Since Julia called me out in her excellent post on Friday, I figured I should respond with an off-schedule extra post. We’ll be back to normal schedule Tuesday morning.
The most important part is where we agree: These are extremely important questions. She says looking at presidential nominations “helps us to trace how power flows within political parties, analyzing what matters when the stakes are highest.” Exactly. Nominations define political parties; presidential nominations are the single most important nominations. And we can’t assess what nominations are telling us about the parties unless we understand how they work. Moreover, a big part of how democracy works - or doesn’t - takes place within the parties, and so understanding nominations is critical to evaluating the strength and weakness of US democracy.
We agree, too, about “how Trumpism has limits.” Julia gives the excellent example of how Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans defied the America-firsters by bringing Ukraine aid to the House floor.1 Look too at Trump’s ham-handed reaction to the Arizona court decision reviving their draconian 19th century abortion ban. Trump, attempting to find middle ground on a policy question he clearly has no real interest in, called for Republicans there to roll it back, and as far as I can tell they basically ignored him.2
But we disagree most likely about how the nomination process plays out. What I see are expanded parties, especially including informal party networks, competing and cooperating over presidential nominations: The players are party actors, including politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, donors and activists, and party-aligned interest groups and the partisan press. The outcome in most cases should properly be seen as a party choice.
So where Julia sees “name recognition” as important, I see long-term and developing relationships between candidates and party actors. And where she sees “ambiguity” as helpful to candidates, I see the difference between coalition-style vs. factional candidates.
To be fair: Julia’s formulation fits well with Donald Trump’s original nomination in 2016, while it’s impossible to make the case that the Republican Party deliberately chose Trump that year. From my perspective it’s a clear breakdown in what has otherwise been a successful record of parties controlling their nominations; I can explain it as a fluke, but it’s obviously a strike against the idea that parties decide presidential nominations.
For the other recent nominations, however, including Trump’s during the current cycle, I think the evidence supports the idea that parties decided.3
Julia’s rejoinder:
I don’t have much to disagree with, but that has never stopped me. I think the coalitional candidates vs. ambiguity might be a semantic distinction, or it might be an important and substantive one. It’s true that on balance I see parties as less in control of their nominations than Jonathan does, but my post was woefully ambiguous (see what I did there) on this point. Regardless of how much party elites vs. primary voters control the nomination, I think the ambiguity point works - it explains why Trump had so much support in 2024 from corners of the party that were skeptical in 2016.
It’s true that a majority of House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid - but I’m fairly certain that at least several of them were in the “vote no, hope yes” caucus and were perfectly happy that the bill passed as long as they didn’t have to vote for it. Only a slim minority voted for an amendment that would have stripped all Ukraine funding from the bill.
The Democratic effort to repeal the law has moved forward after three Republicans voted with Democrats (on the third attempt) in the Arizona House. It’s possible that the party as a whole is actually following Trump’s directive by supplying the needed votes - but it sure looks to me as if the party opposes it but was unable to secure the votes.
In this, I disagree with the authors of The Party Decides, who read the historical record (for example on the 2008 Democratic nomination) differently than I do and find less evidence of party control for a few recent nomination cycles (see also Hans Noel here, and myself and Julia here).