I Know How Your Party Coordinated Last Summer

What the nominations of 2024 taught us about Democratic and Republican party strengths and weaknesses

The Niskanen Center invited me to participate in a forum on American political parties, and it just went live today. It includes contributions from Dan DiSalvo, Jennifer Dresden, Ray LaRaja, Julia Azari, Dan Schlozman, and Sam Rosenfeld. My piece focuses on the important differences between the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations of the summer of 2024, and how well they mesh with existing theories of political parties.

Under the “UCLA School” version of party nominations, party elites (officers, elected officials, interest group leaders, major donors, etc.) examine different candidates for office and confer with each other about who they think offers the best combination of electability and fealty to the issues they care about. If they can agree on a candidate, their collective endorsements and influence among donors can give that candidate a substantial advantage in the primary elections. Thus, even though primary voters are technically in charge of party nominations, party elites are actually driving much of that activity, and they often get the nominee they want.

As I argue in my Niskanen piece, the Democratic Party demonstrated a far more robust and aggressive model of party power this summer, not only shoving an incumbent president off the ticket but coordinating behind his replacement in a matter of hours without any real input from voters. In some ways the choice to rally behind Kamala Harris was a pretty easy and obvious one, but there were a lot of ways that rollout could have gone wrong, splitting the party or weakening the nominee, and those didn’t happen.

Yet, as I argue, while the Democrats exceeded the standards of the UCLA model, Republicans, as they have since 2016, fell short of it. As I write,

The Republican Party has underperformed electorally in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and Trump’s leadership of it — in which he has made the party synonymous with himself, recruited and endorsed unpopular candidates, and maneuvered himself into two impeachments and ongoing legal troubles — is arguably a proximal cause. This has not caused party elites to organize to stop his third nomination; indeed, elites were overwhelmingly behind him in this cycle (unlike in 2016, when they largely stayed silent). This could be viewed as part of Republicans’ demonstrated preference for policy gains over electability (at least on abortion and upper-income-skewed tax cuts, Trump has surely delivered), or, more realistically, a recognition by party elites that they are incapable of making choices their passionate voters oppose. The GOP seems very much the mass-led party that produces factional candidates – the sort of thing that primary skeptics warned of and that party elites organized to prevent after the McGovern-Fraser reforms.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing! And please check out the entire series — it’s fascinating.