Party Power
An interview with Seth Masket on the Democrats, loss, and the electability obsession.
With Trump gearing up to run again and with Biden’s favorability, even amongst his own party, sinking, the next few months are sure to be filled with conversations about who the Democratic Party is and who it should be. We spoke to political scientist Seth Masket about his work — asking him to lay out how parties evolve, how they respond to public pressure, and whether party strength is a good thing. As we learn, reckoning with party identity and party power is nothing new.
This interview with Seth Masket was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
I am a professor of political science and the Director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. My work has focused on political parties. I focus mostly on party organizations, and how they're related to polarization.
I wrote one book called The Inevitable Party. I look at efforts to reign in political parties, efforts to either get rid of them, get them out of politics, or to limit them and how those efforts often end up making parties stronger in the end – and somehow politics worse.
I put out a book in 2020 called Learning From Loss, which is about the Democratic Party between 2016 and 2020. I was looking at how Democrats came to interpret Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016 and how those interpretations led to their choice of Joe Biden for 2020.
The party conversation I'm so interested to have – particularly your take that when parties get stronger, politics get worse. First of all, what does a strong party look like?
No, that's a really good question, and it's honestly something that is incredibly vague in a lot of research and journalism. I generally think of party strength as the ability of the leadership of a party to make decisions for the party. That is, if the party leaders and the party elites decide that they want to nominate a certain type of candidate, those candidates ultimately win the nomination.
There are a lot of ways for that to happen. The archetype for a strong party would be like Tammany Hall in New York City or Mayor Daley's organization in the 1950s and 1960s, where you had a boss who was saying, this is going to happen, this is the stance our party's going to take, these are the candidates we're going to nominate, and the rest of the party follows suit.
There are other ways of defining party strength, however. Some people see polarization as a form of strength so if the Democratic members of Congress are all voting along the Democratic Party line and all Republicans are voting along the Republican Party line, that could be seen as a form of party strength.
In terms of weakness, the modern example I use for that would be the Republicans in 2016. You had a lot of different people running for president. Most of the prominent elected officials didn't state any sort of preference for any candidate, they simply said, we don't want Donald Trump to be our nominee. Well, Trump gets the nomination. Okay – that is not a strong party. If they're signaling one thing and the result is the opposite, that is not a strong party. They lost on a really big thing. And then ultimately, once Trump wins all those primaries, the rest of the party leaders decide to endorse him and back him. That's not any sort of party strength I'm familiar with.
It has less to do with winning and more to do with how parties interact internally?
Yeah, I think that's an important distinction. When I'm thinking about party strength or weakness, I don't particularly care whether the party is winning or losing in November. It is more about whether a party is making decisions and whether the decisions are forced upon it.
Meaning, whether or not the electorate is forcing decisions?
Yeah. By the voters or public opinion, that sort of thing.
How does the Democratic Party respond after 2016? What role does the Sanders campaign play in this analysis?
That's really what my whole last book was about. In 2016, the Democrats, due to party strength, signaled very early on that Hillary Clinton was the nominee they wanted. They overwhelmingly endorsed her and donated to her and really signaled to all other Democratic candidates that this is not the year for them to run. Like, we've all decided we want Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders decided to ignore that. He was just not interested in that party message and he did, I think, better than a lot of people would've expected him to do given so much of the party was aligned against him.
But he still came up short, and I think one of the interpretations coming out of that election cycle is that perhaps the party looked too strong. Perhaps it looked like the party had made up its mind too early. At least for Sanders supporters, that signaled a lack of legitimacy – the decision should be a more open, more competitive one. One of the things we saw from the Democratic Party in 2020 was a real effort to make it look like it was not interfering – that's why you had 20 people on a debate stage.
For my book, I spent a lot of time interviewing Democratic Party activists in the early contest states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, and the main question I wanted to ask them is why they thought Hillary Clinton lost.
People had a lot of theories about why Hillary lost. Some people thought she was a flawed candidate. Others thought she was a fine candidate, but the party messaging was off. Some thought it was just a bad campaign – too much investment in the wrong parts of the country. There’s Russian interference, James Comey, sexism in the media – there are all sorts of ideas.
Was any of this clarifying to you? Was there a prevailing theory or train of thought?
I think I was surprised how much this idea of “electability” came into play. I end up dwelling on that topic a lot in my book – it plays an important role in American politics. People are convinced they can spot the electable candidate well in advance. They just have an idea of what electability is, but if you try to think it through, it is actually a very elusive concept. It's not who I want to be president, it's who I think other people want to be president. And it's almost impossible to test. People will probably say electability means a white man is likely more electable. Well, maybe. Except, studies show that women get elected about as often as men do. People of color do pretty well in elections too. Electability is less about what is empirically true and more about what a lot of people in the party think.
Democrats, in particular, are very quick to make massive transformations within their party. Anytime they lose a presidential election, they're always convinced they did something terribly wrong, and after 2016 they were massively fixated on electability. That became the singular focus.
