The Party Is Not Over
8 min read
The smoke-filled room is back! Praise the Lord—and pray the system works. To be technically accurate, there is no actual room, and if there were, it would not be smoky. Nonetheless, we have witnessed the extraordinary reassertion of a principle whose disappearance has been nothing short of calamitous for American politics. To wit: Nominations belong to parties, not to candidates.
If you have read a biography of Abraham Lincoln, you may recall that his entire record as an officeholder before the presidency was a single two-year term representing Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives. What you may not recall is: Why only two years? Did Lincoln lack ambition or talent? Face defeat by a stronger opponent? Retire in disgrace? None of the above. In Illinois, the Whig party machine had set up a rotation scheme in which party loyalists took turns occupying the party’s only safe House seat. When his turn ended, Lincoln went home.
Peculiar as this seems today, for most of U.S. history, it was taken for granted that nominations were party property. From the time of Martin Van Buren, who basically invented the modern U.S. political party, Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life. The parties identified, trained, and promoted qualified and reliable politicians; built political coalitions and brokered deals across diverse ideologies and constituencies; organized officeholders to work together in government; maintained institutional knowledge and ensured strategic continuity over time. All of those political tasks were, and still are, essential.
To perform them, the parties used everything from torchlight parades to pork-barrel spending, but their most important tool, the sine qua non of party influence, was control over who would be on their ticket. That power, exercised in formal ways like ballot access and informal ways like jawboning, allowed the parties to act as traffic cops. Party chairs would advise a green candidate to run for county commissioner before aiming for the House. Party donors would open and close the money taps to help reliable players. Party bigwigs would offer and withhold endorsements and steer media attention. The apogee of the party-controlled process was the so-called smoke-filled room, the (somewhat metaphorical) site where party leaders, elected officials, and trusted delegates met at the national convention to choose a presidential ticket.
Contrary to popular belief, the decision makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests. Although it is true that the parties were dominated by white, mostly Protestant men, that was a reflection of their era. Other institutions were also dominated by white, mostly Protestant men.
And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates. By offering careers and perks to loyalists, the parties were able to attract impressive talent. The political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts, in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time, found that the old party system’s congressional candidates were at least as experienced and well qualified as today’s. Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt—traits no one wants to go back to—they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths. Party insiders usually knew their candidates personally. They had worked with many of them, or had at least observed them, for years.
Donald Trump is not the first authoritarian-minded tycoon to put himself forward as a national savior. In the 1920s, a groundswell of popular support formed for a presidential run by the car magnate Henry Ford, a vicious anti-Semite who claimed that only a hard-driving businessman could solve the country’s problems. The parties were having none of it. As Collier’s magazine reported in 1923, “Almost without a single exception the men who constitute what is usually known as the ‘organization’ in every state are opposed to Ford.” Senator James Couzens said, “How can a man over sixty years old, who … has no training, no experience, aspire to such an office?,” adding, “It is most ridiculous.” Both parties shut their doors, and Ford’s presidential run was over before it began.
By the 1960s, however, the parties were under pressure to democratize their selection process. After Hubert Humphrey won the nomination in 1968 without entering a single primary, the Democratic Party put primary voters in charge. The new rules’ very first outing was disastrous: Left-leaning primary voters chose George McGovern (an architect of the new rules, as it happened), who lost 49 states in 1972.
What followed was an interim period in which the old system operated alongside the new. Primary voters had the main say, but party hacks clawed back influence in what became known as the invisible primary, a race for the support of party leaders, donors, and key constituencies such as unions and business. The hybrid system seemed to work—until, in 2016, it didn’t.
That year brought two insurgent candidacies. In no meaningful sense was Donald Trump a Republican or Bernie Sanders a Democrat. Trump had been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he had donated to both parties; he had shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. Sanders was an independent who had switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. Yet both insurgents saw that they could bypass the party gatekeepers by exploiting social media, raising money online, and belittling or skipping endorsements. The Democratic establishment barely fended off Sanders, and, of course, Trump seized the Republican nomination and then the party.
By that point, no Americans under age 65 had working experience of functional political parties. Instead, the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless or corrupt intermediaries at worst. When Russian email hacks revealed in 2016 that Democratic National Committee officials favored Hillary Clinton over Sanders, the public and media were scandalized and the party chair quit. In earlier times, the appropriate reaction would have seemed more like: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!”
Today, the Republican Party can still do some minor gatekeeping. It maneuvered former Representative Madison Cawthorn out of his House seat after he accused (unnamed) colleagues of holding orgies and using cocaine. For the most part, however, the GOP is engineered to serve Trump. In 2020 and 2024, it did not even pretend to deliberate over a platform.
The Democratic Party, however, has not gone as far down the road to self-dissolution. It has maintained so-called superdelegates who give elected officials and party elders a voice at the convention, albeit more in theory than in practice. In 2020, the Democratic establishment, by rallying to Joe Biden, again succeeded in heading off Sanders.
And now—the stunner. In a head-on conflict with its incumbent president and nominal leader, the institutional Democratic Party has prevailed. It has reclaimed control over its nomination. The party’s elected leaders and donors fell in line and told Biden that the party could not accept his continued candidacy, effectively cutting off the support he needed to win.
This astonishing turn raises two fascinating questions: Why did it happen, and how much will it matter? The answer to the first is that the party is realistic about its situation and that Biden is, in the end, a party man. Both the man and the party deserve credit for putting the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.
The second question depends on the outcome. If Democrats lose in November, the party’s intervention will be judged to have been desperate and pointless. But if the Democrats win, their gamble will vindicate the party as an independent actor. For the first time in two generations, the country will see why parties matter and how they can function independently in the public interest, doing what individual voters and politicians cannot.
Biden’s removal from the ticket also illuminates the single most important fact about American politics today, which is that the two parties are no longer the same kind of thing. As Brian Klaas and Tom Nichols have underscored in The Atlantic, one party is a coalitional party that maintains a sense of its identity and independence; the other is a personality cult projecting the will of one authoritarian-minded man. One party retains institutional guardrails; the other traffics in transgression. Both parties fielded dangerously unfit presidential candidates in 2024, but only one was able to muster the will and desire to correct itself. Until the GOP can be restored to its traditional role as a coalitional party, it will remain a source of hazardous instability.
In his new book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—And Could Again, Yuval Levin writes, “It is now painfully obvious that the reforms that disempowered party professionals in both parties were a catastrophic mistake, which has sown bitter division throughout our political system and beyond it in the broader culture and done terrible harm to our country.” As Levin correctly notes, the weakening of the professional party organizations—along with the breakdown of Congress—is at the root of contemporary American political dysfunction. Our two parties cannot do what we need them to do if they are bystanders in their own nomination contests.
In principle, restoring more nominating power to party professionals is one of the easiest reforms out there. Whenever they choose, the parties can change their rules to provide for what Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution calls peer review. Surveys find that voters are open to giving parties and professionals a voice in the process.
In practice, however, Americans have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands. What’s needed is a reminder that a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture. We’ve just seen one.
