Category Archives: The Party System

Our Political Parties Are Behind the Times

24 Apr 2016 By in The Party System Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

REAL CLEAR POLITICS is offering a mind-bending set of survey results showing how respondents would vote in hypothetical general-election match-ups.  A number of organizations conduct these surveys, and at the moment the results of all of them are pretty consistent.

Clinton vs. Trump
Clinton would win

Clinton vs. Cruz
Clinton would win, but more narrowly

Clinton vs. Kasich
Kasich would win

Sanders vs. Trump
Sanders would win

Sanders vs. Kasich
Sanders would win

Sanders vs. Cruz
Sanders would win

These fascinating results help correct the myopia that sets in during the primary season, when passions within the parties control the focus.  On the Democratic side, Sanders is losing the delegate race to Clinton, yet in a general election he might fare better than she.  His positions, though untenable, might be more palatable than the kinds of ideas the Republicans are touting, for according to the polls, he would beat any of the remaining GOP candidates handily.

Interestingly, Clinton, though holding her own within her party, would fare less well than Sanders nationally.  She will be lucky if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, because, of the three remaining GOP candidates, he is the only one she can probably beat.  She might be beaten by Cruz, and the lowly Kasich, according to these numbers, would defeat her easily.

Overall, these surveys highlight the blinkered condition of the parties.  Sanders, the candidate the Democratic establishment has refused to accept, points up the existence of a dominant voter base that Clinton’s candidacy isn’t capturing.  Clinton is electable, but Sanders is even more electable than she.  Old-style Democrats don’t want to see this.  They don’t want to abandon the comfortable centrist positions they’ve grown accustomed to.  They’re ignoring the reveille: new, more egalitarian policies are what the nation wants and needs.

On the Republican side, we see confirmation of what we knew from the start, that the Republican field was weak though large.  The two Democratic candidates are more in sync with national sentiment than are their counterparts in the GOP.  Overall, the Democrats are more likely to prevail.  Meanwhile, the GOP’s most viable candidates, Trump (on the basis of primary support) and Kasich (on the basis of electability), are those the party has been most unfriendly toward.  Cruz’s candidacy provides the sole hope for the staunchly conservative wing of the Republican party, a minority element that continues to jeopardize the health of a national mainstream Republicanism.

Neither political party has proved adept at accommodating the sentiments of the voters, who are demanding new leadership and significant ideological reform.

When Nominating a President United a Party

31 Jul 2015 By in The Party System Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Party leaders calling on Theodore Roosevelt at home following his nomination for president.
This photograph provides a measure of how much our style of choosing presidents has changed.  In 1904, when this picture was taken, there was no doubt whatsoever of the power of political parties to select their presidential nominees.  In the century since, both parties have lost that control.

Admittedly, the star of this picture, Theodore Roosevelt (in the white vest), was immensely popular, and the incumbent.  His rise had been dependent, however, on his skill in gaining support of the major powers in his party–the political bosses who controlled large blocks of delegates, and the senior officeholders whom the bosses supported.  A presidential hopeful had to take into account established figures and personally win them over.  The months leading up to a convention were a period of intense jockeying, as hopefuls and their friends made the rounds, trying to gain traction within the organization.  No way could a candidate hope to become president without the party establishment, because the power to select a nominee really lay, not with voters, but with their delegates.

Ultimately, delegates to the conventions chose the nominee.  They could change their votes during the balloting if they pleased, and such changes were often necessary.  This process forced the people who were most invested in a political party to come to an agreement about competing nominees and decide which of them best served the party’s interests.  In the process of rejecting candidates, the party also closed off undesirable ideological directions it might have taken.  (Both the Democratic and Republican parties curtailed the independence of delegates after the tumult of the 1960s, gutting the conventions of their essential purpose and drama.)

Young Roosevelt understood that his individual destiny was interdependent with that of the GOP.  Early on, he labored to prove his loyalty to the Republican Party, despite his Progressive leanings and reputation for being an impetuous renegade.  He recognized that, whatever his personal talents (which proved to be considerable), he needed the vast organizing structure of the party to propel him upward.  After angling for years to get the party where he wanted it, the party finally acquiesced.

The ritualistic mating game they had played was epitomized in the nominating committee’s formal call on Roosevelt after the convention.  They visited Roosevelt at his home on Long Island, Sagamore Hill, where he personally received them and demurely accepted their invitation to be the party nominee.  The character of the event was not unlike an at-home wedding.

The accommodation that he and his fellow Republicans achieved gave Roosevelt the personal glory he craved, while benefiting the party, which, by organizing itself around Roosevelt, soared to new levels of popularity.  In the general election that pitted him against Democrat Alton B. Parker, Roosevelt won every state in the North and the West, including Missouri, which hadn’t gone Republican since the 1860s.  His margin of victory was 2.5 million popular votes, the largest in American history.

