Did the parties decide in 2024?
Did the parties decide in 2024?
It’s been a remarkable summer not only in electoral history but also for the trajectory of American political parties, and it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned about what parties are and aren’t capable of.
Much of the scholarly discussion about the power of modern U.S. political parties has revolved around the work of the “UCLA School” of scholars known for works such as The Party Decides (2008) and the 2012 article “A Theory of Political Parties.” (I was a co-author on the article, and much of my own work, including my 2020 book Learning From Loss, is in line with this literature.)
The basic argument from this line of work is that modern parties, like their more organizationally robust forebears, structure and determine the outcome of nominations, but do it in a less direct manner since the reforms of the early 1970s and the wholesale adoption of presidential primary elections. Party elites (officers, elected officials, interest group leaders, major donors, etc.) can examine different candidates for office and confer with each other about who they think offers the best combination of electability and fealty to the issues they care about. If they can agree on a candidate, their collective endorsements and influence among donors can give that candidate a substantial advantage in the primary elections. Thus, even though primary voters are technically in charge of party nominations, party elites are actually driving much of that activity, and they often get the nominee they want. This is true not just at the presidential level, but at the state and local level, as well. There is no scholarly consensus that this is the way that nominations work, but proponents of the argument have surely been the prime movers in the literature in recent years.
Read the whole series: Partisans without parties.
So how well does this model of elite coordination describe what we’ve seen from the two parties’ presidential nominations lately?
It did a pretty good job describing how Democrats picked, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020, giving their eventual nominee many structural advantages and nudging other candidates out of contention long before anyone started voting in Iowa or New Hampshire. But it falls well short of describing the much more aggressive version of party activity we saw among Democrats this past July. Even U.S. parties at their strongest have rarely had the kind of muscle needed to push an incumbent president out.
In this case, direct pressure from top party elites – including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden’s own former running mate, Barack Obama – accompanied by the desertion of many Democratic members of Congress, a decline in public approval, and a widespread consensus among voters and pundits that Biden had massively and viscerally bombed at the June debate with Donald Trump and that he would likely not improve in the future, convinced the president to step aside. And once he did, the party elites’ signal to close ranks behind Kamala Harris was fast and extremely visible, with Biden quickly endorsing her, followed by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jim Clyburn, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL), all 50 state Democratic party chairs, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more. And then, importantly, Democratic officeholders with presidential ambitions — including Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom — lined up behind Harris.
This looks different from conventional party nomination accounts for several reasons:
The speed: Elite consensus often takes months to build. Arguably this had been occurring tacitly behind the scenes long before Biden considered withdrawing, but the public phase occurred almost instantaneously.
The lack of voters: Party elites often function cognizant of limits set upon them by party voters, and mindful of their ability to steer their votes in upcoming primaries and caucuses. The coordination behind Harris happened after all the primaries and caucuses of 2024 had occurred. It was done not to guide voters, but rather to present the Harris choice as unanimous and legitimate, and not give any segment of the Democratic electorate cause to stew or protest the way, say, Bernie Sanders fans did in 2016.
The dominance of electability: Democrats nominated Joe Biden in 2020 in very large part because they thought he, and none of the other candidates that year, could defeat Donald Trump, even though several of those candidates were more skilled campaigners and were arguably closer to the party’s mainstream on some key policies. In an ironic twist, Democrats de-nominated Biden in 2024 precisely because they thought he was no longer electable. They rallied behind Harris not because they thought her policy stances were better or she could better deliver on them (indeed, there’s a good chance she does not have Biden’s legislative skill set), but because they now found her more electable.
I view this as an unusually strong example of party power, although potentially in an unusually easy case. Biden, a devoted Democratic actor for half a century, is more likely to listen to party elites than some other modern presidents might be, and rallying behind the sitting vice president, even one who was substantially less popular at the time, seemed far preferable to the multilateral war and messy convention that might have otherwise ensued. Still, even among those advocating for Biden’s withdrawal, few thought it would go as smoothly as this or would result in such a notable bump in the party’s prospects for November.
The GOP seems very much the mass-led party that produces factional candidates – the sort of thing that primary skeptics warned of and that party elites organized to prevent after the McGovern-Fraser reforms.
Yet while the Democrats arguably exceeded the standards of the Party Decides model, Republicans, as they have since 2016, fell short of it. The Republican Party has underperformed electorally in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and Trump’s leadership of it – in which he has made the party synonymous with himself, recruited and endorsed unpopular candidates, and maneuvered himself into two impeachments and ongoing legal troubles – is arguably a proximal cause. This has not caused party elites to organize to stop his third nomination; indeed, elites were overwhelmingly behind him in this cycle (unlike in 2016, when they largely stayed silent). This could be viewed as part of Republicans’ demonstrated preference for policy gains over electability (at least on abortion and upper-income-skewed tax cuts, Trump has surely delivered), or, more realistically, a recognition by party elites that they are incapable of making choices their passionate voters oppose. The GOP seems very much the mass-led party that produces factional candidates – the sort of thing that primary skeptics warned of and that party elites organized to prevent after the McGovern-Fraser reforms.
It is certainly plausible that we will see a resurgence of Republican organizational strength in a post-Trump world, and it is similarly plausible that we have seen the high-water mark for Democratic strength. But suffice it to say that the two parties are in very different places right now and offering challenges to the UCLA School from either side.
Seth Masket is a professor of political science and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver and the 2024-25 senior visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020 and The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy. He writes about the Republican Party on his Substack Tusk and in an upcoming book.
Image: Office of U.S. House Speaker via Wikimedia Commons
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