We're revisiting one of the most important Supreme Court cases you’ve probably never heard of. A case so stressful that it pushed one justice to a nervous breakdown, brought a boiling feud to a head, and changed the course of the Supreme Court.

Listen: https://t.co/oiZmBNqrq4 pic.twitter.com/dqehQlU6gP

— More Perfect (@MorePerfect) June 1, 2023

This was one of the more fascinating pieces I’ve read on the sources of weakness in modern state parties, how that weakness affects their competitiveness, and the role of non-party, outside donors in that process. We’ve known that the McCain-Feingold law caused enormous damage to state political parties, and it’s unclear what role that law might have played in the background. This story is primarily about outside donor alliances that think they can perform party functions better than the parties. The story is about the decline of the Democratic Party in Florida, written by a long-time Democratic political operative there. The whole story is worth reading.

The story is titled: “Anatomy of a Murder: How the Democratic Party Crashed in Florida.” It appears here. Some excerpts:

When I left the party job in 2009, I genuinely believed we were out of the ditch and on a better path. We’d built our box. We had a foundation. Things were trending in the right direction for Democrats in Florida.

But right about then, a new idea was floated: standing up a donor table—or alliance, if that makes you feel better—that would operate and fund organizations outside of the party.

This move was pitched as a supplement to the work of the state party, which would build a “long-term progressive infrastructure” that could carry on the goals of the Obama operation into the future. My concern was that the alliance would not be an add-on, but instead would end up being a replacement for the party.

Florida Democrats sat at a fork in the road. And the decision they made then led directly to where we are today….

The donor and his advisor had a different idea. Donors didn’t have confidence in the state party, so they wanted to set up a series of outside groups that could be the basis for “long-term progressive infrastructure.”

In a nutshell, the concept they were pitching was was simple. A group of state and national donors and Democratic-supporting organizations would pool their money and decide collectively which groups or candidates they would support, with the goal of electing Democrats and advocating for progressive policies. (It should be said that the favored policies that were often to the left of what a winning Democratic coalition in Florida would accept.) By giving money, donors got a seat at the table, and this table would operate in a manner not dissimilar to Shark Tank: supporting organizations would pitch them; they would make decisions based on these arguments. On its best day, the groups which made up the alliance would all have their own lanes and areas of expertise. That was the plan.

But in addition to reinventing the wheel, we countered, alliance-backed groups wouldn’t be legally allowed to coordinate with the actual candidates, and also there would be no real accountability for the money. Say what you want about the party itself: At least every dollar is disclosed, every decision is public. This was not the case for the alliance….

Elections are determined by lots of inputs. There’s the political and economic environment. The money. The candidates, their stories, and their visions. There are external shocks and events. There’s luck. But there’s also a lot of blocking and tackling, the kind of routine, unglamorous work that political professionals do in order to maximize a campaign’s chances of success.

Unless you’re in a very favorable race, you can’t win if the only thing you have going for you is the blocking and tackling. But by the same token, if you’re in a competitive race, trying to win without that basic blocking and tackling is asking every other factor to break your way.

And while it’s not sexy, these routine mechanics of electioneering—the blocking and tackling of politics—are something Republicans in this state do very well on a year-round basis. This is why we have an overwhelmingly re-elected Ron DeSantis and his Free State of Florida, while my state’s Democratic party is barely hanging on life support.

Outside groups are fine. I ran a national group in 2020 that was created to support Joe Biden. But what happened in Florida is that the outside groups—not the candidates or the party—were designated to be the primary driver of turnout, messaging, and in some cases, even candidate recruitment….

Take one element of this: voter registration. One of the original arguments for the donor alliance in Florida was that it could fund groups with a year-round focus on voter registration. But that has been an abject failure.

Since 2012, partisan voter registration has declined for Democrats in Florida in just about every year, and today, Republicans have a healthy advantage in this metric for the first time in state history. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone: When you outsource voter registration to these legally non-partisan organizations, they can’t engage in partisan organizing. And you know what Democrats need to do with voter registration? Find more Democrats to register….

When political parties are weak, they tend to become feckless and inept. Feckless and inept parties lose elections….

The lesson here ought to be painful for Democrats: We didn’t lose the demographic battle—we lost the partisan organizing and persuasion battles….

I don’t think if Florida Democrats had simply leaned into the 2006-2012 organizing model that my party would be dominating the state today. Some of the national reshuffling in the partisan coalitions over the last 20 years would have hit Florida even harder than most places. 

That said, had we focused on building a more sustainable party organization (as they did in Wisconsin) we would have elected at least one Democratic governor, have at least one Democratic U.S. senator, and would have substantially more Democratic state legislators and members of Congress. Of this I have zero doubt. 

Odd WP headline, since that’s the point of having any rules for inclusion. But here are the details — these are the rules for the first debate only:

The Republican National Committee will require presidential candidates to attract 40,000 individual campaign donors and the support of at least 1 percent of voters in multiple national polls to qualify for the first debate with Fox News in Milwaukee this August, according to four people briefed on the plans.

The filter, which also requires candidates to pledge support for the party’s eventual nominee, are stricter than similar rules Democrats adopted to set their own first debate stage in 2019, when 20 candidates met over two nights. Democrats allowed candidates to qualify either by meeting a 65,000-donor threshold or by getting 1 percent in at least three early state or national polls.

Republicans, by contrast, will require both a donor and a polling standard. The polling standard requires a candidate to be at 1 percent nationally in multiple polls that are deemed credible by the RNC. One person briefed on the plan said there may be an option to use state polls as well if candidates can get more than one national poll showing them at 1 percent.

“Debates are not a vanity project but a critical opportunity to find the next President of the United States. If you can’t find 40,000 unique donors to give you a dollar and at least 1 percent of the primary electorate to support you, how can you expect to defeat Joe Biden?” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement.

The Texas Tribune:

Texas Republicans have muscled through legislation allowing unprecedented state interventions into elections in Harris County, the most populous county in Texas, threatening to drastically overhaul elections in the Democratic stronghold.

The bills targeting Harris, which would eliminate its chief elections official and allow state officials to intervene and supervise the county’s elections in response to administrative complaints, are headed to the governor’s desk.

Lawmakers say they’re responding to repeated election issues in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston. The county, for its part, has signaled it will challenge the bid to remove its elections administrator and is portraying the bills as a partisan power grab and the latest in a series of legislative moves by Texas Republicans to tighten access to the ballot in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

From the WSJ: Twitter’s top official for monitoring safety and content moderation said she resigned Thursday, the second time an executive with that role has departed since Elon Musk bought the social-media company in October. Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head… Continue reading

Thanks again to Justin, Tabatha, Derek, Guy, and Rick P. for excellent work being primary bloggers during May while I had to attend to other things. Here’s the June blogging schedule: Week of June 5: Nick Stephanopoulos Weeks of June… Continue reading

From the WP: An Atlanta-area investigation of alleged election interference by former president Donald Trump and his allies has broadened to include activities in Washington, D.C., and several other states, according to two people with knowledge of the probe… Continue reading

A sad story that exemplifies what’s been happening with election administrators in several areas around the country. From the WP: After facing an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for certifying the results of the 2020 election, a Republican on… Continue reading

Marion County, IN (home of Indianapolis) has been the site of two major Supreme Court election-law cases, Whitcomb v. Chavis and Davis v. Bandemer. A  lawsuit has now been filed asking a federal court to declare Marion County’s system of… Continue reading

This NYT story runs counter to a lot of the narratives after 2022, but the story explains what its data analysis differs from those narratives: In the 2020 presidential election, voters who were 18 to 29 in 2008 backed Joe… Continue reading