The Democratic Party’s recent dithering over its subpar incumbent president was an excruciating spectacle, underscoring a troubling reality: The party is hollow and lumbering. In ordinary times, this would merely mean an electoral price to pay—a loss here, a setback there. After all, losing elections is part of democracy. But these are not ordinary times. The Republican Party long ago collapsed into a personality cult, sacrificing its foundational principles at the altar of one old man’s narcissism. But for nearly a month after President Joe Biden’s disastrous late-June debate performance, it seemed that the Democrats would follow suit—leaving us with two failed parties. This is not just a political inconvenience; it’s an existential threat to our way of government.
Ultimately, Biden bowed out of the race in a surprise announcement on July 21, after weeks of pressure from Democratic politicians, donors, and voters. He also endorsed his running mate and the incumbent vice president, Kamala Harris, to fill the role at the top of the ticket. But the long, torturous process by which he came to that decision exposed serious, troubling problems in the party and in our two-party system more broadly.
When political scientists analyze the health of political parties, one question they ask is whether the parties are institutionally robust. A weak party is a personalized one—an extension of just one leader. A healthy party is bigger than any one person. A healthy party shares leadership and transfers power across generations, and boasts many party committees and offices, in many places and communities. It is grounded and responsive to its constituents, is integrative and complex, and exists beyond the ambitions of any single group or person. A healthy party, like democracy itself, is a collective enterprise.
Much has been written about the numerous failures of the Republican Party over the last decade. So let’s focus instead on the Democratic Party, and open our inquiry with a forensic question: What is the Democratic Party today, anyway? Who is in charge?
If you went looking for a physical manifestation of the party, you’d find it in a squat office building a few blocks south of the U.S. Capitol—a building so bland and nondescript that it would be at home in any of the multitude of generic suburban office parks built in the late twentieth century. If you inquire at the front desk who runs the office, somebody may give you a name: Jaime Harrison, a onetime aide to Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and a former corporate lobbyist, who ran for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina in 2020 and lost.
But who actually runs the party? The party “elders”—Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries—current and former congressional leaders and a former president? Individually and collectively, they have enormous power but are cautious to use it, because doing so carries the risk of failure: If their desired outcomes do not come to pass, then their status and ability to influence events will diminish.
Then there are the other individual elected Democrats—60 members of the House and Senate (including the vice president, who presides over the Senate) as well as 24 current governors. In one line of political science theorizing, U.S. political parties are creatures of their politicians—shared electoral brands that benefit everyone—and everyone has a stake in maintaining those brands.
Donors exert considerable influence on a party, too, but they are fractured. Yes, they are capable of occasionally elevating a nonviable candidate, but their main power appears to be negative power—by holding back their money, they can tank a candidacy. The media play a role, but they do not lead. Others with influence include issue groups that make demands, but they are maximalists pushing specific agendas or legislation, not compromisers. None of these groups is capable of brokering, let alone initializing, the collective action that should define a healthy political party, though some groups do get what they want by mere force of intensity or resources.
For some political theorists, this is all contemporary U.S. parties are—“coalitions of interest groups and activists seeking to capture and use government for their particular goals,” as UCLA’s Kathleen Bawn and her colleagues have written. Hardly an inspiring picture, but a reasonably explanatory one in the current American context: a lot of groups arguing with one another over whose priorities get top billing, and whose get relegated to mere token talk, and which candidates are best served to advance those priorities.
In a presidential campaign, formal power within a party may lie with the delegates who will gather at conventions to nominate a candidate. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in mid-August, thousands of state and local politicians and activists—the closest thing to a representation of the party’s rank and file—will gather and could, in theory, choose a presidential candidate other than Harris. But in practice, these delegates tend to do as instructed. When the party gathers later this summer, they will almost certainly anoint Harris as the party’s nominee.
And what about the will of those voters? They are, of course, limited by the choices provided for them. Once, the Democratic Party had a social base, but now many voters see it as a remote cabal of out-of-touch elites, whose only outreach to voters alternates between cries of alarm about the dangers Republican pose—and entreaties for money so the party can spread yet more cries of alarm.
Despite widespread voter dissatisfaction and low voter turnout, both Democratic and Republican candidates still win public office on the local, state, and national levels, the latter even in the Trump-personality-cult era. That’s because our electoral system of single-winner elections renders third parties as mere spoilers and wasted votes. Democrats and Republicans have a monopoly on opposition to each other, and the lesser-of-two-evils strategy is infinitely renewable.
But when it comes to sustaining the civic commitment to democracy, to the liberal pluralism and connection and integration and intermediation that modern party democracy depends upon, many aspects of that system are failing—and that now very much includes the Democratic Party.
