Is the Democratic Party "hollow"?

A strong, savvy, strategic party that’s still awfully weird

I was a guest on Derek Thompson’s podcast recently, and he mentioned off-handedly that he thought the success of Democratic Party insiders at pushing Joe Biden off the ticket in favor of a new, better-performing candidate casts some doubt on the notion that American political parties (or at least the Democrats) are “hollow.”

The phrase comes from a recent book, “The Hollow Parties,” that was written by two good friends of mine, Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman. And while I don’t want to put words in their mouths, I do want to say that I think Thompson’s remark gets the force and meaning of the hollowness point somewhat wrong. What’s true is that the Democratic Party, at key moments in recent cycles, has proven somewhat robust and capable, at least compared to what you might expect. In 2020, they circled the wagons around Joe Biden rather than allow Bernie Sanders to keep winning pluralities against a divided field. In 2024, they circled the wagons against Biden to swap in a younger candidate. And you see this on policy, too. Once everyone agreed that being too lax on immigration was an acute political vulnerability, the party pivoted hard (but tellingly in terms of the hollowness analysis they did this very late). They do things.

But think back to Biden: Who, exactly, pushed him out?

Not the delegates of the Democratic National Convention. People tried (believe me) to make the case that delegates are “pledged but not bound” and were, in fact, free to vote their consciences. But there was zero appetite outside of a tiny handful of delegates for bucking the president. Nobody was formally challenging him for the nomination. The Democratic National Committee, to the extent that it exists at all, was squarely behind Biden, and the party’s formal chair, Jamie Harrison, played no role except as an obnoxious Biden booster on Twitter. This is the hollowness of the party. Things happen but they’re not really participatory or legible — not bounded by structure with rules and clear procedures or ways for citizens to get involved. And at the end of the day, while it’s perfectly cogent to say that Biden was pushed out of the race, it’s also completely true that he stepped down voluntarily. He is ultimately a person of decency and honor who cares about his legacy. A Trump-like egomaniacal SOB could have just brazened through it despite everything, because the party structures that pushed him out were, in fact, pretty hollow.

Who is the party?

During the weeks of crisis in July, I think the single most important actor in the whole drama was Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi does not hold any actual position in the Democratic Party, other than back- bench House member with the courtesy title Speaker Emerita. But she at least did, in the recent past, hold a formal party role and had for a long time before that. Her word carried a lot of weight, as well as the implication that she spoke on behalf of other elected officials. But after Pelosi, the second-most-important person was probably George Clooney, a well-known actor and celebrity who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times at a critical moment. Not only was that op-ed influential on its own terms, but it also broke the silence around a fundraiser in Los Angeles that was held before the debate.

I wrote about this fundraiser in my post-debate article:

Five days before the debate, someone who’d seen Biden recently at a fundraiser told me that he looked and sounded dramatically worse than the previous times they’d seen him — as recently as six months ago — and that they were now convinced Biden wouldn’t be able to make it through a second term. I blew that warning off and assumed things would be fine at the debate.

That was me confessing to error. I was told a relevant piece of information, and I dismissed it. But when I saw the debate, the relevance was immediately clear. My article, though, unfortunately, did not make huge waves. Clooney, who is both more famous than I am and was also a direct eyewitness, confirmed the events two days later:

But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.

After Clooney, other attendees backed up his version of events, as well as the one I’d been told.

Probably more important than Pelosi or Clooney individually was the collective judgment of a whole bunch of columnists and media figures. That includes everyone from me to Tom Friedman and beyond. A lot of the Biden-boosters on the internet complained, at the time, that the media wasn’t calling for Trump to set aside, even though Trump is worse. But the point is, we were essentially behaving as party actors, calling on the party whose victory we preferred to make better choices. Similarly, it seems that many of the major donors to the party’s affiliated super PACs were threatening to freeze funding unless Biden stepped down. No one donor is that important in the scheme of things, but the collective view of many big donors matters.

But the formal congressional leadership was paralyzed and indecisive.

Other party organs like the Democratic Governors Association weren’t even in consideration as potential players. Some elected officials — front-liners who needed to save their own skin and a tiny handful of courageous safe seaters like Michael Bennet — said and did the right thing. Most of them, however, didn’t. Ezra Klein, who in some sense kicked the whole thing off with a column months earlier, called on the Democratic Party to do its job and “organize victory.” And this more or less happened. But the “Democratic Party” that organized the victory is a sort of strange entity that has essentially nothing to do with the Democratic Party in any legal or official sense. It’s a loose network of self-consciously partisan donors and media figures.

