The above image, from the recent floor fight over the Speakership, is a fantastic illustration of my ongoing discussion of how primaries affect party evolution in the United States. The simplest version of the discussion goes as follows. Problematic Politician (PP) wins a primary. Winning the primary means using a major party’s label. Winning control of the label means the golden ticket to compete in the general election (It gets PP on the general election ballot automatically). If the district is dominated by the party label that PP won control over, the general election is a gimme. Of course, once the elected to be the incumbent member of Congress from that district, losing the seat becomes a low probability event.
This is an illustration of one key role played by parties in a representative democracy: the label is a signaling device to voters who use it often as the sole decision item in terms of their vote.
Once PP goes to Washington they are a part of their party’s caucus and no matter what else is true about them, the fact that they own their party’s label means they might be very important, especially if the party is in the majority and that majority is narrow. The assumption is that PP will be voting for the caucus’ desired leadership. Usually, this is mostly Pro-forma, but it is always possible that PP might need to be convinced to play. Maybe this means cutting deals, as McCarthy did with Matt Gaetz, a PP from Florida. At a bare minimum, it means normalizing PPs into the party caucus.
This is an illustration of another major role played by political parties in a representative democracy: they are collective actors, bound by label (as a sign of membership) to collectively organize the government.
Note, though, the utter lack of any centralized control of party labels in the United States. Control of a given label for an individual politician comes via the primary. Once in Congress, you are in the club and only truly extraordinary circumstances change that (as opposed to other democracies that we could name).
All of which sums to the following.
The more the party, as a whole, needs votes from the PP (or, as we saw in the Speaker fight, PPs) then more the party will have to normalize its more problematic members, hence mainstreaming them. This is clearly what Marjorie Tayle Greene wants and has achieved to some degree. It is what Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert are getting. At a bare minimum, they were central and important during that fight, even as they rebelled against the vast majority of the caucus.
Along those lines, see The Hill: Handful of McCarthy detractors get new top committee assignments
Four of the Republicans whose votes against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) led to a historic four-day Speakership floor fight last week will get new roles on top committees.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and first-term Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) will join the House Financial Services Committee, while Reps. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) will join the House Appropriations Committee.
The general dynamic I am describing here also will be the reason the House GOP will treat George Santos (R-Narnia),* as a perfectly normal member of the chamber and make noises about “innocent until proven guilty” and “let the process work its way out” because they can’t afford to lose a seat with the slim margin they have in the chamber. McCarthy, in particular, is aware that he needs every vote he can get for, well, anything and everything the caucus attempts to do over the next two years.
And this is also how the party, as a whole, changes. If you are forced to normalize that Q-Anon types and the fabulists (as well as the election deniers and insurrection-downplayers), your overall organization evolves to adapt. To be clear, these types of changes don’t have to be in the PP kind of direction, the same dynamics apply to various possible directions, even the pragmatic. It all depends on what the nomination process produces.
This brings me to one of my core points about primaries. US parties are not constructed in a strategic way, but instead, evolve on the fly in response to whatever the primary process produces. And let me remind the reader that the vast majority of partisan office-holders come into the party, officially speaking (as in controlling the label) via the primary process.** The press has a tendency to pretned like it is jus the presidential nomination process, and I find sometimes that that is therefore where readers’ minds go. The entirety of the party system is shaped by primaries, and have been for a very long time (longer, by many decades, than has been true about presidential nominations).
There are no gatekeepers for control of the label, save the primary voters. Moreover, those gatekeepers tend to be a relatively small slice of the electorate, tend to be ideologically more extreme than the general pool of co-partisans in a given district, and they operate in a low-information environment (especially if it is an open seat).
I would refer readers back to my post in June of 2020, QAnon and Congress, which discussed how MTG won the nomination and was certain to win the seat (and I will confess to being mildly surprised that she has only been in Congress since 2021. It feels so much longer than that–I was thinking 2019, TBH). Greene was one of nine candidates in the primary and she had the most money of any of them.
As I wrote at the time,
My basic point remains that we do not have a system that allows for the coherent construction of political parties that can cogently present policy alternatives to the voters. Instead, we have two vessels that can be filled in various ways without national strategic purpose. The gateway to running in a primary is self-selection and nothing more. The only way to filter out fringe candidates is to hope that primary voters are savvy enough to do so in what amounts to massive collective action problem.
And if the fringe candidate is the one with the most money and therefore the most name recognition, then that fringe actor can capture control of the party label, whether the party writ large wants that candidate or not. And then, from there, the partisan breakdown of the district is destiny save in very unusual (if not impossible, depending on the numbers) circumstances.
None of this, by the way, is a defense of the House GOP caucus embracing Matt Gaetz, MTG, or George Santos, but it is an explanation of how the party ends up behaving as it does. And how any party in the US is likely to behave given the conditions above (slim majority, internal conflict, etc.).***
Not only do these dynamics influence the internal party behavior in the chamber, but it also affects what voters are socialized to accept. If their team is embracing certain PPs, it makes it easier for the general electorate to also accept those PPs and any others that might emerge. It changes what is “normal” for a given set of politicians and their voters.
That last point is really, really important. In an alternate universe, MTG would have been the QAnon candidate running against a mainline Republican and a mainline Democrat. She would likely have lost the election in 2020 as a result, because having to openly discuss her views without the cloak of protection of the Republican Party would likely have turned a lot (but not all) of voters off. And while partisans can jump ship (as we saw in Boebert’s slim re-election win), it is always better to be the major party nominee because a lot of voters use that as the main signaling device for voting. And when the fringe gets into office, those voters often will simply become more accepting of the fringeyness of it all, rather than reject their team.
Some additional writings on this subject:
- The Centrality of Nominations
- The Power of Primaries
- A Note on Primary Elections
- An Extreme Example of the Problem with Primaries
- Another Example of Primaries in Action
- Assessing the Party Fringes
*This is especially true because if Santos is kicked out or resigns, there is a very high probability he will be replaced by a Democrat because of the partisan makeup of his district. This fact, coupled with the slim majority, means Santos is safe from internal attack unless something truly indefensible is revealed (and note that the threshold for what they might be is defined by the circumstances I have outlined).
**I would note that in states with Top Two access to the label in the first round is basically all-comers, the same in Alaska’s Top Four process.
***And yes, a thousand times yes, the GOP is responsible for whom it embraces and what it ignores. But that responsibility doesn’t change that our overall system helps to produce it and that all of us have to live with the consequences thereof. I know someone is going to assert that the GOP is inherently susceptible to these outcomes and the Democrats aren’t. I think this is both true (as it pertains to certain specifics) and not true (as it pertains to the fact that any party under the right conditions can be held captive to a fringe), but that doesn’t change the overall analysis. Indeed, we can see how Senate Democrats had to kowtow to their moderate fringe (if you will) when it came to Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.
Further, I have made clear that I see the GOP’s fringe as a different animal than the Democrats’. See Not Both Sides wherein I noted, apropos to the above, “Kevin McCarthy is about to be Speaker because he kowtowed to Trump and he is about to have to placate people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert in the process.”
