Outside the Beltway

Presidents Shape Parties More than Parties Shape Presidents

How party change actually works in the US. Plus more on messaging and organzing.

Steven L. Taylor · Tuesday, October 28, 2025 · 6 comments

To follow on from yesterday’s post and to drill down on a very specific point about the role presidents play in parties in the United States, let’s focus on the following interchange between Ezra Klein and Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, from the episode entitled, How Can Democrats Win Back the Working Class?

Before getting into the specifics, let me clarify a few things. I am arguing that there needs to be a push to get Democratic politicians to recognize the disadvantages they face with the structural confines of American politics, so as to incentivize them to be prepared to put forth meaningful democratic reform. They had a chance in 2021 and failed to act. Note that what I want to see is American politics to be better representative of the actual preferences of the people, for politicians to feel the need to be responsive to their constituents (not just primary voters), and for races to be competitive for public office (note that less than 10% of House seats are competitive).

I have noted reform options repeatedly in the past, and will write an updated list at some point, but will share a simple example: expanding the House of Representatives. The House was designed to expand with the population, and it did for over a century. But in the early 20th Century, the House was fixed at 435, and while the population had more than tripled since that time, the House has remained static.

This is a reform that can be done by statute and would address, but not totally fix, a number of democratic deficiencies in the system. It would make gerrymandering harder, it would increase the representativeness and likely competitiveness of districts, and it would lessen some of the problems with the Electoral College.

While I am writing all of this to hopefully persuade whoever it is that might come across it, as noted in the prior post, my object of criticism is Ezra Klein, and really others, in the broader analyst space who are, in my view, arguing for small-ball responses to a major set of problems. If Ezra and others like him are going to focus solely on things like messaging and organizing while ignoring real problems with structure that make those solutions likely fruitless, then we are going to see democracy fade further.

Again, if the VRA is gutted in a way that allows partisan gerrymandering but takes away the bulwark of majority-minority districts that help create some semblance of representativeness, we could find ourselves in a situation in which the minority of voters controls the House for perhaps a generation at least.

So, as much as I understand the general lack of understanding and pushback due to the complexity that reform arguments get, I don’t see any other route forward than to push for those changes. And I know that I need to persuade people of that fact, and hope that people with bigger megaphones get with the program.

I also desperately want people who talk about parties and democracy to understand how things really work versus the version we all often have in our heads,* which leads me back to the episode of The Ezra Klein Show that started me down this path in the first place.

Towards the very end of that episode, the following interchange leaped out at me.

Klein: I think people have gotten way too pessimistic about changing party reputations. We have watched it happen over and over and over again in the past couple of decades.

Bill Clinton substantially changed the reputation — whether you think that was for better or for worse — of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump substantially changed the reputation of the Republican Party — changed who votes for it. Barack Obama changed the Democratic Party, in his era at least.

Abbott: But what’s the common denominator in all those cases?

Klein: Party leadership.

Abbott: Right. But it’s not going to come from the current party leadership.

First, the actual answer to the question of “what’s the common denominator in all those cases?” is “They were the party nominees who won the presidency.” In other words, a specific type of leadership as filtered through specific institutional structures.

It seems worth noting that no party leader outside of those parameters matters all that much in American party politics. The presidency is the only way to have some kind of central influence over the party. A losing nominee does not, nor does the Speaker of the House, let alone the House Minority Leader. Further, no one cares about who the head of the RNC or DNC is. I write about this stuff every day, and I can’t remember either party chair’s name at the moment.

Trump, I would note, was an exception as a former president with a term yet to win.

Furthermore, it must be remembered that they became the nominees because they won primaries and caucuses, not because they were cultivated by The Party. The parties did not shape them as much as they shape the parties.

Second, regarding “But it’s not going to come from the current party leadership.” I agree, but let’s note a few things.

In October of 1989, no one in their right mind thought that Bill Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee in 1992. It took a recession late in George H. W. Bush’s first term to lead to it being his only term. Indeed, in early 1991, Bush so looked like a shoe-in for reelection due to the success of the first Gulf War that many top-name Democrats chose not to run, leaving the field for the farm team Democrats like the Governor of Arkansas.**

Yes, Clinton was a product of the Democratic Leadership Council’s project to cultivate a more moderate type of Democrat in response to the perception that the party was too liberal. But the fact that he was the nominee in 1992 was far more the result of a series of events that no one could have predicted than any purposeful action by Party Leadership.

In October of 2005, Barack Obama had not yet completed his first year in the US Senate. While he had given a memorable speech at the 2004 DNC and was seen as an up-and-comer in the party, he was a long way from being the 2008 nominee.

In October of 2013, no one in their right mind would have thought TV reality star and self-important real estate developer Donald Trump was going to be the GOP nominee in 2016. The same was true in October of 2014. And while he had descended the golden escalator already by November of 2015, many (myself included) thought there was no way he would be nominated.

What’s my point?

