Category Archives: political parties

“The Real Problem With the Democrats’ Ground Game”

Russell Berman in The Atlantic:

They called it the “Big Send.” Democrats gathered in living rooms, libraries, and coffee shops across the country to write letters to millions of potential voters in swing states and competitive congressional districts, urging them to vote in November. During the 2020 pandemic election, the novel but decidedly 20th-century tactic had cut through the glut of digital messages that inundated Americans’ cellphones and inboxes, and organizers hoped it would similarly boost turnout for Democrats in 2024.

It did not.

In a study set to be released later today, the group behind the letter-writing effort, the nonpartisan Vote Forward, found that personal messages sent to more than 5 million occasional voters deemed at risk of staying home last fall had no effect on turnout. (The group’s campaign produced a modest increase in turnout among a second, slightly smaller set of low-propensity voters, but it still fell short of previous Vote Forward programs.) What’s unusual is not Vote Forward’s lackluster findings, but that the group is ready to tell the world about them. Every election, a constellation of progressive organizations sells donors and volunteers on the promise that their data-driven turnout programs will deliver victory at the polls. These mobilization efforts have taken on ever-greater importance in an era of tight elections, where the presidency and majorities in Congress can hinge on just a few thousand votes.

Progressive groups are only too happy to brag about their wins; they’re much less likely to divulge details about their campaigns that flopped. Driving this reticence is a fear that donations will dry up—or go to other organizations in a highly competitive campaign industry—if funders find out their money made little difference on the ground. In several instances, researchers told me, Democratic firms have either pushed them to suppress the results of studies that didn’t produce desired findings or cherry-picked data to make the numbers look better. “We have a people-pleasing problem in our party,” Max Wood, a progressive data scientist, told me.

Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Vote Forward and its progressive campaign arm, Swing Left, is trying to change that culture. Just as Democrats are now debating, sometimes fiercely, why their party’s message failed last year, Radjy believes that to emerge from “the political wilderness,” they need to have candid conversations about their organizing and turnout efforts. Radjy has been frustrated by what she describes as Democrats’ lack of introspection and transparency. For months, she’s been asking party organizers and consultants what they learned in 2024, and what they’re going to do differently going forward. “We’ve got to actually be honest about both what works and what doesn’t work,” she told me. In the next election, “if we are serving volunteers, donors, and voters reheated leftovers from 2024, we are doing it wrong.”…

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“Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare Speaks on Redistricting Effort, Partisanship Claims”

A coming vote on new mid-decade maps for Tarrant County, Texas (where Ft. Worth is the county seat) has been quite controversial, with charges of racial and partisan impropriety, and likely litigation on the horizon.

County Judge Tim O’Hare has initiated the redistricting process.  (In Texas counties with fewer than 225,000 people, the “county judge” is a judicial official, but in counties like Ft. Worth, the “county judge” is both a member of the legislature and the chief executive; the policymaking body consists of four commissioners elected from precincts and the county judge elected at-large.)

And Judge O’Hare has been in the news quite a bit this week based on the rationale for the new maps.  Per The Texan: “The only reason O’Hare said he is looking for three Republican precincts in the county is because he can’t figure out a way to have four.”   And CBS recounts: “O’Hare said, ‘This is about partisan politics. You can legally in this country, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, draw maps for partisan purposes. So for me, it’s 100% about partisan politics.’”

O’Hare’s dead wrong about that latter point, but his confusion is understandable, and that’s absolutely the Supreme Court’s fault.  In Rucho v. Common Cause, citing dicta from racial gerrymandering cases and improperly conflating “partisan” and “political,” the Supreme Court did say that securing partisan advantage to some degree is constitutionally permissible.  (I still think that was both unnecessary and wrong, but I’m not the one in the robes.) 

But – and this is a critical point that some legislators of both parties have willfully misunderstood — the Court did NOT say that excessive partisan gerrymandering was legal.  Quite the opposite: the Court recognized as “fact” that “excessive partisanship in districting” is “incompatible with democratic principles.”  Rucho held only that the federal courts were unavailable to hear claims of excessive partisanship. 

