The battle between grassroots Democratic activists and Washington-based party leaders continued to unfold Tuesday night, with the national party notching some rear-guard victories and local forces delivering the party its second high-profile setback in as many weeks.
Through all of these contests, national party leaders have argued that their decision-making is not personal or ideological. They believe in the same progressive values as the grassroots activists, goes the argument, but more moderate candidates are needed to be able to win the general election and take the House back from Republicans.
That argument was made most explicitly earlier this month in the New York Times, by Brookings senior fellow Elaine Kamarck, who endorsed the practice of political parties intervening in primary elections. Kamarck was responding to The Intercept’s coverage of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer attempting to push a candidate in Colorado out of a House race by appealing to party elites’ superior savvy (emphasis added):
That’s an assertion of fact, not opinion. And according to new political science research, it is incorrect.
A paper in this month’s edition of the peer-reviewed Legislative Studies Quarterly analyzes a decade’s worth of federal elections, finding that party organizations boost moderate candidates across the board, whether the general election is expected to be competitive or a long shot. In other words, party support for moderates does not appear to be strategic, but sincere. “They’re not doing this to have a better shot at winning elections,” said the paper’s author Hans Hassell, assistant professor of politics at Cornell College in Iowa.
The evidence points more to the conclusion that party elites “have strong incentives to prefer loyalists who can be trusted to implement its preferred policies after the nomination,” Hassell writes.
The study not only breaks with other political science findings, but decades of rhetoric from party leaders. It’s obvious from the most casual survey of primary elections that parties support moderates, but the races that observers tend to watch closely are competitive contests in swing states, so it stands to reason that a moderate in such a district may indeed be the smarter strategic play. Indeed, in a series of high-profile battles with progressive activists, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has consistently positioned itself as being pragmatic, willing to bend on its progressive principles if doing so can lead to victory.
Hassell’s work expanded the field of vision, looking at races in which the Democratic nominee is likely to cruise to victory. The full scope of the research indicates that party leaders are actually committed to elevating candidates with a narrow range of beliefs.
If party elites were merely strategic actors, the data would show higher support for moderate candidates in swing races, while not showing as much support in seats that were either safe or out of reach. That’s not the case. In Hassell’s findings, parties consistently supported the more moderate primary candidate, regardless of the expected outcome of the general election. Even after excluding incumbents — which party committees almost always support — support for moderates holds. It’s also consistent regardless of party. And while this data set used Senate races, for his book Hassell also measured House races, finding the same result.
“Party elites are not systematically showing any preference for more moderate candidates in competitive districts,” Hassell writes. In fact, the pull for moderate candidates is stronger in noncompetitive districts. “This shows that parties are not strategically moderating their preferences in attempts to win competitive districts.”
Kamarck’s use of Berkeley to make her point is instructive to this end. If Hassell’s research is right, we’d expect to find elites even in Berkeley lining up behind the more moderate candidate, even though a communist is more likely to be elected there than a Republican. And indeed we do. Former Obama campaign aide Buffy Wicks is running for an open state Assembly seat, receiving large donations from the likes of Obama’s billionaire former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. The majority of her donations for a down-ballot Assembly seat came from out of state in the initial reporting period. This is precisely the type of party elite donations that Hassell tracks to prove establishment support for moderates, regardless of the makeup of the district.
Kamarck’s reference to Berkeley may simply have been meant as a rhetorical flourish, but it ended up undermining her central claim. Hassell’s paper, which builds off his 2017 book, “The Party’s Primary,” includes interviews Hassell conducted with Republican and Democratic state party chairs, staffers, donors, and candidates, to see if what they say matches what they do. The interviews are inconclusive. While some parroted the line that the party network focuses more on winning, others highlighted splits with lower-level activists. “There absolutely is a disconnect between the elites — party leaders and donors — and party activists,” said one former state party chair who was unnamed in the paper. “They’re focused on different things. They’re different types of people.”
This ideological leaning can be best seen in how parties target viable candidates within their narrow networks. As a former party staffer puts it, “[The party’s elite] are all connected to each other. … And if they don’t know each other, they all know somebody who knows somebody who knows them. It’s a small group where information is shared.” So the candidate search cannot help but reflect the preferences of that small, insular group; it’s like looking under a streetlamp for your keys because that’s the only place where you can see.
by David Dayen and Ryan Grim, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via AP
[ed. See also: Clinton To Keynote State Democratic Convention.]
