It’s hard to think of a worse recent year for the Democratic establishment. It’s also hard to think of a better one.
The Democratic National Committee, ostensibly the nerve center of that establishment, was $2 million in debt as of July, its members in open revolt against their chairman, Ken Martin, a party lifer from Minnesota who was elected last year on a promise to expand the Democrats’ appeal. This year’s primaries played host to a rolling left-wing insurgency, in which progressives and socialists wrestled nominations away from incumbents and favorites of the party’s elected leadership and donor class. Crucial Senate contests in Maine and Michigan became expensive, bruising civil wars. “The establishment Democratic Party is a failed enterprise,” Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado — hardly a bomb thrower — said this month in an interview with the journalist David Sirota.
And yet this same party is, by most polling, the odds-on favorite to retake the House of Representatives next month. It’s also as likely as not to win control of the Senate, a prize that seemed hopelessly out of reach a year ago, when the Democrats faced their lowest approval ratings in a quarter-century of polling. The main super PAC for Senate Democrats is raising more money than it ever has. Republicans are increasingly allocating resources to deep-red states and districts where they have not had to seriously defend seats in years. This is the odd koan hanging over Democratic politics this year: Is it possible for a party to be a failure and a success at the same time?
If the answer is yes — and it is — then it has a lot to do with the vagueness of what we mean when we talk about the Democratic Party and the establishment that in theory runs it. In political rhetoric, the party “establishment” is a noun or, more usually, an epithet that can mean practically anything and anyone — from beleaguered apparatchiks like Martin to elected leaders like Chuck Schumer to talking heads like James Carville, from centrist purple-state senators who enrage liberals to liberal donors in San Francisco and Manhattan who enrage centrists. Are all these people the Democratic establishment? Are any of them?
In their 2024 book, “The Hollow Parties,” the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld coin a term for the hazy geography of influence that, in very different ways, now constitutes the modern Democratic and Republican establishments: the “party blob.” The formal party structures, they observe, are now overshadowed by advocacy organizations, campaign-consulting firms, donor networks, dark-money super PACs, partisan media and others that have, over time, informally taken on much of the work of selecting candidates and winning elections that once fell to the parties themselves.
These groups share partisan commitments but have no real accountability to voters or official party leaders. Their priorities and incentives are often more complicated than simply winning elections, and they can exist at cross-purposes. But their defining characteristic is their diffuseness. In the party blob, no one is really in charge.
Seventy-five years ago, a cigar-masticating ward boss might have struggled to explain what the Democratic Party — then a kludgy assemblage of Northern liberals, Southern segregationists and blue-collar union workers — stood for. But he could have explained easily enough what it was. The Democratic Party consisted of the state parties, their local affiliates and the national campaign committees. Its leaders appointed delegates who nominated candidates and maintained lists of voters. And they did whatever was necessary to get the latter to cast ballots for the former.
Americans have been conflicted about the role of parties in politics for as long as the country has had them. But the party system mostly withstood challenges to its supremacy until the 1960s, when societal and technological developments like suburban migration, television and public-opinion research began eating into the official Republican and Democratic organs’ monopolies on influence. The most serious blow to the old system came after the Democrats’ cataclysmic 1968 national convention, in which party elites orchestrated the nomination of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey amid furious street protests. Following Humphrey’s loss in the general election that November, the party, faced with a crisis of legitimacy, agreed to reforms that shifted most of the power to nominate candidates to primary voters.
The new rules stripped influence from big-city mayors and other traditional machers and allowed interest groups — championing constituencies from professional-class feminists to Black and Hispanic voters and politicians, and causes from environmentalism to civil liberties — to step in as power brokers. (Surveying the first post-reform national convention in 1972, one delegate sniffed, “There is too much hair and not enough cigars.”) The reforms didn’t just redistribute power; they also reordered the Democrats’ internal incentives. The newly empowered groups justified their existence less by winning victories for the Democratic Party than within it, claiming turf for their own often-conflicting policy priorities and representational interests.
The modern Democratic party blob was shaped by the post-1968 reforms, but also by a very different erosion of party power that occurred in the G.O.P. over the same period: the rise of a party-conquering conservative movement backed by business-linked philanthropists. Liberal activists first lamented that movement’s network of think tanks, grass-roots organizations and ideologically aligned media, then tried to imitate it, building their own party-outside-of-a-party infrastructure.
Two major external developments have radically accelerated the parties’ blobification in the 21st century. The internet lowered barriers to organizing, fund-raising and communicating outside of party systems, enabling candidacies as disparate as those of Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, which shared practically nothing besides an inclination to push at the constraints of the existing party categories. Supreme Court decisions removing nearly all constraints on campaign contributions, meanwhile, have produced an arms race in spending by outside groups, which now eclipses the parties’ and campaigns’ own.