That’s a big difference.  Or, at least, it should be to anyone who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution.  If local law enforcement won’t arrest or prosecute you for shoplifting, that forbearance doesn’t make shoplifting legal.  (See, e.g., federal appropriations riders preventing federal prosecution of some marijuana-related crimes; federal executive orders temporarily declining to enforce a very clear statutory social media ban) 

So while O’Hare’s correct that blatant use of government power to punish opposing partisans represents a weird lacuna in the redistricting context for federal court enforcement, it’s not true that 100% partisanship in the drawing of district lines is “legal.”

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“Maryland’s primary elections are unconstitutional, lawsuit alleges”

The WaPo has a story on independent voters claiming a right to participate in primary elections under the state constitution.  The complaint is here.

Existing Supreme Court precedent on the primary process and the First Amendment mostly gives the keys to parties to choose their electorates by opening or closing primaries as they wish.  But nothing in federal law requires the state to hold a partisan primary at all.  (States with “top X” primaries generally indicate candidates’ partisan preference without purporting to choose a frontrunner on the party’s behalf.)

Meanwhile, Nevada’s Assembly speaker introduced a last-minute bill (the session ends next week) to open up primaries to independent voters, over the apparent objections of state Republicans.  (See the opening sentence of the last paragraph.)

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“How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape”

NYT:

Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2024 was not an outlier.

It was the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for a Democratic Party out of power and hoping for a comeback.

The steady march to the right at the county level reveals not just the extent of the nation’s transformation in the Trump era but also the degree to which the United States now resembles two countries charging in opposite directions.

Mr. Trump has reordered America’s political divide both geographically and demographically.

Republicans are overwhelmingly making gains in working-class counties.

Democrats are improving almost exclusively in wealthier areas.

It is the same story by education: Republicans are running up the score in counties where fewer people have attended college.

Democrats are gaining ground in a small sliver of the best-educated enclaves.

All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all — according to an analysis by The New York Times.

It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020.

By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.

These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.

The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.

Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations….

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“Josh Hawley and the Republican Populists, at War With Their Party”

NYT:

The lone Republican vote in the Senate last month to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees came from an unlikely Democratic ally: Senator Josh Hawley, the archconservative from Missouri best known for calling out “wokeness” in all sectors of society, and for raising his fist to offer solidarity with supporters of President Trump hours before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

And yet the overdraft vote was hardly the first time Mr. Hawley had stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2023 he introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, which died in committee for lack of Republican support. He has broken from his party by refusing to vote for cuts to Medicaid as part of the budget reconciliation process.

In March he joined a Democrat, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, to offer a bill that would speed up the contracting process for new unions. A G.O.P. senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, signed on as a cosponsor, but otherwise, Mr. Hawley said in a recent phone interview, “not a single Republican would touch it.”

Since his arrival to the Senate in 2019 at the age of 39 as its youngest member, Mr. Hawley has charted two seemingly parallel courses: as a full-throttle champion of socially conservative causes and, somewhat less noisily, as a populist who aligns himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, on many populist issues.

“His ultimate goal is to break the alliance the social conservatives have had with the corporate world since the Reagan era,” said Matt Stoller, a former Senate aide to Mr. Sanders.

The term “populist” conjures two raw-knuckled protagonists of the agrarian South, Andrew Jackson and Huey Long, with whom the whippetlike Mr. Hawley, a Missouri banker’s son who attended Stanford and Yale Law School, would seem to have little in common. But prioritizing working-class Americans over elites has been a key rhetorical theme in Mr. Trump’s political ascendancy, and Mr. Hawley has embraced it….

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“D.N.C. Will Send More Cash to Red States, Aiming to Strengthen Party’s Reach”

NYT:

The Democratic National Committee is pledging to give tens of thousands of dollars monthly to every state party across the country, emphasizing red states over blue ones, in an expansive — and expensive — push to make Democrats competitive from Alaska to Florida.

The D.N.C. will spend more than $1 million a month on the 50-state program, which is increasing the organization’s monthly cash donations to state parties in red states by 50 percent and in blue states by 30 percent.

