This is not a sentence written often lately, but the U.S. Supreme Court has just done a great service to American democracy.
On June 30, the Court struck down federal limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with individual federal candidates. Some early reports on National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission represented the 6–3 decision as a victory for big money. To some extent, it is—but for once, in a good way.
Years of campaign-finance reforms have curbed the power and leverage that the Republican and Democratic Parties have had in elections, which has handily undermined the quality of candidates on the ballot (see: Graham Platner). Letting the parties spend more should helpfully restore some of their leverage. When the parties were stronger, they somehow managed to assemble hundreds of contending interest groups into just two broad coalitions. They negotiated compromises and reconciled differences. Who has that job now?
For decades, people who call themselves political reformers have agreed that the hero of American democracy is the small-dollar donor. Instead of the corrupting influence of big donors and party bosses, public-spirited citizens would send their $20 checks to candidates who stood up for ordinary people. That was the theory.
But decades of elections and innovations in small-donor fundraising have proved this theory false. Small donors consistently make bad decisions for bad reasons. Like large donors, they are disproportionately ideological and hyper-partisan. They regularly value conflict over achievement. They are overimpressed by performances on TV and social media. They act on impulse. They often neglect the downballot candidates necessary to build majorities that get things done.
As the political-science professors Zachary Albert and Raymond La Raja write in their new book, Small Donors in US Politics: Myth and Reality, “The elevation of small donors, in effect, may address one type of bias (the outsized influence of the wealthy) but neglect or worsen another type of bias (the growing influence of the most extreme voters), which is no less problematic.” That cautionary may is necessary because small donors, although not ultrarich, are generally richer than the average American. Instead of serving the needs of ordinary voters, small donors actually pull the political system toward the intensely partisan cultural and social causes that excite Americans of above-average income.
[Idrees Kahloon: Small-dollar campaign donors are hurting the political system]
Some of the star recipients of small-dollar donations over the past two decades have been, on the Republican side, Ron Paul, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Sharron Angle, and Donald Trump; on the Democratic side, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Nearly 60 percent of Platner’s donations arrived in gifts less than $200.
If the small donor is advertised as the hero of politics, the party “machine” or “establishment” has long been condemned as the villain. The Illinois liberal stalwart Abner Mikva—who served in state politics and all three branches of the federal government from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s—often told a story that expressed his generation’s scorn for machine politics:
It was 1948. I had just come to Chicago, in Illinois, from Wisconsin … Adlai Stevenson was running for governor and Paul Douglas was running for senator, so I stopped in at the Eighth Ward regular Democratic-organization headquarters. I said, “Hi, I’m Abner Mikva; I’d like to volunteer for Stevenson and Douglas.” And the quintessential Chicago ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth, leered at me, and said, “Who sent you, kid?” I said, “Well, nobody sent me.” He put the cigar back in and says, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” And that was the beginning of my political career in Chicago.
The post-Watergate campaign-finance reforms of the ’70s restricted the flow of party funds into federal politics. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation of 2002 blocked the flow of party funds into state politics if those funds might be used in ways to benefit federal candidates indirectly.
The combined effect of these laws was to redirect big money into new vehicles, such as political-action committees and super PACs. Two 2010 cases—Citizens United v. FEC at the Supreme Court and SpeechNow.org v. FEC at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—liberated these vehicles to spend unlimited amounts to influence campaigns and elections. PACs performed some functions of the old parties, including candidate recruitment and selection. But they were less transparent and accountable than the parties, and less permanent. They come, and—like some of the big Republican PACs of the Paul Ryan era—they go.
Neither PACs nor the small donors accept the most fundamental mission of the old parties: mediating factional disagreements that now play out as ugly spectacle.
In 2015, Jonathan Rauch argued about politics: “We live in a world of second and often third choices, and in order to govern one must make decisions and engage in practices which look bad up close and are hard to defend in public but which, nonetheless, seem to be the best alternative at the time.” Navigating this world of second choices requires institutions built for the long haul: the parties. But restoring this bygone power to the national parties has long seemed out of reach.
[Read: A Supreme Court decision that might improve politics]
The Supreme Court has now opened the way. NSRC v. FEC allows parties back into campaigns and elections. Until June 30, federal law capped how much parties could spend on congressional and Senate races in coordination with their candidate, the amount varying according to the district’s or state’s population. In 2026, the caps were set at roughly $130,600 to just more than $4 million for Senate races, and $65,300 to $130,600 for House races.
By removing these caps, the decision grants parties real leverage again. When parties can spend massive amounts of money, they can withhold money as well. In Maine, for example, national Democrats tried to warn local Democrats that Graham Platner was a poor choice for the U.S. Senate nomination. NSRC v. FEC would put teeth into such warnings: If you heed our advice, we will help a lot; if you don’t, we’ll redirect our resources to more promising races in other states.
Since 2010, candidate quality has become a grave and growing problem for both parties, especially in Senate elections. Remember the “I’m not a witch” lady who gave away a U.S. Senate seat for Delaware that Republicans could have won in 2010? Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin in Missouri in 2012? And so on to the conspiracy theorist and venture capitalist Blake Masters, who lost Arizona for the Republicans in 2022? The problem has become acute on the Democratic side in the current cycle, and the national party has proved ineffectual in supporting more electable candidates, especially in Maine and Michigan.
Party power—and party wisdom—has an opportunity now to reassert itself, thanks to the Supreme Court. After years of oligarchic politics (thanks to Citizens United) and the shortsighted ideological extremism of small-dollar donors, this new ruling on party campaign spending offers hope that the old parties can again guide campaigns and elections onto a better path. The old machines, once so despised, look better now that Americans have experienced the alternatives.
The post Party Machines Weren’t So Bad After All appeared first on The Atlantic.
