How the presidential transition replaced the smoke-filled room
Parties hammer out internal differences in the shadow of one personality.
The hollowing out of American political parties is widely understood to have limited their ability to act as brokering organizations. In this Hypertext forum, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld bemoan the decline of the “accommodationist” tradition in American party politics and Ray La Raja shows how state parties became easy takeover targets. Daniel DiSalvo traces party decline to the destabilizing impact of the information environment, and Julia Azari highlights the threat that racial politics can disrupt a party ill-prepared to mediate disputes. But there is one place in which this picture looks less bleak: the presidential transition.
Presidential transitions remain insulated from many of the changes described by each author: They continue to be highly secretive affairs, shielded from the glare of our nationalized media, and relatively inexpensive, making them less vulnerable to capture by deep-pocketed donors. In many ways, recent presidential transitions resemble the smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear, where intra-party disputes are quietly resolved. Transition teams increasingly make critical decisions for the party over everything from the composition of the Cabinet to the White House agenda. The significance of the trend is only enhanced by the ever-growing power of the president vis a vis Congress.
In 2020-21, the transition process played a moderating role for the Democratic Party, smoothing out conflicts between its various wings with nary a leak to the press.
In an illustration of this factional dynamic, one person I interviewed for my book Roadblocked described the composition of the 2020-21 Biden-Harris transition team this way:
[It] looked a little bit more like a parliamentary system where you have 40 to 50 percent of the people coded as being part of what people either call the ‘Warren Wing’ or the ‘Sanders Wing’ of the party, and then you had half of them or a little over half being folks that had served in prior administrations.
For example, Josh Orton, an aide to Senator Bernie Sanders, was on the Labor Department agency review team, and Anne Reid, the chief of staff to Senator Elizabeth Warren, was involved in reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services. Progressive think tankers from the Roosevelt Institute and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth joined those from Democratic party stalwarts like the Center for American Progress. Felicia Wong, a member of the transition advisory group, said in a public interview the transition team was “trying to bring people together from across the very big tent that is the Democratic coalition.”
This structure had an immediate impact when the transition team evaluated candidates for open positions in the administration. One person told me, “They would choose three different people,” a progressive as well as “someone that was totally corporate…and then you have folks who would be really moderate in their presentation and very measured, not ready to get outside the bounds.” The consequence of this was that:
It seemed [the transition team was] seeking out a kind of ‘a team of rivals’ … pick people who had very different perspectives on basic policy questions deriving from really different sets of values about the role of the government and the role of the private sector.
Right now, in the run up to the 2024 election, the pre-election transition process for former-President Donald Trump seems to be having the same brokering effect for Republicans, albeit in a much more public, less civil style.
Read the whole series: Partisans without parties.
Initially, all signs pointed to the most extreme elements of the party overwhelming the presidential transition. Project 2025, the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, linked together dozens of far-right groups to propose a near total takeover of government and an array of far-out MAGA policy proposals should Trump win.
What has happened more recently, however, has suggested something very different. The high-profile and extreme nature of the Project 2025 report provoked such a strong media response that Trump has tried to distance himself from it, despite his ticket’s doubling down on inflammatory rhetoric in many areas.
And instead of choosing the head of Heritage to oversee the pre-election transition, Trump chose Linda McMahon for the job after the convention. The former administrator of the Small Business Administration, McMahon has chaired the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) for the last four years. It’s a Trump-aligned think tank, to be sure, but one that has a much more moderate style and strategy for the future than Heritage’s tear-it-all-down approach. When the co-chair of the Trump transition team, Howard Lutnick, was asked about the role Heritage was playing, he said “none, zero,” that the organization was “radioactive.” It seems likely Heritage still has a few seats at the table, but it doesn’t seem like it has been given the biggest one.
The UCLA school of political parties teaches us to think of the parties as an umbrella under which an array of allied interest groups huddle, and presidential transitions continue to match this metaphor excellently. The party as understood by UCLA scholars has thus retained some strength despite its weakening influence over candidate selection.
To construct a map of each party’s network of allied interest groups, members of the transition team, even more than party delegates, would be the right place to start. Where else would you find Economic Policy Institute economist Jared Bernstein, former Chamber of Commerce lobbyist Mark Gitenstein, and the international president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Lonnie Stephenson, working shoulder-to-shoulder than on the advisory board for the 2020-21 transition team?
Presidential teams also act as brokering agents during the runup and aftermath of the election. In 2020, the Biden-Harris transition team even linked groups far from Washington to the planning for the new administration.
Take, for example, the way the Biden-Harris transition team interacted with women’s organizations. One participant explained how the team sought to tap Planned Parenthood’s affiliates, recounting they would ask:: “Can you bring us a practitioner from Texas? Can you bring us a practitioner from deep Georgia, from Mississippi? From Alabama?”
Or, consider the role of organized labor in flagging potential hires during the 2020 transition. “It wasn't lost on me where the incoming [transition recommendation] was coming from…We tracked that they were endorsed by the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters,” someone involved in staffing said.
The presidential transition team acts as a broker, balancing the intense staffing and policy demands of allied groups.
This is the transition team acting as a broker, balancing the intense staffing demands of allied groups.
In 2020, such brokerage wasn’t restricted to personnel decisions. The transition team moderated policy demands, as well. Activists in the Democratic Party, for instance, demanded the president-elect cancel student debt on day 1. Some of those activists were on the transition team itself, but the structure of the transition, and the secrecy of its proceedings, moderated those demands.
One person involved in student debt issues on the transition said to me: “things kind of move up the chain and it's a little bit unclear whether [recommendations from the transition team] just go into a file somewhere or whether they actually get into the bloodstream of the President's inner circle that's going to be making these decisions.” In the end, though he did act later in his administration, President Biden didn’t cancel student debt immediately after the inauguration.
Similarly, activists within the Democratic Party urged the incoming administration to act on racial equity, generally, and to enact a slavery reparations commission, specifically. Such a commission had been in the party’s platform for several decades at that point and it seemed enough pressure had mounted to finally achieve this goal.
The transition team privately met with activists for slavery reparations as well as other proposals to address racial justice. In the end, President Joe Biden acted on day 1 on the issue, signing an executive order to require federal agencies to prioritize racial equity. He didn’t, however, agree to the slavery reparations commission, an indication that the structure of the transition team allowed it to hear out activists’ wishes while maintaining a moderate policy agenda.
Though the modern presidential transition may be a forum for party strength, it doesn’t undo the logic of an increasingly candidate-centered party system. In fact, it may do the opposite.
At the center of any transition team is the president-elect. More than 1,000 people worked on the 2020 transition effort, but it ultimately revolved around Joe Biden, his relationships, and his agenda. One person summed it up this way: “[We] would always go back as a reference to what Biden's platform was, because that's kind of your constitution.” And another person said the job was “keeping people focused on the mission, which is just really to help this guy [Joe Biden] do what he said he would.”
Heath Brown is an associate professor of public policy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and author of Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency.
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