Outside the Beltway

Repeat After Me: US Parties are Weak

Weak and presidentialized.

Steven L. Taylor · Monday, July 1, 2024 · 15 comments

There are days (many, in fact) wherein I wonder how much better off we would be if the national press understood our political system better. This morning the proximate cause of my wonderment is this headline and story from the NYT: The Road to a Crisis: How Democrats Let Biden Glide to Renomination.

My immediate thought upon seeing the headline was to wonder who the Times thinks are the “Democrats” and what, pray tell, do could they have done to forestall Biden’s renomination?

On balance, the piece is mostly vague on this subject coupled with quotes from various former campaign types linked to the party. Noteworthy is that the DNC or any reference to the institutional party is missing. Now, understand, that omission is appropriate because they have no role of consequence here. But, to my broader point, that should suggest that maybe “The Democrats” are a more elusive bunch than the headline and general thesis of the article (and the current vibes) suggest.

Barely seven weeks before Democrats gather in Chicago to formally nominate Mr. Biden for a second term, the Democratic Party is in crisis. Many party leaders, donors, activists and ordinary voters, stunned by the president’s faltering debate appearance, now fear he will lose to former President Donald J. Trump and drag Democrats to devastating defeats in congressional and state elections.

So, yes, there is clear concern. But I would also note, simply as a matter of fact, that while there are party leaders who are concerned, there have been plenty who have asserted confidence in Biden. Likewise, I am sure there are donors who are concerned, but we also know the money is still coming. And I know there are Biden voters reading this (and a Biden voter writing this) who are concerned that the debate performance will help Trump win.

Concern, I would continue to note, is one thing, but it should not lead to panic. (But that’s not the point of this post).

Back to the article.

Mr. Biden is surrounded by a tight circle of longtime aides and family members who have encouraged his desire to seek a second term. But interviews with top party strategists, office holders and people close to Democrats seen as possible presidential hopefuls suggest that, just as crucially, party leaders were lulled into complacency or pressed to step in line at crucial moments when they might have persuaded Mr. Biden to step aside.

Ok, so the notion the president “is surrounded by a tight circle of longtime aides and family members who have encouraged his desire to seek a second term” sounds like, well, every president ever.

Moreover, as I noted yesterday, most party leaders are almost certainly loyal to the president. The entire orientation of the parties is to win the presidency and this, coupled with the general institutional weakness of the parties, means that the president is at the top of the party pyramid.

In other words, to talk in vague terms about “party leaders” without any specificity is, in my view, to be making it sound like there is some actual group of persons with real authority out there who can, you know, do something. As such, the notion, as the headline states, that “Democrats Let Biden Glide to Renomination” (emphasis mine) surely amplifies the power of some vague Democratic leadership (that doesn’t actually exist).

And what are the best examples that the piece provides? Well, they are most impressive.

At key moments, those who tried to sound the alarm about Mr. Biden’s potential weaknesses — among them David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, and James Carville, who helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 — were slapped down by Democrats, often in the brutal discord of social media sites like X, and chastised by top Biden aides for being disloyal.

Ok, so some dudes who were prominent in the past said some stuff on Twitter.

That’s it.

That’s the example of “party leaders” who tried to “sound the alarm.”

I suppose that shouldn’t fail to note the “brutal discord” that was on display. I mean, they were chastised! On social media!! Can you even imagine?

“What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?” Mr. Axelrod wrote on X.

Mr. Axelrod drew fierce pushback from Democrats across the country, including from inside the White House. In his own post, Mr. Biden’s former chief of staff, Ron Klain, noted that Mr. Axelrod had referred to Mr. Biden as “Mr. Magoo” in 2019. And word leaked that Mr. Biden had vented about Mr. Axelrod in salty language.

The notion that this amounts to “party leaders” doing anything is literally laughable (I know because I laughed to myself when I read it). Axelrod was a prominent adviser to Obama (who left office in 2017, by the way) and is now a consultant and talking head. Yes, he is a Democrat, but not one with any formal power.

Biden won in 2020 and the 2022 mid-terms were better than expected, as the piece notes. There was, therefore, no significant primary challenger (sorry, Dean Phillips). This was not a surprise.