I still don't think there's any consensus on why Hillary lost, but there seemed to be this kind of convergence around the idea that “identity politics” played in it – that somehow Hillary Clinton being a woman, championing people of color, championing the LGBTQ community, left the white working class out of the conversation, and so they pivoted to the candidate who was talking to them, Trump. I don't think that's necessarily an accurate interpretation, but that is what a lot of people within the party came away with. And they felt the way to deal with that in the future is to nominate someone who's basically less scary to the Midwestern, working-class whites. And that is how everyone eventually converged around Biden.
Do you feel like the party is continuing down this path?
Well, there was this interesting moment right after the election in 2020, where, for a few days we didn’t know the results yet of the presidential election, but we knew a lot of the congressional results. Democrats had won fewer House seats than expected. Immediately, everyone went into circular firing squad mode – everyone was accusing everyone of being the reason why Democrats didn’t do as well. We saw the familiar battle lines drawn. The more moderate Democratic members of Congress, Abigail Spanberger and others were saying the party lost because of identity politics, because we look too woke, and because Democrats wanted to defund the police. The left started firing back saying “actually, no, it wasn't us – you guys actually don't know how to run campaigns; you are running ancient campaigns that are completely out of step with where the electorate is now.”
I don't study this. I can only observe what I can observe, but it doesn't seem like the Democratic Party has figured out how to battle internally and campaign collectively. I'm at a loss even trying to think about who will be running in this next election.
In terms of identity for the party, I don't know if there's any real attempt to unify it, and I don't know that there needs to be, honestly. I mean, the US is obviously a hugely diverse country and the fact that it only has two major political parties is really an anomaly. Each of those parties is going to be filled with lots of different factions and people who feel very different things. I think it's fairly healthy for factions within a party to compete with each other in primaries and argue out what the party stands for. They don't necessarily have to completely unify, but, you're right in that it does create a challenge going forward.
You wrote that ‘the judicial branch is a lagging indicator of party power’ – how do you feel about the Supreme Court specifically?
My impression is that the Supreme Court is in a really dangerous area. It's never been a particularly popular branch, but it's usually been more popular than Congress, for example. It's slipping because it's suddenly wildly out of step with public opinion when it usually isn't.
The real story there is you have a powerful aspect of the Republican coalition that has been focused for like 40 plus years on getting a pro-life majority on the Supreme Court. It has been a stated objective. There was really a push in 2016, when Mitch McConnell saw an opportunity, with an open seat. And with Trump's election, Republicans had the opportunity to name three people to the court who were committed to overturning Roe.
And after that, there's suddenly a widespread recognition across the country by Republicans that they have this majority and you suddenly see Republican state legislatures all across the country passing massive abortion restrictions that they never would've even tried a few years earlier because they knew that the Supreme Court would just throw out the case. But, suddenly the majority was open to it.
And as a result, they're also open to a lot of other changes. Some very, I think, radical changes in the right to privacy, in business law, in labor, and all sorts of other things. They seem to be trying to strike while the iron's hot and move very quickly on what they know is an unpopular agenda, but they simply know that they have the numbers and they have the means to enforce it now.
I hear political scientists talking about this idea of the Court being in danger of losing its legitimacy a lot. That it’s the branch that is inherently the weakest; that it has no army, it has no police. It relies on people taking it seriously. It relies on historical legitimacy and its legacy for its rulings to matter. In theory, it's compromising that legitimacy by making rulings that are very radical and very out of step with public opinion.
Now, I don't know what it means in practical terms for the Court to be losing its legitimacy. Like, we don't wake up one morning and say, “The court's no longer legitimate people can ignore it.” Biden has criticized the court on its Dobbs ruling, but he hasn't said we should ignore the Court from now on.
If the Supreme Court is going to restore its legitimacy, I think some significant reforms are going to be necessary and probably going to be imposed upon it. That could mean increasing the size of the Court, or putting term limits on justices. Reforms would probably help, but I don't know how we get there in the short run. And I don’t know how a major institution can go on while being perceived as illegitimate.
There is a narrative that Republicans, like you stated above, have been planning and gaming for decades for these moments we’re in now. Is this narrative true or false?
Everybody involved in politics is convinced they're losing to the other side. Republicans are convinced that Democrats are more organized and more manipulative, and Democrats feel the exact same way about Republicans. The nature of being a political organizer is that you often feel like you're losing. That said, I think one of the major differences between the parties in recent years and recent decades is Republicans are more likely to take risks with American institutions. They're more likely to try things like a government shutdown, risk the nation's credit rating over their budget priorities, simply deny a president any consideration of a Supreme Court nominee in the final year of his term, and just mess with the basic institutional norms in order to get their policy goals. Democrats are more committed to democratic norms than to their policy priorities. Republicans are the opposite. Democrats generally think that there is value in keeping these institutions going, and they're willing to give up some stuff in order to do that.