Focused by common purpose in an election season, the constituent elements of the party blob can outwardly resemble a political party. They share partisan loyalties and enmities and agree broadly if not entirely on matters of policy. They pool resources toward the goal of electing some politicians and defeating others and, in 2024, even managed the extraordinary challenge of easing a sitting president out of the race and quickly building consensus around a replacement.
To voters on the receiving end of outside groups’ phone calls, email barrages, TV ads, mailings and door-to-door harangues in the weeks before Election Day, the difference from the parties’ own work is often imperceptible — enough so that a reasonable person might ask what, exactly, is so bad about the blob. The smoke-filled room was never much loved by anyone who wasn’t in it, after all. Is the further decline of the parties in favor of other actors that do many of the same things, often more effectively, really a problem for anyone but Ken Martin?
One answer is that political parties are a little like newspapers: inefficient and anachronistic, maybe, but also delivering intangible benefits that are more clearly visible in retrospect, amid their decline, than they were in their era of hegemony. The Democratic Party’s retreat from red states and rural counties, for instance, clearly hastened its evolution into a party by and for professional-class urban and suburban liberals, confined by that class’s cramped political imagination and language. (“Can I level-set with you?” the subject line of a recent D.N.C. fund-raising email asks.)
Relying on outside organizations and super PACs has also brought a fundamental instability to the work of campaigning. Over the past decade and a half, Democrats have come to depend on grass-roots organizations focused on Black, Latino and young people to register and mobilize voters. But the downsides of that reliance became clear in recent cycles, as those demographics grew less uniformly Democratic and groups like the now-defunct New Georgia Project — a powerful force in Democratic campaigns in that state for a decade — fell victim to chronic nonprofit problems of infighting and fundraising struggles.
Dark money is even more unstable, as the structured donor alliances of two decades ago are supplanted by plutocratically wealthy individual givers. Republican campaigns in the last two elections, for instance, have been heavily funded by a relative handful of Silicon Valley billionaires, some of whom were until recently aligned with Democrats — most significantly Elon Musk, whose $276 million investment in Republican campaign efforts since July dwarfs all donors’ spending combined on the equivalent Democratic effort this year. And the flood of unaccountable outside money has also brought with it a backlash. In this year’s Democratic primary upsets — most dramatically Michigan’s Senate race — left-wing challengers have defeated better-funded opponents in large part by making the funding itself a campaign issue.
This state of affairs, however bleak, is very different from the bleak future that political observers once anticipated would follow the decline of the parties. In the 1980s, a common line of criticism held that the old party organizations had given way to an increasingly empty, image-oriented politics industry: a simulacrum of a participatory process that in reality was tightly controlled by what Joan Didion, surveying the 1988 presidential primaries, described as “a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite.” This was a party blob washed clean of both the corner-bar grit of the machines and the idealism of the reformers who had toppled them, its strategists and media consultants busy re-engineering elections into a post-ideological consumer act like choosing between Coke and Pepsi, building stables of politicians bred mostly for their hair and teeth.
But where, in this picture, would you put the Democratic Socialists of America, which backed the successful challengers in several of this year’s Democratic primaries? The D.S.A.’s rise is at once a story of party-blobification and of a revolt against it. Like the conservatives of the 1970s, the group frankly views the party it occupies as a host for an ideological movement rather than as a partner. It also practices an exaggerated form of the interest-group litmus-test politics that came to dominate Democratic politics in the post-1968 era, measuring its own strength less by general-election victories than by its ability to enforce candidate loyalty to left-maximalist positions.
At the same time, the D.S.A. is an authentically participatory organization, tapping the sort of civic-minded enthusiasm that once fueled party activism — “the least-hollow party in America,” as Schlozman describes it, despite not being a party at all.
Its rapid ascent in Democratic politics, and its candidates’ upset wins, suggests that many Democratic voters have an appetite for the political-participation hack it represents: It is a means of engaging seriously in Democratic Party politics while also casting a vote of no-confidence in the party itself. And the same Democratic consultant class that Didion once supposed would produce an infinite regression of Michael Dukakises has, this cycle, mostly drawn attention for its recruitment of candidates like Graham Platner, the scandal-plagued former Senate nominee in Maine: marketable left-wing insurgents who simultaneously embody an appetite for partisan combat and a skepticism of party.
One obvious factor in this is the extreme negative polarization of American politics — a phenomenon still in its infancy in the ’80s and now advanced enough that Charlie Cook, the veteran political analyst, has suggested thinking of the Democrats’ likely victories next month as a “red undertow” rather than a “blue wave,” in which Republicans are sucked under by Trump’s unpopularity even in the absence of a serious surge of enthusiasm for Democrats. It’s a darkly funny end stage to reach in the country’s long, ambivalent history with parties. If Americans have finally made them irrelevant, it is not by transcending them, but by absorbing what we least liked about them. In a way, we have all become the blob.
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