The Democrats may have ultimately coaxed Biden aside, but the delays and delusions that have surfaced over the course of the summer have revealed a party unsure of what it collectively stands for, where donors think they can get what they want, where an incumbent president’s ego can toss a whole party into chaos, and where those still working with that president will give in to conspiracy-thinking to defend their current positions.
What happened? How did the Democrats get to this point?
In the first half of the twentieth century, there wasn’t much of a national Democratic Party apparatus. Instead, it was a federated network of state and local party organizations, many of which had thick roots in their communities. Complex, integrative, and institutionalized, it possessed the classic hallmarks of a healthy party. Having a deep social base gave the party real meaning—a crucial role for an intermediary institution.
The Democrats were identified as the party of the working class. But it was also a strange patchwork of factions, somehow combining Southern segregationists and Northern liberals, united only in their shared opposition to Republicans, and their once-every-four-years coming together to nominate a presidential ticket they could all live with.
The civil rights revolution of the 1960s split that fraying Democratic coalition and helped set in motion a long realignment of U.S. party politics. With this realignment, party organizations continued to change alongside the changing civic culture of the country. The prevalence of television transformed politics, to some degree, into public theater: Public ceremonies replaced the old party clubs where backroom deals were made. Starting in 1972, presidential nominating conventions became mere televised coronations, with state delegates having only a ceremonial role—yet another blow to the relevance of state parties.
Because, really, who needed them? Individual candidates could now speak directly to voters over the airwaves. And citizens could respond, indirectly, by contributing to new issue groups that promised to make demands on their behalf in exchange for monthly donations.
And so gradually U.S. political parties morphed into national networks of fundraising and campaign consultants and affiliated issue groups, increasingly based in and around Washington, D.C. Money replaced community presence as the currency of politics, and a disconnect (both real and perceived) seemed to grow between elected officials and their constituents.
Financialization of political parties initially helped Republicans, who had a head start in the early fundraising wars because of their natural appeal to big business. But in the 1980s, Democrats soon caught up, leaving behind their old organized labor constituencies for the shiny new promise of tech and financial services money.
The cascading effects of these changes were extreme. Issue groups sorted themselves into the competing party coalitions. State and local parties became shells, mere financial pass-throughs. An (increasingly) permissive campaign finance legal framework unleashed even more money into politics. But instead of rebuilding the lost civic capacity of local party organizations, that money went into blitzing the airwaves and increasingly social media with simplistic, terrifying messages about the stakes of the always upcoming election.
The result was a hollowing out of the major parties: mere electoral vehicles, performing for an audience that was increasingly put off and distracted. And so, here we are.
To be sure, the Republican Party capitulated first. In the 2000s, its small-government-enthralled leadership grew too distant from any social base, too caught up in the concerns of its donors, and too internally fractious to coordinate. It outsourced many of its central functions—like voter mobilization and candidate recruitment—to groups with narrow agendas. It papered over the destruction wrought by its policies with grievance-based, dog whistle politics. Into this empty shell stepped Donald Trump, and he wielded it like a king hermit crab. It is now his party and his alone, with a platform built from his ramblings. It is not a political party capable of sustaining liberal democracy, which depends on the rotation of power and pluralistic compromise.
And the Democratic Party? Is it capable of sustaining liberal democracy on its own, or is it, too, on the brink of capitulation? In the latest Gallup poll, just 23 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats—the lowest number in the poll’s 90-year history. Meanwhile, 51 percent of Americans choose not to affiliate themselves with either party—the highest share in the history of polling. This level of disaffection suggests that the two parties are failing in their crucial role as intermediary institutions—collectively integrating concerns of diverse Americans into a coherent and meaningful representation. Without parties to integrate, represent, and share power, democracy falls into chaos and authoritarianism, violence and force. There is a simple, obvious answer to our present conundrum: Replace them with new and better parties.
But this is not so easily done. Democrats and Republicans have too long benefited from America’s system of single-winner elections, which ensures that one or the other of them will triumph. They have no incentive to evolve.
But American democracy simply cannot continue like this. We need parties that are capable of collective action on behalf of a genuine social base and that can connect people to government.
So, we must change the electoral system. Proportional representation would make more parties viable in Congress and state legislatures, allowing new parties to organize and compete (or more likely, existing factions within both parties would break off and form their own parties, under new leadership and management, and capable of taking a clearer and more vibrant message to voters). Fusion voting would make more parties meaningful in those elections that must remain single-winner elections. These are straightforward, completely constitutional changes in voting procedure that would allow new parties to emerge and build new coalitions. It’s the best shot we have.
Many will argue that the two parties themselves would never allow this to happen. But perhaps the good news is that, in their feckless loss of legitimacy, they’ve also proved their incapacity. Now hopefully they can have the grace to move aside.
