Primary Lessons

If you have been paying any attention whatsoever to this year’s primary contests, you have probably noticed some of the drama. In the Texas GOP run-off for the US Senate, for example, the MAGA-coded, and ethically challenged candidate, Ken Paxton, defeated the more standard-issue Republican, John Cornyn, who was first elected to the seat in 2002. Or, perhaps you have noticed that Graham Platner, the winner of the Democratic primary for the US Senate in Maine, was revealed to have exchanged a number of sexually charged texts with women who were not his wife.

In terms of political consequences, both examples illustrate that the power to nominate candidates in the United States does not belong to the institutional party organizations, but to the primary voters in each state (which is a smaller subset of the general election voters in a given state, which is, in turn, a smaller subset of eligible voters in a state).

It is worth noting that this system has produced, in Texas, the candidate who is more vulnerable in the general election, and, in Maine, a candidate who was clearly not adequately vetted before he knocked out his competition.

To paraphrase an old saying, the proof of the nomination is in the winning (or losing), so the exact wisdom of these nominations will be judged in November. Still, they underscore the lack of thoughtful control of who a given party’s standard-bearer is. Indeed, should either candidate win, they will do more to help shape their respective parties than the established parties will shape them.

And those two examples are not at all alone in this cycle.

One of the aspects of American politics that I wish more Americans, even well-informed ones, were aware of is how anemic our political parties are as institutional actors. Especially when they do not control the presidency. That anemia is manifested in parties that cannot control who bears their label in elections, nor what those candidates say, believe, or (if they win) vote on in Congress (see, e.g., Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, just to name two recent exemplars).

Our parties are not deliberately constructed entities with clearly defined policy goals; instead, they are conglomerations of persons operating under franchise labels that are formed somewhat haphazardly through the primary process.

I think this is important not for some abstract academic reason, but because parties are a key (if not the key) mechanism for connecting voters to government, i.e., they are essential for representation. If they are flawed, then it is not surprising if our broader politics are likewise flawed.

As we talk about things like districting and its consequences, as well as broader questions of democratic reform, parties need to be front and center. And as much as people claim they dislike partisanship, the reality is that no representative democracy functions without parties. 

We need parties that can clearly articulate policy choices to voters, who compete to represent their distinct interests. Instead, we get loose conglomerations that can be reshaped without much of a plan.

If we want to understand how weak our political parties are as institutional actors, as well as to think about how influential presidents can be in our system, we need look no further than recent primary elections.

Primary elections are nomination contests, that is, they are the gateway for an individual to be the official nominee of a political party in the general election. With some rare exceptions, they are the way that all candidates reach general election ballots in all partisan elections in the United States (some local elections are nonpartisan, i.e., there are no party labels on ballots).

This process is taken for granted by Americans, as the mechanism has been used for legislative and other elections in the US since the late Nineteenth Century. While people tend to think more about presidential primaries (which have really only been the mechanism for nomination since 1972), we often don’t think enough about how these nomination contests shape parties. When we talk about “The Republicans” or “The Democrats” recruiting candidates or shaping messages, we often forget that there are no central committees making these decisions. There isn’t even any actual national party leadership of consequence.

While yes, there is a Republican National Committee and a Democratic National Committee, among other relevant organizations, they do not dictate who is in the party, which candidates will run, nor what they should believe.

In simple terms, to be an elected official in the United States, the steps basically go like this:

1. A person decides they wish to seek nomination by either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party (sure, they can also try third-party routes, but that almost certainly means losing the contest).
2. They have to win the nomination, almost certainly via a primary election.
3. Once nominated, they then have to win the general election.

Let’s note a few things here. First, it should be noted that no formal party organization figures into the above list. Maybe some party bigwig suggested you jump through the needed hoops to register as a primary candidate (as Chuck Schumer tried in Maine with Janet Mills), but probably not. It is largely a self-selection process. One need pass no ideological tests nor demonstrate any particular loyalty or purity vis-à-vis either party label.

No, all one needs to do is win the primary, and the official imprimatur of either the R or the D is placed beside your name on the November ballot.

