Democrats officially nominated Hillary Clinton as their standard-bearer in the presidential contest on Tuesday, sealing her position as the first female nominee of a major party in US history at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia.
While Clinton had already met the threshold of the 2,383 delegates required to clinch the nomination and beat Bernie Sanders through her primary victories, the official vote was a significant moment in American political history despite lingering discord within the party.
Although Clinton finished the Democratic primary with 2,807 delegates, compared with Sanders’ 1,894, a faction of the Vermont senator’s supporters arrived at the convention threatening a floor fight – or contested vote on the floor – over the nomination. They were further emboldened by leaked emails showing personal bias toward Clinton among officials at the Democratic National Committee, a controversy that culminated on Sunday in the resignation of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
But in a bid for party unity, the campaigns of both Clinton and Sanders agreed to hold a vote that allowed Sanders delegates to show their support for the progressive senator, who defied all expectations by creating a grassroots movement across the country.
In another symbolic gesture, it was Sanders who called for the party to unanimously nominate Clinton when the roll call vote reached its completion with the Vermont delegation. The moment echoed the 2008 Democratic convention, when Clinton ended the roll call vote with a similar call for acclamation for Barack Obama from the New York delegation.
Yet the overwhelming sense that a bigger glass ceiling was being shattered on Tuesday with the first steps down the path toward putting a woman in the White was on everyone’s lips in the Philadelphia hall.
Speaking from the floor of the arena as Clinton’s historic moment was announced, Grindly Johnson, a Virginia delegate from Richmond who is supporting Clinton, said: “I’m ecstatic. I don’t even have the words. I grew up in segregated America and now a woman might follow a black man in the White House. I wish my parents were alive to see this.”
“This is Democracy at its best,” said Sibal Holt, a Louisiana delegate from Alexandria, after Sanders nominated his 2016 rival.
Davante Lewis, a delegate from Louisiana who supported Sanders, said he had mixed emotions after the roll call.
“I’m proud of our party that we have nominated a woman and have broken that glass ceiling,” he said. But Lewis said he would follow Sanders’ example and support Clinton in November.
“We cannot let Donald Trump be president,” Lewis said. “And right now Bernie Sanders’ supporters are [the] biggest threat to [Trump’s] becoming president of the United States.”
Jerrold Nadler, a New York congressman who has known both Clinton and Sanders for decades, said he was confident the party would now come together.
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