The extra money to red states, the D.N.C. argues, is to build long-term infrastructure in places where it is currently lacking to create possibilities in elections beyond just the upcoming midterms. The monthly price tag: $17,500 to each state party in a blue state, and $22,500 in a red state. (The party has a formula that looks at governor, Senate, House and state legislative seats to determine whether a state is red or blue.)

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“A Top Democratic Official Plots to Take Down Party Incumbents”

NYT:

Less than three months after the young political activist David Hogg was elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he is undertaking a new project that is sure to rankle some fellow Democrats: spending millions of dollars to oust Democratic members of Congress in primary elections next year.

Mr. Hogg, 25, who emerged on the political scene as an outspoken survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., said his party must squelch a pervasive “culture of seniority politics” that has allowed older and less effective lawmakers to continue to hold office at a moment of crisis.

And so he is planning through a separate organization where he serves as president, Leaders We Deserve, to intervene in primaries in solidly Democratic districts as part of a $20 million effort to elect younger leaders and to encourage a more combative posture against President Trump.

In an interview, Mr. Hogg said he understood that he would face blowback for his decision to serve simultaneously as a top official in the party — which is typically focused on electing Democrats over Republicans — and as a leader of an effort to oust current Democratic lawmakers.

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April 10 Safeguarding Democracy Project Webinar: “Partisan Primaries, Polarization, and the Risks of Extremism”

Join us for the final SDP webinar of the spring semester, April 10 at 12:15 pm PT (free registration required):

Thursday, April 10
Partisan Primaries, Polarization, and the Risks of Extremism
Register for the webinar here.
Thursday, April 10, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar
Julia Azari, Marquette University,
Ned Foley, The University of Ohio, Moritz College of Law, 
Seth Masket, Denver University, and 
Rick Pildes, NYU Law School  
Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA
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Political Parties—New Ideas

As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, we have a political party that was elected in part because Americans are concerned about the price of groceries. Now that they hold three branches of government, their primary budget goal is to maintain and extend tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthiest in our society. And to pay for it, they are targeting food assistance, subsidies to health care through Medicaid and Medicare, and now Social Security.

As promised, here is the core of a new idea about how to think about rebuilding our party system. Again, this is a slight re-edit from an article I wrote almost a decade ago:

Wed to responsible party government and conceiving of parties narrowly and almost exclusively as ideological speakers, party reformers have been blind to the democratic potential arising out of the associational diversity within the partisan network. This blindness has prevented systematic consideration of both the part association can play in mobilizing and informing citizens and the ways that building out the associational life of contemporary political parties–by shoring up those nodes of the partisan network capable of fostering social ties between elected officials and activists and between activists and constituents–could contribute to good governance.

Contemporary party organizations, while not the membership organizations of bygone eras, have yet to shed their essential associational attributes. The era of nineteenth-century urban machine politics that depended on the confluence of relatively strong personal ties and a formal organization bound by patronage is long gone. Yet, even in the twenty-first century, political parties remain networks of individuals and groups– activists, donors, officeholders, and dealmakers–tied together and to the electorate by social connections of various strengths. Beyond their capacity to act as vehicles for aggregating and amplifying preferences and perspectives, the formal parties have an associational life, although there is great variation in the depth and breadth of that life.

Although some of this has changed since 2020 (particularly who votes), those concerned about the Democratic Party’s losses still have something to learn from this diagnosis:

. . . Without denying that the causes of our crisis in representation are numerous, an associational path to responsible party governance takes as its starting point a significantly underappreciated transformation of the political landscape: the increasing social isolation of political elites and its impact on both participation and the flow of political information between ordinary Americans and their leaders.

The contrast between the social networks of political elites today and those in prior eras of American history is both stark and revealing. While democratic politics is frequently a contest among elites, prior to the advent of mass media, candidates needed “to build extensive interpersonal networks not confined to particular occupational or social circles” to garner reputation and votes. As such, the path to political power ran through membership in socioeconomically integrated civic associations–the Shriners, the Rotary Club, the American Legion. These groups required regular attendance at meetings and frequently involved election to higher offices and attendance at federated meetings. Political elites were thereby prevented from becoming socially insulated from the rest of American society.

