In a Summer of political tumult, the Democratic Party came together under immense pressure in a way that challenged old understandings of power, politics, and parties in the United States. In particular, during the Summer weeks during which Democratic voters, activists, and leaders raised concern about the party’s nominee for president, President Joe Biden decided not to seek another term in the White House. Vice President Kamala Harris united the party behind her candidacy signaling it is time to let go of cliché media narratives about Democratic Party infighting.
Blame party
While journalists, elected officials, activists, and voters often blame political parties for all the ills of society, political scientists, whom you know as the people who study politics for a living, tend to view them as vehicles of democracy. A party, in political scientist E.E. Schattschneider’s classic definition, is, quite simply, “an organized attempt to get control of the government.” Thus, strong parties are not inherently undemocratic, elitist, or corrupt but rather a healthy feature of a democracy.
Almost one hundred years ago, humorist Will Rogers quipped: “I am not a member of any organized political party – I am a Democrat.” Understanding the Democratic Party as an organization in more or less constant chaos has been a recurring theme ever since – in good times and in bad times. The idea that Democrats are in “disarray” is one of the most reliable media narratives in political journalism in the United States.
The phrase is not exactly new but over the last decade “Dems in disarray” has devolved into something of a running joke among political journalists and activists. It has been employed over and over in recent years with the frequency reaching feverish proportions this summer. But how useful is the focus on infighting to understand the Democratic Party and political life in the United States?
Big tent
Back in the late 1920s, when Rogers made his famous remarks about the Democrats, the party did indeed seem far from organized. Internal divisions had played out in public at the 1924 convention which deadlocked over the nomination of a presidential candidate as close to sixty different candidates received votes over a total of 103 ballots before John W. Davis of West Virginia emerged as the compromise candidate.
The party coalition included both Roman Catholics and the vehemently anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, it included both Prohibitionists (“drys”) and anti-Prohibitionists (“wets”), both Northern industrial workers and Midwestern and Western farmers. It was a party at odds with itself, or, to use a political euphemism, a “big tent” party.
By the 1930s, the diversity within the party was termed the “New Deal coalition,” after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political programs, and included organized labor, farmers, racial and religious minorities, segregationists, and intellectuals. This uneasy alliance delivered electoral success for some three decades before collapsing under its own weight in the bedlam of the 1960s.
The fractions turned into open street fights as Mayor Richard Daley, one of the key power brokers within the party, sicced his police on New Left and anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 convention in Chicago. Even after the white South found a warm embrace in the Republican Party eager to capitalize on a Southern Strategy, the Democratic Party was not an ideological organization but rather, to quote political scientists Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, “fundamentally a group coalition.”
The various groups vying for power within the party, including liberal intellectuals, racial minorities, feminists, college-educated suburbanites, organized labor, and college students, still clash over policy and candidates. The 2020 primaries saw a record-breaking number of candidates duke it out with hopefuls ranging from leftist icon Bernie Sanders to party stalwart Amy Klobuchar, from small-town mayor Pete Buttigieg to New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg. Victorious emerged the moderate Joe Biden. Not because he was beloved but because the experienced straight, white, man from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was understood as the most electable. And with Donald Trump in the White House, electability trumped everything else for the Democrats.
Brat summer
Ever since Donald Trump, surprisingly, won the White House in 2016, Democrats, for all their differences, have come together in opposition to Trump and his political agenda. Still, a quick search online will yield an avalanche of articles using the “Dems in disarray” frame (often verbatim) even as the party during Trump’s term more often than not stood united against him.
To some, party leaders and ambitious elected officials (think governors Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan) declining to heed the calls from pundits and columnists to challenge Biden in the party primaries looked like unity in the face of the threat of another Trump term. To others, especially to those very same pundits and columnists, it looked like (you guessed it!) “dems in disarray.”
The real storm came after Biden’s catastrophic performance in the first 15-30 minutes of the presidential debate against Trump in late June. Amid increasing calls for Biden not to run for a second term, the media concluded the Dems were, yet again, in “disarray.” To be sure, the issue initially divided Democratic leaders (in particular along racial and gender lines) but by the time Biden announced he would endorse his vice president for the nomination something happened. Within hours the party coalesced around Kamala Harris. For weeks, pundits and columnists had urged governors like Newsom, Whitmer, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania to seek the nomination. There was even talk of a mini-primary, televised debates, and floor fights at the convention. Instead, party leaders and activists immediately lined up behind the vice president. Both Newsom and Shapiro announced their support for Harris mere hours after Biden’s announcement and Whitmer the following morning. In the end, no challengers threw their hats in the ring and Harris won the nomination with 99% of the delegates. Today, the party seems more united than perhaps ever before.
A party that successfully forces an incumbent president eager to serve a second term to step aside and then within hours rallies around the vice president is not only a strong party. It is also a remarkably united party. The contrast between this party and the one pundits and columnists see engaged in never-ending infighting is stark. It is easy to fall prey to the “Dems in disarray” framework – big tent parties include people with a variety of identities, principles, and goals – but it is increasingly clear that such a narrative obscures more than it reveals. The Dems are in array.
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Oscar Winberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku. His work focuses on the modern political history of the United States and in particular on the relationship between politics and the media.
