From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
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The Economist – Lexington
The uproar over his candidacy reveals dysfunction afflicting both major parties ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
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It is as though a giant trap has sprung: Democrats suddenly find themselves faced with the prospect of losing the White House and both houses of Congress just as the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has further empowered the presidency and hobbled the administrative state. Democrats’ scorn for Republicans at choosing an unpopular nominee for president, a candidate compromised by criminality and extremism, has turned to panic as they realise they may have committed to a nominee even more compromised in the eyes of voters, by infirmity. How did the party get itself into this mess? How can it fix things?
The answers are it didn’t and it can’t—at least not in the short term. Indeed, these are trick questions, because they imply that a major party is capable of making independent decisions. Leaders of both parties long ago surrendered any decisive role in choosing nominees, which is why Donald Trump could conduct what his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, called “a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party”. Since President Joe Biden sabotaged his candidacy in a fateful debate, the Democrats have revealed a comparable vulnerability: they cannot co-ordinate their various power centres in Congress and state governments to provide a clear vote of confidence, or no-confidence, in their candidate. “The signals are way way way more inefficient than most of us thought, and I thought they were pretty inefficient to start with,” says Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist and the author, with Sam Rosenfeld, of “The Hollow Parties”, a new book on the parties’ decline.
Read more: 🔒 The Economist – Lexington: Joe Biden is only fooling himself
That decline dates to the 19th century, but it accelerated in the 1970s with reforms meant to diminish the influence of party bosses, as well as changes to campaign-finance laws. These led donors to shift their giving from the parties to candidates and to new, often shadowy groups that advocated for particular issues or politicians. By 2020, candidates’ campaigns and outside groups—connected to the parties only loosely, if at all—were spending three times as much as the national parties.
Amid the entropy Republicans have proved more directed, in part because wresting control of the courts gave them a strategic focus. That goal drew together the outside groups and officeholders, unifying social conservatives bent on outlawing abortion with corporate conservatives bent on deregulation. Their efforts have not just been aimed at the federal bench. Democrats dominated state Supreme Courts into the 1990s, but since 2013 Republicans have accounted for a majority of the state justices nationwide. It is no coincidence that, as Americans have polarised and sorted themselves geographically by party, Republicans have also done a better job of locking up state elective offices. Of states where one party controls the governor’s office and both houses of the assembly, Republicans dominate 23, Democrats 17. Democrats have all but stopped competing in some rural states, conceding a head start to the Republicans in the Senate and electoral college.
Both parties have become weaker because of the well-intentioned reforms of the 1970s. Once upon a time, party insiders picked nominees. But after their divisive convention in 1968, Democrats instituted reforms, later adopted by the Republicans, to choose nominees only by means of statewide primaries. Now, “robot” delegates to conventions vote mechanically for whoever carried their state. The noble objective was to democratise the process, but it neglected a couple of considerations: a party apparatus without influence over the choice of leader has little influence over anything else; and party insiders, whatever their flaws, are particularly astute judges of fellow politicians.
“The two parties gave up their most important mission, which is the selection of the nominee, and they gave it up to primary voters in an age when whims can win,” says Elaine Kamarck, a member of the Democrats’ governing body, the Democratic National Committee (dnc), and the author of “Primary Politics”. “What’s absolutely clear in the case of both Trump and Biden is that it’s important to have people in place who actually know the candidate and know something about governing.” The alternative, she warns, is that “we could subject ourselves to a bunch of charlatans and authoritarians for the next decades.”
Party all the time
Ms Kamarck proposes a system of “peer review” whereby, before the primaries, each party’s congressional representatives and national-committee members would privately question candidates and issue votes of confidence or no-confidence to help guide primary voters. Another fix might be for the Democrats to restore and even enhance the power of “superdelegates”, a group that includes governors, members of Congress and other party eminences. Such delegates are not bound to vote for any candidate, but a Democratic rule from 2018 bars them from casting votes unless the contest goes to a second round of balloting—a virtual impossibility. If Republicans had comparable numbers of superdelegates who could vote in the first round, they might have stopped Mr Trump in 2016, since he arrived at the convention with a slender majority in delegates and considerable opposition.
Fixing the Democrats’ deeper problems would require nurturing local networks of activists across the country year in and year out, rather than leaping quadrennially to the service of that season’s champion in a handful of swing states. When Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate, was elected chairman of the dnc in 2005, he invested in a “50-state strategy” to run Democrats at every level of government in every state. But once he was replaced the party drifted from that ambition. “They paid lip service to that, but they didn’t invest in places like Texas and Mississippi,” Mr Dean says. “And when you don’t do that, you get the result that you’ve got. And it’s getting worse, by the way.”
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