By contrast, electoral incentives today pull candidates and parties into a narrow social network of extremely unrepresentative and socially isolated donors and activists. Given the sheer cost of running a federal campaign in the current era, individuals running for office are required to tap their social networks for significant early capital to gain the confidence of party operatives. It is, thus, not surprising that a vast majority of members of Congress are millionaires.

Even beyond the donor circle, the tendency of contemporary political parties has been to eschew broad mobilization. For the average voter, computer-generated requests for donations have replaced the ward boss as the personal face of the party. This is particularly concerning since those most likely to be targeted by such impersonal requests also happen to have relatively high incomes and levels of educational attainment. Political commentator Michael Lind only slightly overstates the case when he writes:

Politicians chosen by membership-based mass parties have been replaced by politicians selected by donors and sold … to voters. At the same time, the decline of neighborhood party machines turning out the vote has resulted in declining participation by lower income and less educated voters. The Americans who do vote are disproportionately affluent.

When millionaires constitute a supermajority of Congress and lawyers are overrepresented in Congress, the interests of lawyers, millionaires, and college-educated white men have more resonance than other interests and experiences. The absence of individuals with more typical experiences of American life–individuals who have never had a white-collar professional job, women who have left their young, school-age children at home with siblings because they cannot afford daycare, or those who regularly navigate the criminal justice or welfare systems–in Congress (and presumably in the social networks of the partisans upon whom members of Congress rely for policy advice) makes it significantly less likely that Congress will prioritize policies addressing the experience of such citizens.

To make matters worse, entrenched socioeconomic segregation means politicians– even ones who gain from church attendance or NRA membership–are much more socially isolated from individuals from different walks of life than they were in the past. Put plainly, if members of Congress and their associates were financially dependent on public education for their children, they might not have been quite as taken aback by the broad bipartisan outrage at Betsy DeVos’s nomination. Equally important, the less government addresses those needs, the more likely those constituents will disengage from electoral politics, and the vicious cycle begins. While few would wish to return to the eras in which political power ran through sex-segregated and racially exclusionary clubs–veterans’ groups, Masonic Lodges, or the Klan–the socioeconomic exclusivity of contemporary partisan networks has had democratic costs.

Social insularity of party elites along with the unrepresentativeness of both voters and party activists affects the types of policies and actions that are considered, even in the absence of corruption or undue influence. Individuals’ experiences of the world shape how they process information, what issues they prioritize, and what issues fall off their radars. A behavioral economist might describe this in terms of the availability heuristic; an anthropologist might describe it in terms of culture and social practice. The bottom line, however, is the same: Social context shapes what one prioritizes (e.g., tax cuts or social security), finds reasonable (e.g., accepting extravagant gifts from donors or engaging in an illicit market to make ends meet), and perceives as being problematic (e.g., what constitutes sexual harassment or racism). No amount of data or polling can compensate for the fact that polls are written by the very elites whose world experiences are increasingly insular.

The associational life of partisan elites inevitably affects responsiveness and accountability. The absence of consideration of this phenomenon by responsible party government theorists can probably be attributed to the fact that through the 1950s, elected officials and party leaders had robust ties to their constituents through membership associations based on socioeconomic status (if not race or gender). Churches, veterans’ groups, and even the Ku Klux Klan in the South were extremely well integrated into the party network.

The optimal partisan network, it follows, is one with both socioeconomic and intergenerational breadth and interpersonal depth. Such a political organization would be more capable of mobilizing voters of all ages through a broad cadre of party activists with ties to a representative electorate. It would be better able to disseminate political information during and between elections.

There is much more to say and more that I have said about why the associational path is not only theoretically optimal but also practically possible. It is also increasingly clear to me that the reintroduction of fusion politics at the state and local level could go a long way to rebuilding our party system in an associational vein. But for now, I will stop.

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