A case study in why political parties matter

The Democratic Party just showed how parties help navigate uncertainty

In the last five days President Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic party’s nomination for the presidency, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination, and a majority of Democratic delegates pledged their support, making her the party’s presumptive nominee. 

After weeks of intraparty turmoil, the speed with which the Democratic party went from one candidate to another is a bit whiplash-inducing. But looking through the lens of American institutions, it’s a case of the party mostly working the way political parties are designed to work. 

No political party would want to be in this position of changing its standard-bearer at this point in the election cycle. But what we’ve seen happen in the Democratic party is a case study of why political parties in democracies are not just high-profile candidates’ personal campaign vehicles. They are necessary institutions in their own right. 

As much as Americans love to disparage political parties, this week shows why we need them.

In some ways, what’s happening this week is — frankly — just the Democratic party behaving like a political party is supposed to in a democracy. From an institutional perspective, here are three things to keep in mind.

1. Are there rules? Yes. Are they being followed? Yes.

What’s happening now is different from the Presidential nomination process we are all used to. But political parties, like other institutions in our democracy, provide a structure for navigating uncertainty. They come with rules and processes to help the party keep their work moving forward even when things don’t always go as planned. Having enough flexibility to follow an existing alternative to the “normal” process isn’t chaos, it’s a clearly-defined plan B. 

And that’s where we are at this point. 

The presumptive Democratic nominee has stepped aside, and the political party is turning to the procedures in place for what happens if a party needs to select a new candidate after the primaries have occurred. So far, it looks like those procedures are being followed. The Democratic convention hasn’t happened yet, so the party does not officially even have a nominee. Now that President Biden has withdrawn, the delegates he won in the primaries are freed to make a different choice at the convention (or its virtual component). So while this week’s events feel like a political car crash, it's actually more like a detour around some unexpected heavy construction. A surprise and a traffic jam to be sure, but everyone is still obeying the rules of the road. 

2. It is normal for the leaders of a party to be at odds with each other. That’s actually why we need parties.

Parties, especially during campaigns, often present themselves as a united front behind a shared vision for a brighter future. But we all know there is so much more happening beneath the surface. 

Just as federal and state legislatures bring people of different faiths, backgrounds, and views together to hammer out compromises, parties too are places that bring citizens in our country together to find common ground or find compromises that can bridge differences. No two politicians, even politicians in the same party, represent the exact same set of voters. But all politicians will fight for their chance to represent their voters and their views. 

We can safely assume that politicians — even those in the same party — are sometimes going to need to fight it out to move things forward. 

In fact, one of the reasons we need political parties for our democracy to work is that they are the place where those competing views get sorted out and coalitions get built. Parties give different communities and factions a way to manage their differences and still work together. We see plenty of examples in the United States and around the world where political leaders have been able to hash out their differences and come out the other side better able to do all the other things we need parties to do, like campaign and actually govern. 

Take the first nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. At the time, Roosevelt’s ideas were considered radical by some party leaders and multiple candidates with varying views sought the nomination. Competition for the Democratic nomination for president was fiercely split as various factions wrangled over competing leaders and the differing visions they represented. But after repeated ballots and some moderation of his foreign policy stances, FDR secured the support of an overwhelming majority of delegates, clinching the nomination by 945 to 190 ½ votes. Ultimately that contention didn’t lead to disarray, but instead opened the door to a political coalition that navigated crises from the Great Depression to World War II and offered voters a coherent vision for the country’s future. Without a party structure to force that kind of compromise, who knows how things would have ended up.

So it’s a good thing for democracy that party leaders have ways of cooperating and competing at the same time. In a healthy party, this kind of push and pull leads to compromises that keep everyone in a party rowing in largely the same direction, without allowing any single person to unilaterally dictate what that direction is. The competition does not inhibit cooperation and even solidarity within a political party — it’s the process by which they’re achieved. 

So the fact that support coalesced quickly for Harris after a period of turmoil suggests that the Democratic party’s ability to achieve that level of teamwork isn’t totally broken. Polling from Monday indicated that three-quarters of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents support having Harris as the nominee. And while Biden endorsed Harris shortly after announcing his withdrawal, her status as likely standard-bearer was not cemented until many other leaders and groups offered their support and delegates themselves indicated their intentions.  

3. Political parties have to do a lot of things at once — and that’s hard. 

Let’s also put our entire candidate selection process into broader context. When primaries were adopted, it was in response to the “smoke filled rooms” of the 19th and early 20th century that lacked transparency and put candidate selection squarely in the hands of a limited circle of party elites. Through successive reform efforts, these gave way to primaries in which nominations for various offices would depend on candidates’ popularity with voters. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became the principal method for choosing presidential nominees.  

But primaries can’t solve every problem that parties might face or do everything they need to do. Parties have an interest in fielding candidates who are likely to succeed in securing office and who will generally contribute to advancing the party’s policies once there. In a healthy democracy, parties have a role to play in ensuring that the candidates representing them on the ballot aren’t a danger to democracy itself. So parties have to be representative of their voters, responsive to voters’ preferences and needs once in office, and also resistant to takeover by authoritarian leaders who would pose a danger to the entire system. That’s a lot for one institution to do, which is precisely why having parties that are robust enough to navigate and adapt to unexpected and challenging circumstances is so important for democratic resilience.

At the same time, when the dust settles we’ll want to remember this moment.

Is this to say that there’s nothing to see here, and the Democratic party has no self-reflection to do? Of course not. Again — no political party would choose to be in this position. Others have already pointed out that if party leaders were going to do this much wrangling, their members would probably have preferred for them to do it sooner if possible. 

Some of this is on the party, but some of it comes down to shortcomings of our electoral system more broadly. If we had more widespread use of fusion voting or proportional representation, our parties would have incentives to get in better shape.

But this need for reflection and perhaps reform does not itself indicate an existential crisis for the Democratic party or American democracy, which already faces plenty of challenges. This is a moment to look around and realize how important parties are as institutions, and how critical it is that we consider reforms to support parties in fulfilling their role, as part of our ongoing work to keep our democracy healthy.