American political parties are in disarray. No longer the engines organising and driving US politics, their roles have been supplanted by partisan social media influencers, non-profit political groups, super PACs, billionaires and hired consultants.
A few generations ago, political parties organised politics based on organic connections with their members, providing them structure, access, and benefits.
Today parties have become “brands” for voter identification and fundraising vehicles for party operations and consultants who provide message testing, voter data files, advertising and communications.
The connections between most voters and political parties are limited to loose brand identification and lists for fundraising emails, text messages, social media posts or robo-calls asking for money or votes. The amounts raised by these efforts pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions contributed by billionaire donors who fill the parties’ coffers and the increasingly powerful liberal or conservative “unaffiliated” interest groups and political action committees.
Reportedly, in the 2024 presidential contest a liberal independent committee raised and spent almost as much as the Harris campaign (about a billion dollars) on messaging that was sometimes at cross-purposes with the campaign they were supposedly backing.
Republican independent expenditure groups did much the same; one spent a quarter billion dollars targeting Arab and Jewish voters with disinformation mailings and ads designed to suppress their votes. The billions spent by the campaigns and independent groups deluged voters with messages and counter-messages causing confusion and alienation.
Even when the parties paid consultants to contact voters using canvassers or phone banks, the efforts were perfunctory and unconvincing because the canvassers or callers had no organic ties to the voters. Decades ago, canvassers and callers were local elected party captains engaging their neighbours.
This lack of organic connection with voters, weak party infrastructures and the barrage of digital messaging contribute to party identification being at an all-time low – 43 per cent of Americans identify as independent, 27pc as Republicans and 27pc as Democrats.
Now billionaires and interest groups, not parties, govern electoral operations. Look at their role in defeating congressional Democratic incumbents in 2024, or how billionaire donors are stepping over the will of Democratic voters in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race.
During the primary contest, they spent $30 million in advertising to smear and defeat a progressive candidate, Zohran Mamdani. Now, despite Mamdani’s decisive win as the Democratic Party candidate, the same billionaires have pooled their money to support an independent in November’s election.
To date, Democratic officials haven’t criticised this move. The party has a rule stipulating that consultants who work against Democratic voter-endorsed incumbents or candidates will not be eligible for party-funded contracts. This sanction hasn’t been applied to those groups that accepted contracts to defeat pro-Palestinian incumbent congressional Democrats, a clear demonstration of the “official” party’s weakness in the face of billionaire spending.
After losing 1,200 federal and state legislative seats during the Obama era and suffering defeats in two of the last three presidential elections, I was initially optimistic to see recent headlines about autopsies being conducted to understand Democratic losses. What’s clear, however, is that groups conducting the autopsies are the very consultants causing the problem. Their solution: Better message-testing, social media and digital messaging, etc. In other words, pay us more and we’ll dig the hole deeper.
The parties must reform and reconnect with voters by rebuilding state and local infrastructures. Some of the Democratic Party’s newly elected leaders are pushing in that direction by increasing funding for state parties and reducing amounts for outside consultants. But while billionaire-funded groups maintain their dominance in the political process, Democratic reformers face an uphill battle to wrest back control over elections and party affairs.
The Republican side appears to be a lost cause. Donald Trump and his cult-like MAGA movement have taken advantage of Republicans’ weak party organisation, transforming it into a wholly-owned Trump subsidiary. Republicans opposing Trump’s conquest have been silenced or drifted away to form “anti-Trump” PACs focused on advertising campaigns rather than rebuilding the Party.
American politics has become less a battle between two competing organised political parties and more a contest between billionaire-funded entities waging virtual campaigns to lure voters to their “brands”. Until a significant effort is made to regulate the corrosive role of big money in politics, this will continue as will voter disaffection and alienation.
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