How to Win in a Knife Fight

Also, make certain your convention team can communicate instantly and make rapid decisions. At the 1976 GOP convention, the Ford teams covering the floor felt tremors from the Mississippi delegates, who were dissatisfied over Reagan's VP choice. Ford's people persuaded Mississippi to drop its winner-takes-all rule, giving Ford a healthy minority of the state's votes and a big dollop of momentum.

Rule #4: Have a Strategy to Win. Whatever combination of endorsements, announcements, policy statements and stagecraft you can engineer to create a sense of momentum going into the convention, do it. Nelson Polsby, one of the great scholars of conventions, wrote that delegates "behave in a way that will maximize their political power … Delegates will trade their votes for access to the candidate they think most likely to win nomination." So create the appearance of a bandwagon for your candidate and invite uncommitted superdelegates to climb aboard.

But don't do things that make it more difficult for your candidate. Behind and looking for a way to shake things up in 1976, Ronald Reagan took a gamble and named his running mate a few weeks before the convention. Sen. Richard Schweicker, a Pennsylvania moderate, did give Reagan a few more votes in the Keystone State delegation. But his selection unsettled conservative delegates (hence his Mississippi setback).

In addition, save some surprises—and hold back some votes. You want to have positive news each day of the convention, especially the day of the vote. In 1940, Sam Pryor, a master operator and supporter of Wendell Willkie, carefully salted away supporters in the camps of other candidates, including his principal opponents. Then he carefully moved just enough of them into the Willkie column so he rose on each ballot while his competitors fell. It helped that the delegates were hidden in states well down the roll call like Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York. And it especially helped Willkie that he appeared to pull votes from his principal competitors. Since this year's convention is likely to take only one ballot, keep some superdelegates ready to pop out just before and during the convention.

Rule #5: Focus on Staging. Conventions are elaborate made-for-TV productions. We live in a culture of the visual. Every moment and every event should be scripted. The media will complain about it, but think through what messages you want and when you want them. This script must be visually powerful and interesting enough to keep the cameras on your candidate and not somewhere else. Make the spectacle personal. The Al and Tipper Gore kiss, for instance, did him a lot of good. And be sure to provide fresh content all the time. In the era of cable TV, talk radio, the blogosphere and YouTube, someone is watching and talking all the time. If you're not pressing content into all available channels, someone else will.

National political conventions are equal parts carnival, prime-time soap opera, policy lecture and weeklong party. They are easy to caricature and increasingly anachronistic. But they have been an important element of the liturgy of democracy. And while in recent decades conventions have become antiseptic, predictable and largely ignored by the national press, this year, for the Democrats, could be different.