Roosevelt forgot what he knew about interdependence later in life.  Having declared that he would never again run for the presidency, he yielded his place to William B. Taft, who retained the White House for the Republicans in 1908.   In 1912, Roosevelt made a disastrous decision to run against his party, splitting it and effectively giving the presidency to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats.  It was that party’s first presidential victory since before the Civil War.  Roosevelt’s go-it-alone mentality and determination to defy the stolid power of the parties betokened the ill-conceived and divisive presidential bids so prevalent now.

 Image: from this source.

Off-Beat Graphics

16 Mar 2012 By in The Party System Tags: ,

Detail of HistoryShot's "History of the Political Parties, Part I)

Writing about critical elections made me aware of how difficult it is to describe all the different political parties that have existed in the US over time.  So I was fascinated to discover this firm, called HistoryShots, that makes some pretty remarkable graphical representations.  The one that caught my eye is a snaky-looking thing showing the tortuous history of the political parties, but there are others with titles like “The Genealogy of Pop and Rock Music”  and “The History of Dow-Jones Industrials.”

I love a good visual!

New ‘Critical Elections’ Page

8 Mar 2012 By in The Party System Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Jackson, McKinley, FDR, & Reagan

So many readers come to my site looking for “Parties Made New: Our Critical Elections” that I have moved this essay to its own new page, where it’s easier to read in its entirety.  It can be accessed by clicking on the permanent new “Critical Elections” link on the main menu, above; or click here.

On the new page, the recap of our six critical elections has been combined with an analysis of the 2008 election to form a single piece, as originally intended.

Thanks to everyone who has visited the site–I enjoy writing for you.

A President Without a Party? Americans Elect

23 Feb 2012 By in The Party System Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Have you heard of this?  Americans Elect is an online method for nominating and electing a president without the aid of a party.  It’s an intriguing if problematic experiment that’s gotten a lot of press this election season.  Thomas L Friedman praised it as a well thought-out initiative that could demolish our “two-party duopoly.”  As late as last week, an enthusiastic Douglas Schoen of The Daily Beast proclaimed “it’s not too late” for Americans Elect to produce November’s winning ticket.  (Wikipedia identifies Mr Schoen as a paid consultant for AE.)  Supporters expect AE’s momentum to build in the next few months, as the remaining Republican candidates are winnowed.

The idea of Americans Elect is so seductive.  Just visit its website: it’s as simple and pristine as a new Apple computer.  With its childlike graphics and cheery colors, it makes politics seem so uncomplicated and straightforward.  You will be walked through the steps of political participation.  All you need to do is supply your email address (every trust relationship begins with that these days), check a few boxes regarding your political values, fill in the blanks regarding your favorite candidates, and—wah-la!—you have circumvented everything you loathe about the parties and pushed the country one step toward a brighter future.  Or have you?

The premise of Americans Elect is that “the voice” of “the people” is being distorted and disregarded, and that the nation will be better off if we eliminate all political intermediaries.  Americans Elect aspires to get rid of parties (which it pictures as impeding the rise of the best leaders) by crowd-sourcing the nominating process and the (snakier) task of platform-building.  Leave behind the mess of face-to-face politicking!  We can achieve a better outcome impersonally, with the aid of quantification and the newest technology.  This is the gist of Americans Elect’s appeal.

To my mind, AE’s fails to identify our system’s real demons.  We do not need “more democracy.”  I’m not sure we even need better leaders.  We do need better ideas and a reining-in of excesses in the way political candidates and partisans campaign.  In the meantime, Americans Elect is a legitimate expression of frustration: a way for voters to threaten the security of the Democratic and Republican Parties, which have turned into such behemoths that it’s hard to imagine how to supplant them or get them to change.  The difficulties of creating a competitive new national party are daunting.  It could be done, but it hasn’t—not for the last 150 years.

Nonetheless, isn’t building that party better than embracing the alternative Americans Elect is offering, which is to elect a president dependent on—nobody?  Whose only debt is to the electorate, considered abstractly?  Parties constrain the executive by placing him or her under obligation to a brokering community.  Historically, presidents have been constrained—in a good way—by a large community of peers, who are party statesmen.  Americans Elect aims to create an executive untrammeled by any such obligation.  “Pick a president, not a party,” its slogan proclaims.  This atomized notion of leadership would make the Founding Fathers, who were all members of the political elites of their states, turn in their graves.

Will AE be the wild card of 2012?  And what kind of ticket will it field?  Despite its non-partisan stance (apolitical, really), Americans Elect must itself become a party or fail.  Even as it effects a technological end-run around this eventuality, outside forces require its transformation from the virtual to the real.  The process has begun already.  The organization has been engaged in a massive signature drive (using paid organizers) so that, once its presidential ticket has been selected, its choice will appear on ballots nationwide.  Meanwhile, questions regarding AE’s personnel, financing, field operations, organizational status, and lack of transparency are swirling.  No matter how they are resolved, this intriguing experiment forces us to think again about why we need parties and the work we count on the parties to do.

RELATED:
Newsweek article by Andrew Romano
 Wikipedia entry on Americans Elect
Comments re. Americans Elect on Fred Wilson’s blog AVC