Well, there are at least two.

One, Klein seems to forget history when we said a few minutes later.

Klein: So that’s what I was about to say. A thing that is a bit distinctive about the Democratic Party in the past couple of years is: I think, in a strange way, it’s been leaderless.

Abbott: Absolutely.

I would note that the Democratic Party has only been leaderless for about nine months. Biden, and then Harris, were the leaders of the party before that. But Biden’s age and unpopularity blunted his influence. Harris lost the election and lost her leadership role as a result.

That the Democratic Party is largely leaderless currently is normal (I say that as an empirical fact, not as a value judgment). I have written before (I suspect multiple times) that the opposition party is at its weakest the year after it loses a presidential election, especially if it does not control either chamber of Congress. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it is very much the expected thing.

There is no fount of power in such a situation. And leadership, while it is certainly a skillset in and of itself, still needs a basis of power and authority from whence to lead. This point needs to be dwelt on for a moment. Neither the House Minority Leader nor the Senate Minority Leader has any appreciable power. While we might wish for a more dynamic strategic thinker than, say, Chuck Schumer, the reality is that the most effective leader in the world would only be able to do so much with that job.

Reality is what it is. Wishing it to be different does not make it so.

The problem for us right now is that the times aren’t normal, making the normal impotence of the opposition party a problem.

Two, history dictates that while the name of the person who will be the 2028 Democratic nominee may be known to us, we haven’t a real clue as to who it will be.

Three, there is simply no party mechanism to cultivate such a person. If it is Newsom, or Pritzker, or AOC, or Shaprio, or a Player to be Named Later, it will depend greatly on the motivations, fundraising, and support building of the individuals in question. Our parties, as institutions, don’t develop presidential candidates the way so many commentators and analysts seem to think they do (or, at least, talk as if that is what they think is the case).

I cannot stress enough that American parties make party primaries the mechanism of candidate development and selection. Sure, there is a recruitment here and there and the sprinkling of money, but the reality remains that the process to decide who runs and how they are funded is located in a set of individuals, and the primary voters are the deciders. Not Party Leadership is involved in any substantive way.

A clear example of the role of candidates in shaping parties at the congressional level is Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia.  The RNC did not decide one day that what it wanted to do was recruit a QAnon sympathetic conspiracy theorist into the party to become a major voice in the party.  MTG is where she is because she made a specific choice to run and then was able, in an open seat, to gain the nomination, which, given the Republican nature of the district, meant she won.

The entire GOP and Democratic caucuses are built in just that way. This is at least in part why I am less convinced of messaging arguments as a key fix. No one controls that messaging of 435 House candidates, let alone whatever multiple of primary candidates (and the math gets even mathier for state legislative races).

I will note that the one time that a party can at least have a semi-unified message is during a presidential campaign, with one person in charge of it. That message then tends to filter down to help (or harm) all other co-partisans who are running.

Moreover, and to my general critique of the messaging/organization option: in 2028, it will matter very little what local candidates try to say in deviation from the national party’s message. When a person in Iowa sees a local Democratic candidate for office, they will see that candidate far more based on what the Democratic nominee is saying than what the candidate themself is saying. Again, the parties are nationalized and the brands are shaped at the pinnacle of the party, not via the diffuse campaigns of thousands of candidates nationwide.

The broadest point is this: Leadership of the type that Klein is ascribing, correctly, to Clinton, Obama, and Trump cannot be disconnected from them being the nominee and then winning the presidency.

There is no other mechanism within the parties-as-institutions to do so.

And, worse for all of these messaging and organization arguments, the causality is not that messaging leads to voter allegiance. Instead, more often than not, voter allegiance leads to the acceptance of a given set of messaging.

My point is not to say that there is no efficacy whatsoever in local organizing or trying to better communicate with voters. But I am noting that while some of that might help individual campaigns, it is not a road to transforming a party’s brand the way Klein seems to think is possible. The only mechanism for significant recalibration of American parties is through the presidency. That’s where the power is, and that’s where voters get their conception of the party.

That means, among other things, that to even have a chance at the democratic reforms I want to see happen, it will require a Democratic presidential nominee to carry that water. I will confess to not being especially hopeful. But it would help if people in the podcasting, broadcasting, and other analytical spaces who have some influence over Democratic politicians would recognize the enormity of the challenge instead of repacking small-ball politics that ignored, in my view, both the scope of the problem and of the solution.

Note: If one is looking for some reading on the role of presidents in shaping parties from a comparative standpoint, I recommend Samuels and Shugart, Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior.

*That version is one of a mass of informed citizens who have policy preferences and who make voting choices based on desired policy outcomes. In that model, organizing and messaging should create substantive results. But that isn’t how most voters behave. We have our sides and changing our minds is hard.

**I always think of this 1991 SNL skit, Campaign ’92: The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to Bush, which captures what the political world thought in 1991, which opened the door for a guy like Clinton.