Through all of these contests, national party leaders have argued that their decision-making is not personal or ideological. They believe in the same progressive values as the grassroots activists, goes the argument, but more moderate candidates are needed to be able to win the general election and take the House back from Republicans.That argument was made most explicitly earlier this month in the New York Times, by Brookings senior fellow Elaine Kamarck, who endorsed the practice of political parties intervening in primary elections. Kamarck was responding to The Intercept’s coverage of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer attempting to push a candidate in Colorado out of a House race by appealing to party elites’ superior savvy (emphasis added):
Are party leaders always right? Of course not. But they are different from the activists who often dominate the party primaries because they are more concerned with electability than with ideological purity. Party leaders have the job of winning nationally; Democrats are painfully aware that not all congressional districts are Berkeley, Calif.Her contention, which mirrors conventional wisdom, is that party leaders — the loose network of campaign committees, consultants, elected officials, and key donors — are simply more strategic than activists, refusing to let ideology get in the way of their laser focus on winning elections.
That’s an assertion of fact, not opinion. And according to new political science research, it is incorrect.
A paper in this month’s edition of the peer-reviewed Legislative Studies Quarterly analyzes a decade’s worth of federal elections, finding that party organizations boost moderate candidates across the board, whether the general election is expected to be competitive or a long shot. In other words, party support for moderates does not appear to be strategic, but sincere. “They’re not doing this to have a better shot at winning elections,” said the paper’s author Hans Hassell, assistant professor of politics at Cornell College in Iowa.
The evidence points more to the conclusion that party elites “have strong incentives to prefer loyalists who can be trusted to implement its preferred policies after the nomination,” Hassell writes.
The study not only breaks with other political science findings, but decades of rhetoric from party leaders. It’s obvious from the most casual survey of primary elections that parties support moderates, but the races that observers tend to watch closely are competitive contests in swing states, so it stands to reason that a moderate in such a district may indeed be the smarter strategic play. Indeed, in a series of high-profile battles with progressive activists, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has consistently positioned itself as being pragmatic, willing to bend on its progressive principles if doing so can lead to victory.
Hassell’s work expanded the field of vision, looking at races in which the Democratic nominee is likely to cruise to victory. The full scope of the research indicates that party leaders are actually committed to elevating candidates with a narrow range of beliefs.
If party elites were merely strategic actors, the data would show higher support for moderate candidates in swing races, while not showing as much support in seats that were either safe or out of reach. That’s not the case. In Hassell’s findings, parties consistently supported the more moderate primary candidate, regardless of the expected outcome of the general election. Even after excluding incumbents — which party committees almost always support — support for moderates holds. It’s also consistent regardless of party. And while this data set used Senate races, for his book Hassell also measured House races, finding the same result.
“Party elites are not systematically showing any preference for more moderate candidates in competitive districts,” Hassell writes. In fact, the pull for moderate candidates is stronger in noncompetitive districts. “This shows that parties are not strategically moderating their preferences in attempts to win competitive districts.”
Kamarck’s use of Berkeley to make her point is instructive to this end. If Hassell’s research is right, we’d expect to find elites even in Berkeley lining up behind the more moderate candidate, even though a communist is more likely to be elected there than a Republican. And indeed we do. Former Obama campaign aide Buffy Wicks is running for an open state Assembly seat, receiving large donations from the likes of Obama’s billionaire former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. The majority of her donations for a down-ballot Assembly seat came from out of state in the initial reporting period. This is precisely the type of party elite donations that Hassell tracks to prove establishment support for moderates, regardless of the makeup of the district.
Kamarck’s reference to Berkeley may simply have been meant as a rhetorical flourish, but it ended up undermining her central claim. Hassell’s paper, which builds off his 2017 book, “The Party’s Primary,” includes interviews Hassell conducted with Republican and Democratic state party chairs, staffers, donors, and candidates, to see if what they say matches what they do. The interviews are inconclusive. While some parroted the line that the party network focuses more on winning, others highlighted splits with lower-level activists. “There absolutely is a disconnect between the elites — party leaders and donors — and party activists,” said one former state party chair who was unnamed in the paper. “They’re focused on different things. They’re different types of people.”
This ideological leaning can be best seen in how parties target viable candidates within their narrow networks. As a former party staffer puts it, “[The party’s elite] are all connected to each other. … And if they don’t know each other, they all know somebody who knows somebody who knows them. It’s a small group where information is shared.” So the candidate search cannot help but reflect the preferences of that small, insular group; it’s like looking under a streetlamp for your keys because that’s the only place where you can see.
by David Dayen and Ryan Grim, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via AP
[ed. See also: Clinton To Keynote State Democratic Convention.]