And, as we know about the lack of competitiveness in most districts across the country, if you win the nomination of the party that dominates your district, you are a shoo-in for office. This illustrates the saliency of the ongoing redistricting fights, which are relevant for state legislatures as well.

The most pivotal step above, then, is the primary when it comes to actually constructing and shaping the parties, as recent contests underscore.

For example, let’s consider the Hoosier state.

The story starts last December when Indiana’s state Senate voted against redrawing the state’s congressional districts to shift the Republican advantage in the state from 7-2 to 9-0. Specifically,  21 Republican Senators (a majority of the caucus) joined ten Democrats to reject the map that had already passed the Indiana House of Representatives.

Beyond being one of the many fronts in the ongoing redistricting wars, this story also provides an important illustration of how parties work in the United States. To wit, going into the vote last December, President Trump threatened any Indiana state Senators who didn’t vote his way on Truth Social as follows:

Anybody that votes against Redistricting, and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in D.C., will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring…Rod Bray and his friends won’t be in Politics for long, and I will do everything within my power to make sure that they will not hurt the Republican Party, and our Country, again.

Of the 21 Republicans who voted against the new maps, ten were up for re-election this cycle. Two of those retired. Of the remaining eight, six lost their re-nomination bids to MAGA-backed challengers, two won re-nomination (one only by three votes, pending a recount).

Put another way, 75% of those whom Trump targeted lost, with one seat still not settled.

It is worth noting, too, that the Republican caucus in the Indiana state Senate will now be more MAGA in the next session. This is not because of any formal action by the Indiana Republican Party, nor by the RNC. This shift is a choice primary voters made at the behest of the sitting president (with the help of a lot of money to get the word out). This is true of Senator Bill Cassidy’s US Senate seat in Louisiana and Representative Thomas Massie’s US House seat in Kentucky, both of whom lost re-nomination bids to more MAGA-friendly candidates.

To expand this point, the GOP originally started down its MAGA pathway not because there was some purposeful decision to do so. Instead, a plurality of Republican primary voters in 2016 provided Trump the needed delegates to win the party’s nomination. There is no doubt that if leaders in the Republican Party had met in a proverbial smoke-filled room in early 2016, they would not have nominated Trump. But that’s not how our system works, nor how our parties evolve.

It should be underscored that Trump’s influence, as significant as it was in this case, is indirect. His allies had to recruit and fund opponents in these races and hope that the GOP base voters would listen to the leader. This is to be contrasted with the more centralized party leadership that we see in other democracies.

Still, the party that controls the presidency has the advantage in coordinating party action, because that party at least has a clear leader. The party out of power has no such centralizing function (Chuck Schumer is as close as it gets, which is to say, not close at all). Moreover, our politics are so manically focused on the prize of the presidency that this also enhances the significance and power of the sitting president as a partisan leader.

All of which also demonstrates why President Trump has been able to assert as much control over congressional Republicans as he has. Like most politicians, their main goal is reelection, and they can’t get reelected if they can’t get renominated. So, pleasing the base voters in the primary is centrally important, and sitting presidents have a lot of sway over such voters (and Trump, in particular, has been very good at mobilizing followers).

It is worth noting that primaries, as I am discussing them here, are a profound example of American exceptionalism. While one can find isolated examples of primary-like structures in other democracies worldwide, no country on Earth has used primaries as long, nor as extensively, as does the United States.

Primaries also shape our politics more profoundly than we often notice. If most general election campaigns are foregone conclusions because of the way districts are drawn, then that means primaries are often the real elections. But primaries tend to be low-turnout affairs (lower than general election turnout), and they tend to be dominated by the more ideological base voters in each party. While we talk as if most elections are between Rs and Ds, the reality is that most of them of consequence (in terms of who will get the seat) are R v. R or D v. D primaries.

As we find ourselves frustrated or confused as to why Democrats seem incapable of substantial strategic coordination, the diffused nature of the candidate nomination has to be taken into account. 

Further, the machinations of these contests show how the party can somewhat capriciously shift what it stands for not in some purposive, planned way, but simply because of the exigencies of a set of primary elections.

Featured image is Ted Cruz running a phone bank under a Trump-Pence sign