The American political landscape continues to feel the aftershocks of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will not seek a second term. Many questions still linger, including about Biden’s health as well as the state of a Trump–Harris electoral contest.
One lingering, longer-term question concerns the future relationship between presidential candidates and political parties. For some time, candidates who received a major party nomination remade that party into his or her own image. The party took on the presidential candidate’s demeanor, policy stances, and priority problems. While great shifts did not tend to happen on these fronts cycle to cycle, we certainly live in a personality-centric instead of an institution-centric political environment.
Will that dynamic change with the successful effort to push Biden out of the 2024 race? Will a candidate’s relationship with his or her party look more like the 19th and much of the 20th centuries? During those times, the party often held the upper hand. It made the major decisions and then found a candidate to pitch that image to the electorate. Here, many major Democratic leaders decided a continued Biden run did not serve party interests and had the muscle to force the change even this late in the election season.
Some would see such a change as good. Parties think longer-term than candidates do since parties exist beyond any particular election. Those officials in the Republican or Democrat systems tend to think more strategically and consider how systems work. A party-dominated politics, they say, could result in a more centrist partisanship that gives higher priority to getting things done over scoring online clicks.
Others have voiced consternation, even outrage, at what happened to Biden. They see the parties as essentially corrupt institutions filled with a kind of social and economic elite distant in tone, priorities, and experience from the common man. Biden’s removal, they think, is a desperate attempt by elites to undermine the people’s choice as expressed in the process of primary elections. The turn to party power would undermine popular rule and move us toward some form of oligarchy.
Will these hopes or fears of enhanced party power happen? Don’t count on it. The circumstances that precipitated Biden’s removal seem fairly extraordinary. Will voters constantly select candidates for president in their 80s? Regardless of how old, will voters consistently vote to nominate men or women showing clear mental and physical decline?
Moreover, most now admit that Biden’s support, while it had been wide, was far from deep. He was the one who beat former President Donald Trump in 2020 and seemed capable of doing so again. When the chances of winning in 2024 seemed bleak, there was little other goodwill on which Biden could draw to maintain support. Even a dedicated minority might have staved off this move if it existed. Find a candidate the primary voters truly love, and Biden’s Sunday announcement will be an unthinkable aberration, not a new norm.
Beyond the strangeness of the moment, a general trend in American politics counsels against a resurgence of party power. As far back as the 1830s and 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that Americans’ commitment to equality threatened to overwhelm any and all distinctions among persons. We are tempted to move toward ever-greater sameness of conditions as we harbor increasing skepticism of all inequalities.
Our candidate selection will likely continue to move in step with these broader, longer-standing trends. With the 17th Amendment, we moved from state legislatures selecting senators to direct choice by voters. Our presidential party selection system has evolved from choice by leadership to selection by primary voters.
These trends likely will not revert in any systematic manner. Instead, what we are seeing is an aberration born of the particular deficiencies of an 81-year-old Biden and the panic Democrats have stoked in themselves about Trump.
For good or for ill, the primary selection system likely will continue. As much as Sunday implicated change, on this point, things will stay the same. Whether that leaves our politics healthier or more ill is another matter.
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Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.