Top-down, formally organized political parties have a presumed advantage over non-hierarchical ones: It should be easier for them to use their resources efficiently. And when Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke revealed that he had raised more than $38 million in the summer quarter, some Democrats immediately started worrying that the party was wasting its money on a quixotic campaign in very Republican Texas.
Poppycock! I think the Washington Post’s David Weigel gets this exactly right:
After 2016, Democratic donors are more ready than ever to give money but less trusting than ever of the national party's strategy. The result is that they're contesting nearly everything, while party PACs focus on more winnable races. And so far, that arrangement has kept Republicans under pressure.
We don’t know which way the wind will blow in the last three weeks of the campaign. What we do know is that very few Democrats in competitive districts — or even in marginally competitive districts — are complaining that their campaigns are being underfunded. Which means that if the final breeze helps the Democrats, the party is primed to take maximum advantage of it. That’s been true throughout the cycle, whether it’s candidate recruitment, activist involvement or fundraising. It sure seems like a good strategy to me.
Have the Democrats distributed their resources with perfect efficiency? Of course not. But a more centralized process probably wouldn’t have done so either. That’s because the more bureaucratized a party becomes, the more bureaucratic incentives will tend to drive decisions. The result is often risk-averse policy: Signing off on a huge investment in an election where the party has only a one-in-four chance of winning, rather than using that money to push the probability of victory in a few other races from 75 percent to 90 percent, is the kind of decision that can get someone fired.
Of course, decentralized parties can misuse their resources too. Donors and activists can make amateurish mistakes about where to spend, perhaps because the rewards they seek from participation aren’t closely linked to maximizing party victories, or perhaps because their information simply isn’t as good as what a centralized party might have. When party-aligned interest groups make their own decisions about which candidates to support, rather than pooling resources with a centralized party, they may think more about themselves than about a larger strategy. Too much of that, and the party fractures.
In other words, just as we can’t assume that huge fundraising totals for candidates who are likely to lose is necessarily a sign of poor decision-making, we also can’t assume that any particular party structure is best. We know that parties are essential to democracy. But we don’t know much about the best way to put them together — or even what the advantages and disadvantages of various different structures can be. That’s especially true of our peculiar parties in the United States.
1. Hans Noel on the Senate.
2. Scott Kastner, Margaret M. Pearson and Chad Rector at the Monkey Cage on Trump and China.
3. Also at the Monkey Cage: John Sides talks with Jonathan Rodden and Richard Pildes about partisan gerrymandering.
4. Lynn Vavreck debunks myths about the 2016 election.
5. Elizabeth Drew debunks myths about Watergate. An excellent primer for those who aren’t familiar with the history.
6. Amy Walter on voter enthusiasm.
7. And Ellen Kurz wants to abolish voter registration and automate the process. The truth is that the US is an outlier on this; most democracies automatically register all voters, and the main reason for establishing high hurdles to registration here was to make it harder for people to vote. Although advocates for automatic registration sometimes exaggerate the benefits, the case for making it easy to vote is nevertheless very strong.
(Bloomberg)
