presidential nomination process is a party process, not a process governed by the Constitution, federal law or state laws.

Harris's situation differs in other key respects, too. For one thing, because she did not wage a primary campaign, she was not battered by attacks from party rivals in the ways Ford or Mondale were, which can give the other party fodder for attacks heading into the general election. She is also advantaged in ways that other late-clinching candidates have not been: At the time of her nomination, Harris was the vice president, lending her name recognition, credibility and experience that helped make it easier for party elites to rapidly coalesce around her. She was able to raise record amounts of money in a short timeframe as her candidacy energized Democratic voters. Plus, she has been able to more easily utilize the already-existing Biden-Harris campaign infrastructure, unlike the alternative choices Democrats may have considered.

Additionally, other election-specific factors potentially better explain the defeats of Ford and Mondale than the lengthy primary campaigns and party divisions that they faced. In 1976, the GOP was coming off of the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon's resignation, and Ford soon pardoned Nixon after taking office, which hurt the new president's political standing. In 1984, Mondale faced a popular incumbent in Reagan, who rode strongly positive views of the economy to an easy victory.

Ultimately, it's unclear if there's a meaningful relationship between when a candidate becomes the presumptive nominee and their success in November: Out of the eight races that were settled in June or later (excluding the 2020 and 2024 races because they didn't have protracted nomination fights), the nominee went on to win the general election in three.

Harris may also benefit this year from the fact that some of the larger forces at work in American politics may also make it easier for nominees chosen late in the calendar to consolidate support. The political parties are more ideologically "sorted" now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, with most conservatives aligning with the GOP and most liberals backing the Democrats. Meanwhile, polarization has moved the parties farther apart, and voters are more likely to view the other party negatively, which has made it more likely that they'll back their preferred party no matter who each party nominates. This is especially easy to see when it comes to Democrats vis-à-vis Trump, whom Democrats viewed so disconcertingly that they were willing to push aside an incumbent president from their own party to improve their chances of winning.

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The 2024 race has made history in many ways, with the unparalleled departure of a presumptive nominee and rapid consolidation around a replacement candidate. But despite some of its stunning developments, this election cycle has not broken new ground when it comes to the timing of a candidate securing a delegate majority to become their party's presumptive nominee. Harris clinched the nomination pretty late by the standards of modern nomination battles, but how, and how much, that might affect her prospects in the general election campaign is history yet to be written.