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The key to Humphrey's scenario is a challenge to the California delegation. Under that state's winner-take-all primary rules, the delegation must give all its 271 votes to McGovern, who won the primary with 44% of the vote. Humphrey and others are arguing that this unit rule violates the spirit of the party's reform, denying representation, for example, to the 39% of the Democrats who voted for Humphrey. Last week a California federal district court judge rejected a legal challenge of the unit rule, but Humphrey plans to take the case to the convention floor, where he may have the support of other candidates who see the challenge as the best hope to stop McGovern. In the unlikely event that the maneuver should succeed, Humphrey would pick up about 110 California delegates out of McGovern's total. Then, reasons Humphrey, if the non-McGovern delegates hold fast, the convention might turn around.
It is a somewhat wistful projection. Indeed, there are many Democrats neutral or even unsympathetic toward McGovern who believe that if the party denied the nomination to a man who had legally amassed 1,300 or more delegates through the primaries and caucuses, then the party would be in ruins, the nomination scarcely worth having. Perhaps naturally, Humphrey dismisses that idea: "The party is weary of temper tantrums of juveniles who, if they don't get their way, are going to bolt." But Indiana's Senator Birch Bayh, himself an early presidential contender, shares a foreboding that a convention defeat for McGovern would mean a disastrous fracturing of the Democratic Party—"It'd make 1968 look like Little League ball compared to the Baltimore Orioles."
But the McGovern candidacy has already split the Democrats so badly that they are now in some ways two different parties—the McGovernites and the regulars. The McGovern forces —the young, the suburbanites, the intellectuals, an admixture of some blacks and blue-collar workers—are parvenus to the old party, a new political wave bred in complicated ways by Viet Nam, the assassinations, all the dislocations of the '60s. The others—labor, organization Democrats like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, elected politicians —tend to have older and firmer roots in the party's traditional structure.
The McGovernites, superbly organized under the new party rules, have swept to control in state after state, leaving the regular party workers stunned and sometimes apoplectic. In a sense, the McGovernites are, abruptly, the party's establishment now, and some of them, more intransigent and radical than their candidate, have grown abrasive in dealing with the regulars. At Minnesota's Democratic Farmer-Labor Party convention, McGovern zealots pushed through platform planks calling for legalized marijuana, unconditional amnesty and homosexual marriage. Idaho Democrats suddenly found their platform calling for abortion, abolition of the death penalty, amnesty and withdrawal from Viet Nam within 90 days.