The Democratic Party Has Never Been Weaker. This May Be a Good Thing

I t ought to be a pretty optimistic time for Democrats. Donald Trump’s in a deep hole, and his only answer is to ask for more shovels. The House seems likely to tip back toward Democrats, redistricting shenanigans notwithstanding, and strong Senate candidates in a bunch of reliably red states — Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Alaska — have put the Senate firmly in play as well. Arguments over wokeness and wealth taxes have been tabled in favor of hammering Trump over gas prices and rampant corruption.

And yet there remains a palpable fear among Democrats, both inside Washington and out, that party leaders lack a clear message and have no strategy for what comes after November. The party’s national chairman, Ken Martin, barely registers as a spokesman and raises money less effectively than your average PTA. In a truly bizarre turn of events, he recently released a nearly 200-page “autopsy” on how the party managed to blow the 2024 presidential election, then immediately dismissed the report as incomplete and poorly sourced, possibly because it read like a bad poli-sci thesis and failed to illuminate any of the party’s most consequential failures (like, say, rallying around an unpopular, 81-year-old president and then having to choose his replacement in on a Zoom call). Democrats worry that this next round of presidential primaries are shaping up to be chaotic and combative, and no one’s stepping in to winnow the field.

All of which makes me think of that great scene from the film Zero Dark Thirty, when Kyle Chandler, playing a CIA station chief, tells his agents to stop waiting for grownup intervention. There’s no working group coming to the rescue. There’s nobody else hidden away on some other floor. There is just us. Because I’m telling you, Democrats: no one in the party headquarters on South Capitol Street is coming to save you — or can. There’s no actual party anymore, period. It’s just you.

Even by the time I started covering campaigns, seven presidential moons ago, parties were starting to lose their grip on the process. The floors full of fundraisers and national organizers, the powerful state machines and the get-out-the-vote guys with what they called “walking around money” in their pockets — the whole industrial-age apparatus still existed, but it was rusting and wobbly. “The party” didn’t stop Bill Bradley from challenging the sitting vice president, Al Gore, in 2000, and coming much closer to knocking him off than anyone now remembers. (Yes, the same Bill Bradley you saw sitting court-side at Knicks games. Trust me, he could still take you in a game of Horse.) Nor could “the party” do a thing to stop Howard Dean, four years later, from storming to the front of a crowded field, taunting its Washington leaders the entire time, until voters got closer look at how he handled rejection and came away unnerved.

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But even then, in its last gasps of glory, the party establishment, as we liked to call it then, could do a couple of things that almost no one else could. It could raise massive mounts of cash for TV ads and pollsters, and it could mobilize an army of phone canvassers and door-knockers. By 2008, as the internet reached maturity and social media exploded, that advantage was history — and so, of course, was Hillary Clinton’s inevitable nomination. Thanks largely to the campaign finance reform that no one talks about anymore (probably because it turned out to be a disaster), the party’s ability to raise money collapsed at exactly the same moment that billionaires and small-dollar contributors — i.e., you and all your relatives — started taking over. Almost overnight, parties were reduced, essentially, to being professional convention-holders, sort of like the Elks Club. That and the keepers of the precious ballot lines, which is pretty much the the only asset still keeping them in business.

If you don’t believe me, just consider what happened to the Republican Party, which Democrats used to envy for its tendency to operate like the House of Windsor, dutifully handing the nomination to whomever was next in line. Then came 2016, when even Trump seemed shocked by how easy it was to sweep aside the entire elected establishment. Trump could never have been nominated if there hadn’t been 17 Republican candidates — literally — splitting the vote, but that was exactly the point; there existed no semblance of the party that even a few years earlier could have pushed lesser candidates out of the race and propped up an heir. Trump didn’t just borrow the ballot line; within a few years, he had subsumed the party entirely, as it were just another distressed property. Trump’s party is Republican only in the sense that Utah has jazz or Los Angeles has lakes. All that’s left is the name.

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And if you don’t think leading Democrats now are just as powerless as Republicans were then, then take a look at what’s happening in Maine, where Graham Platner, an oyster fisherman who once sported a Nazi tattoo, not only won the Democratic primary for Senate but drove the popular sitting governor out of the race entirely, despite the early machinations of party elders. Does that look to you like a party that’s able to wield the slightest control over who runs for president? More to the point, does it look like a party that has any clue as to what voters actually want? Democratic leaders seem convinced that a political novice with evolving positions and the persona of a reality TV star, who’s allegedly been sexting half the women in Bangor, has little chance at beating a 73-year-old moderate with 30 years of Senate votes. Maybe they missed the last decade of American politics.

THERE IS ONE WAY — and only one way — in which the national party will play a critical role in shaping the presidential race to come. Sometime this summer or early fall, the party’s rules committee will decide on which states are getting the early primaries and in what order. This matters, because momentum and media attention still matter. Leftist candidates running on class warfare or identity politics might have a tougher path in New Hampshire or Georgia than they would in, say, Iowa or Nevada. Jewish candidates — the party could have at least three — would probably rather not start in Michigan, where anti-Israel sentiment runs higher. The party has already decreed an end to caucuses (as opposed to primaries), which adds a further challenge for the Democratic socialist types who rely on organizing.

But even then, despite whatever path the party lays out, there’s no reason to think it will lead where it’s supposed to. The party has no leverage to limit the field, which means that more than a dozen candidates, conservatively speaking, will show up at the starting line. A candidate with a little celebrity and unshakable slice of support — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg come to mind — could outpace most of the field without coming close to a majority, as Trump did in 2016. There’s really no point in spinning out scenarios before we know who’s actually running and where; what I can tell you with near certainty is that nothing is going to happen because the wizards at the DNC mapped it out that way.

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If you’re a Democrat, you should see this as a great thing. For the last three decades, in the belief that disunity was bad and they needed to be more like those locked-down Republicans, Democratic leaders have tried to anoint their front-runners, with sporadic success. For all that time, the party hasn’t chosen a single nominee who hadn’t previously been a senator. The only two who succeeded were Barack Obama (who had served in Washington for about 10 minutes and was challenging the party’s preferred candidate) and Joe Biden (who, let’s face it, won a very strange election). In other words, steering the nomination to Washington insiders has proven, time and again, to be an exercise in self-immolation.

Now, for the first time in decades, Democratic voters will get a crowded and wide-open primary, along with actual, substantive disagreements. That’s bound to yield a better candidate than party leaders would choose, even if that person doesn’t seem presidential to you at the outset. And don’t be shocked if the final stages of that competition include someone none of us have considered yet, someone who’s not so much a politician as an influencer (God, how I hate that word), who’s been watching the devolution of our politics and understands that that party is just another 20th century brand ripe for takeover, like Nieman Marcus or Chef Boyardee. The building on South Capitol is nothing but a facade now. Push on the door and watch it fall.