And when you push this back even farther, it sure seems more important than anything from the July Days that Ezra’s February column generated enough intra-party panic that Biden’s team pushed for the early debate to keep the whole party onside. It worked both in the sense that it quieted the furor and also in the sense that the debate was early enough to make the candidate swap in July. But what actually happened here? Was Biden’s team deluded? Did someone set him up? Things happened to break in a way that, in retrospect, seems very clever. But it seems like dumb luck and an idiosyncratic Ezra Klein column played a very large role. That’s better than a party system that can’t function at all. But it’s not particularly robust.

Coordination games

Biden’s original nomination also underscores the limits of the existing party structure.

The basic idea of nominating an electable moderate made a lot of sense. But why Biden? Biden isn’t just old, he had plenty of bad moderate baggage related to Iraq and decades-old floor speeches about wanting to cut Social Security that lots of other Democrats wouldn’t have had. At the beginning of the cycle, one of the smartest operatives I know insisted that I had to meet Steve Bullock. So I did. He’s very charismatic. And someone who’d won multiple statewide races in Montana could surely hold together enough rural appeal to negate Trump’s electoral college advantage and win. Strong choice!

The analysts crunched the numbers, meanwhile, and found out that Amy Klobuchar was one of the top electoral over-performers in the Senate. The Klobuchar appeal is honestly a bit hard to eyeball. She seems like a good politician to me, but it’s not obvious why she’d be dramatically better than Tammy Baldwin or Gary Peters. But the results are what they are. Another strong choice!

Bennet was beloved by wonks like me but never got even Bullock/Klobuchar-level consideration as an electability candidate. But Bennet, like Biden, had the wisdom not to walk the plank on the fracking ban or decriminalizing illegal entry. He’s younger than Biden and had the same political wisdom as Biden, but didn’t have the same old baggage as Biden. Which is just to say that a truly strong party that was truly able to do “party decides”-type stuff could have easily landed on an option that was better than Biden. Biden emerged as the party’s choice only at the last minute, when there was a desperate need for the non-Bernie factions to coordinate around someone, and he was the only someone available. He was super famous as a former vice president and most rank-and-file Democrats preferred his message — prioritize electability — to the Bernie/Warren message.

And good for him. But the less famous Bullock/Klobuchar/Bennet types also had that message and fit the criteria better. The party, whatever that is, simply didn’t have any mechanism to elevate the profile of lesser-known choices.

Similarly with the 2024 nomination, after lots of handwringing and weird hypothetical scenarios about open conventions, ultimately the obvious thing happened and the nomination went to the VP. She was a better choice than Biden, and she’s always been a better politician than the haters claimed at her lowest moments. But she also just obviously was not the optimal Democratic nominee for this cycle. It would have been better to have someone who wasn’t so closely tied to the Biden Administration, and it would have been better to have someone who didn’t spend 2019 taking policy stances to the left of Biden. This was totally known at the time she secured the nomination, and it may well prove decisive next week. But the existing party, such as it is, struggles to solve coordination problems. As a result, it defaults to options, like Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024, that everyone knows aren’t the best but that serve as coordination crutches.

A rickety foundation

One weakness of this model is that it doesn’t select truly optimal candidates.

But I think the deeper weakness is that a party that lacks legibility and struggles with coordination has a hard time setting priorities. A lot of what parties do in democracies is pick candidates and try to organize victory. But the larger purpose of a party is to set a policy agenda and then accept responsibility for the implementation of that agenda.

Republicans are doing that now through total collapse of the party structure. The GOP is what Trump says it is. If one day they hate electric cars and “big tech,” and the next day Elon Musk is their number one donor and top surrogate, then only Trump himself can say for sure what’s going on. Trump can be tough on China one day and try to strike the soybean sale of the century by praising Xi Jinping’s handling of Covid the next. He doesn’t eliminate all intra-party dissent, but he does clearly and single-handedly define the party and its agenda.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work, though. Political parties are supposed to provide an avenue through which citizens who are particularly engaged can have some kind of intermediated input into the formation of a policy agenda. Trump tweeting stuff and his followers hopping on the bandwagon isn’t that.

The Biden/Schumer/Pelosi approach to IRA negotiations in 2021-2022, however, also wasn’t driven by well-functioning democratic political prioritization. They lacked the legitimacy and public buy-in to set priorities, so they just said yes to everyone and figured the marginal members of Congress would work it out. This ultimately did work out, because Joe Manchin decided to go along. But it came extremely close to accomplishing nothing, it took forever for no good reason, it generated tons of ill will, and now, years later in another presidential campaign, it still isn’t clear what from the cutting room floor will be prioritized if Democrats win. In practice, the odds of Democrats winning congressional majorities are minuscule, so this probably won’t actually matter. But it’s not ideal, and it underscores the fact that a hollow party of donors and celebrities and pundits is no substitute for a proper one.