Mr. Biden showed little interest in retiring to Delaware. He scored a series of legislative wins — among them a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and a $1.9 trillion package to help the nation deal with the Covid pandemic — that led to a wave of praise of his skills as chief executive, some comparing his accomplishments to those of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

[…]

“We had an incumbent president who has the best record since F.D.R. on the economy and who is a very compassionate man,” said Barbara Boxer, the former Democratic senator from California. “Of course we are going to stick with that.”

That run-down, if anything, underscores why there was no primary challenge (and why concerns on Twitter didn’t dislodge the sitting president). Although I would hasten to add that sitting presidents rarely get serious primary challenges and when they do it tends to signal a fractured party in ways that tend to negatively affect the general election.

Let me digress to this observation for a moment:

Mr. Biden was also protected, in an unexpected way, by his choice of Ms. Harris as his vice president: Many Democrats thought she lacked the political skills and presence to lead a national ticket but believed it would be hard to deny the first Black woman vice president the top spot if Mr. Biden did not run again.

Again with the vague “many Democrats.” I am sure that, in fact, many Democrats would prefer Harris to the other Biden alternatives. There is a weird, persistent narrative that treats, in my view, Harris differently than other vice presidents insofar as it strikes me as the normal course of business for veeps to be fairly invisible and not taken fully seriously. I will leave that there as that is a whole side trip beyond this already long post. I will note that this sounds like a strange rationalization for why Biden wasn’t challenged. Is he not being challenged because he is, well, the president, who has had an objectively successful term in office? No! It’s because people are worried about Kamala Harris! Yeah, that’s the ticket.

At the end of the day, and despite the headline and thesis of the piece, the NYT story in question just underscores that institutionally, the party is weak and that our parties very much orbit around presidential nominees. Changing the course of an American political party is not the domain of some vague leadership group, but is instead a collective action problem that has substantial coordination challenges (see, e.g., the 2016 GOP primaries).

I know a lot of readers balk when I make these comparisons, but the reality is the weakness of the GOP as an institution is why the country got Trump in 2016 and it is the weakness of the Democratic Party as an institution that means that Biden, an 81-year-old, is the nominee now and why all this talk of replacing him is moot.

I can feel people leaving the post to type in the comment in the box to tell me that being a lying, cheating, convicted felon is not the same as being old.

Yes.

I know.

That’s not the point.

The simplest point is that there is no centralized control of who gets to run in primaries, nor is there centralized leadership of the parties who have power over the outcomes. No one guards what it means to be a Republican or Democrat. While people tend, just like the NYT above, to talk about “The Democrats” as if there is some group of Democrats who are in charge somewhere. You know, the ones people mean when they say, “Why can’t The Democrats fix this?” Or, “The Democrats need to do something!”

Another point worth remembering in all of this is that the main goal of political parties, even weak and decentralized ones, is to win elections.

The Republicans won the presidency in 2016.

The Democrats won the presidency in 2020.

Judging solely by the base-level goals of the organizations in question, they functioned properly in their candidate selection process in those years. We shall see how 2024 turns out.

Especially in the absence of some kind of actual power structure that has the right to vet pre-candidates and to hold to some level of party orthodoxy, winning really is ultimately all that matters.

Side note: I think one can make a very strong argument that the GOP would be far, far better off with a different nominee and that the main reason the race is as close as it is, given voter sentiment, is because Trump is a lying, cheating thug. This, of course, just further underscores my point.

To be clear, I am not arguing that it doesn’t matter in other, multitudinous, ways that Trump is a liar, a cheat, and a thug. Nor am I suggesting that there is nothing problematic at all about an 81-year-old having a job as demanding as the presidency. But as important as those things are, the issue of whether Biden should be the nominee or not is ultimately going to be judged by a single metric: will he win 270 or more Electoral Votes or not? After all, that is what all the anxiety is about, correct?

And to bring it all home: there is no Democratic Party leadership that has any independent power here, and there hasn’t been for a very long time. I would prefer stronger parties that did a better job of maintaining clear messages about who they are and that had more control over the candidates selected to run, but that’s not the system we have. We, as voters and citizens, need to understand this and it would be terrific if elite journalists would as well.