When Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) announced last week that she was going to become Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), it sent ripples through the American political system. As the cartoon above illustrates, Americans are fleeing from our two established political parties and identifying instead as Independents.
As this chart recognizes, Americans are disenchanted with our two major political parties. This next chart shows us that our parties have been in decline for a long time.
We might ask, why do we need political parties, anyway? To answer this question, we need to understand the function of political parties in a political system.
Parties define themselves to voters by establishing a set of policies and principles that they stand for. Usually, this is done through a party platform in each presidential election cycle.
Parties define themselves to voters by establishing a set of policies and principles that they stand for. Usually this is done through a party platform in each presidential election cycle.
Parties recruit candidates to run for public office. Candidates do not just parachute in; they are recruited and encouraged by a political party organization. In exchange for facing public scrutiny and the possibility of defeat, a candidate is promised support and backing from the party. Few candidates can make a successful run for office without the backing of a political party.
Parties organize and run campaigns. There are Democratic and Republican party organizations in localities all over the country, and it is through their work in non-election years as well as election years that candidates can call on the financial and personnel resources to manage their campaigns. Parties know how to organize phone-banking and door-knocking. They know how to design, order, and distribute campaign materials. They understand the phases of a campaign, from persuasion to get-out-the-vote.
Parties accept responsibility for operating the government. In a well-functioning representative democracy, voters periodically have the opportunity to assess whether their party’s candidates are following through on their campaign promises. They can either re-elect them or vote them out.
The current disdain for American political parties is not because they are too strong but because they are too weak. They don’t perform these functions very well, and, as voters abandon political parties, they become even less able to perform these functions. Let’s look at this.
Developing a platform. In 2020, the Democrats published a 67-page platform to tell voters what the party would try to do if voters put Democrats in power. You may disagree with some elements of the Democratic party platform, but you can’t pretend you don’t know what they stand for. The Republicans, on the other hand, produced no platform in 2020, saying instead that they were in favor of “Donald Trump’s America First Agenda.” No one really knows what this agenda is – including the disgraced twice-impeached loser himself – so voters who vote for Republicans are simply voting against the Democratic Party’s platform. We saw in the 2022 midterm elections that the Republicans campaigned against the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress without stating what they would do to address the problems. Now that they are poised to take control of the House of Representatives, their agenda seems to be the continuous investigation of the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress. We should not be surprised – they talked about real issues during the campaign, but never put forth policy positions in greater detail than would fit on a bumper sticker.
I use the name “Democratic Party” rather than “Democrat Party,” which is what the political opponents of the party use. This began in the 1980s, when in an effort to “own the libs” (before that phrase became popular), right-wing pundits and politicians began to use the shorter term so as to avoid calling their political opponents “democratic,” which has positive connotations. Wikipedia’s entry for “Democrat Party” says that it is “an epithet for the Democratic Party of the United States.” Another reason to call it the Democratic Party is because that is its official name.
Recruiting candidates. Many voters complain about the choices they see when they go to the polls. “We need better candidates!” they exclaim. Well, if you want better candidates, you have to engage with your local political party organization as they identify and recruit candidates. Right now in Virginia, we are looking ahead to the 2023 elections. We vote for state offices in odd-numbered years in my state; next November we will be electing members for our state House of Delegates and our state Senate. The redrawn district lines resulting from last year’s redistricting mean that we have some districts without an incumbent while other districts may have two incumbents. A successful political party runs candidates for every seat, even in a district where the demographics suggest the party doesn’t have a chance to win. We don’t give away any seat. To make this happen, my local Democratic party is holding focus group sessions throughout the community and talking to everyone to find candidates. We have to do this within the next month – it’s already late in the game. If you want better candidates, you can play a role in recruiting them.
Organizing and running campaigns. Running for office takes money, and candidates who aren’t independently wealthy depend on donations to fund their campaigns. The local party organization has access to mailing lists so they can send out those nagging emails and texts so that their candidates can be competitive. Last fall, the Democratic party candidate for the House of Representatives seat in my district raised $400,000 with the help of the Democratic Party. His opponent, incumbent Republican Rob Wittman, had a $15 million “war chest” before the campaign started. We desperately need stronger campaign finance laws at both the national and state levels – Virginia has almost no meaningful campaign finance regulations for state elections, although candidates for national office do have to follow the federal campaign finance laws. Recent Supreme Court cases like Citizens United (2010) greatly weakened these laws. But until this happens, candidates need the support of political parties to get name recognition, raise money, and staff their campaigns.
Accepting responsibility for operating the government. Even though voters are running away from the political parties, parties absolutely govern in Congress. In the US, it’s not uncommon to have divided government, with one party in charge of a branch of government and the other party in charge of other branches. A governing “trifecta” – in which all three parts of the government are in the hands of one party – is unusual. President Trump had a trifecta for his first two years in office, and did almost nothing with it except pass a tax bill that greatly favored his wealthy voters. President Biden had a trifecta for his first two years in office, and, despite foot-dragging and outright opposition from the Republicans, was able to pass a lot of important legislation. In the old days (before Newt Gingrich and his 1994 Contract With America), partisanship was important in Congress but the political parties often rose above their partisan interests and compromised to make things happen. No longer. Hyperpartisanship and divided government reduce accountability.
I don’t know why Kyrsten Sinema decided that it was better for her to be an independent (I don’t capitalize the word because “independent” is a philosophical stance and not the name of a party) rather than a Democrat. Voter registration data in Arizona shows that the electorate in that state is almost evenly divided Republican/Democrat/Independent. By declaring herself an independent, she avoids the humiliation of being defeated by a Democratic Party challenger from the left – most likely sitting Congressman Ruben Gallego, who will probably now run for the Senate seat as a Democrat. Pundits are trying to figure out which party is hurt more by a possible independent run by Sinema. Her narcissistic self loves the attention but could care less about what she’s doing to the American political system.
To reiterate: representative democracies can function only through political parties. The map below illustrates the prevalence of political parties in democratic systems of government.
No democracies in the world operate without political parties. There are a few single-party states – Venezuela, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran, China, Vietnam, and Laos. Two-party systems are most common in the United States, Australia, a few countries in central Asia, and throughout Africa. Most western democracies feature multiparty systems.
This tells us that representative democracies require strong and functional political parties. To the extent that voters desert our two major political parties, the strength of American democracy is threatened. For the first time since this analysis began, the United States is identified as a “flawed democracy” – along with several large democracies in western Europe.
If you are fed-up with our politics and want to have better candidates, more productive campaigns, and more accountability in government, find your local Democratic Party or Republican Party organization, call them, and ask what you can do to help. You don’t have to be a glad-handing door-knocker to help. You can answer phones, put stamps on postcards, help maintain voter or financial records, design campaign materials, hand out campaign materials to the people who are knocking on doors or manning voter booths at the local farmers’ market, drive people around, or a bunch of other things.
Unless you just prefer to complain.
Agreed. You always lay things out in such a straightforward, logical way. I love that. The truck, of course, is to educate the public in a voice they understand.