We should change the functions of the US political parties. This is a different topic from the important–but permanent–debate about what each party should stand for.
As far as I know, every accountable legislative body in the world is organized into parties, which means that parties play an essential role in governance.
Our two-party system is generally thought to be a function of our electoral process. We could have more than two parties, but only if we reformed our elections in a fundamental way.*
When active Americans are dissatisfied with the party that they prefer, most opt to try to change it rather than quitting it (using “voice” instead of “exit”). Those who do quit tend not to vote at all rather than organize new parties. As a result, the Democratic and Republican Parties have repeatedly changed their ideologies and electoral bases since the 1860s and yet have never been replaced.
Although Americans have good reasons to be dissatisfied, they don’t actually rate the parties very poorly on average, nor have their ratings fallen very far. This is an additional reason to expect that our parties will persist.
However, the parties could function differently. Today, each party is basically a label for candidates and clusters of donors, consultants, and incumbent politicians who allocate money and volunteer labor to candidates on their side of the aisle.
Very few people join or belong to parties; we register to vote in one party’s primary elections. Parties per se do very little; campaigns and advocacy groups conduct almost all of politics.
As an example, I live in a heavily Democratic state of 7 million people, Massachusetts, where the state party has raised a bit less than half a million dollars so far in this election year. In 2023, it spent less than $300,000 for all purposes, including rent and salaries. The state party is not a major organization.
On the other hand, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s political committees have spent about $16 million since 2019. (Elizabeth Warren’s political committees have raised about $28 million, but she’s an unusual case because of her presidential ambitions.) These figures illustrate a system that is based on candidates and their campaigns, not on parties as organizations.
People who choose to identify with a party argue about what it should stand for and whom it should support, but the decisions are decentralized. The outcomes depend on many individuals and committees who allocate funds and endorsements across a range of candidates and groups, plus candidates and the primary voters who make some key decisions at the polls. The phrase “the party decides” (from Cohen et al 2008) does not refer to a literal decision by an organization, but to the fact that certain well-placed insiders are influential.
Since parties organize lawmaking, they should be more accountable to regular people, and they should make their decisions about candidates and policies more deliberatively.
Their deliberations need not be wonkish seminars about policy. People who try to influence a party are entitled to care about ideology and values, power and ambition, various kinds of interests, emotions, and even “vibes.” But somehow a party’s conversation should be organized and productive, allowing the whole entity to learn, adjust, and accommodate a range of views.
Parties should also be pluralistic. Since our electoral system serves up just two parties for an extremely diverse country of 341 million people, each party should be home to heterogeneous people and communities. When a party must make a common decision, such as choosing its presidential nominee, these factions will have to compete. But on many other matters, factions can coexist–for example, Democrats can select Andy Beshear to lead Kentucky and Zohran Mamdani to lead New York City without contradiction.
Parties should provide ladders to influence for diverse people who discover political passions, talents, and ambitions. A sign that this is not happening is the fact that virtually no members of Congress held working-class jobs before they were elected (Carnes and Lupu, 2023).
(It is great that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a bartender and waitress before she ran for Congress, but she also held a BA from Boston University and had been a Senate intern. Graham Platner really is an oyster farmer, but he’s also the grandson of the designer of Windows on the World, and he attended the Hotchkiss School and George Washington University. It is hard to find any clear exceptions to the rule that Members of Congress are “bourgeois.”)
To connect parties to millions of ideologically and demographically diverse people requires changing how they operate.
Parties should be more than conduits for money and volunteering during elections. They should offer social and cultural opportunities, public education, recruitment and training, and perhaps direct services on a continuous basis. This implies that party organizations should have much larger budgets than they have now, especially relative to candidates.
Although donors could begin this shift by funding parties, party organizations must depend on dues or small contributions, not on wealthy donors. Besides, current federal law limits donations to parties while basically leaving support for campaigns wide open.
The parties should also interact regularly with other democratic organizations in our society, such as genuinely participatory voluntary groups and unions.
At the state and national levels, each party should organize its internal debates so that various constituencies are explicitly represented. This does not mean a shadowy struggle among donor-funded, DC-based organizations that can veto candidates and policy proposals–the dreaded “Groups” that are said to dominate the Democratic Party, especially (although the extent of their power is debated).
Instead, there should be an ongoing, public debate among organizations that are accountable to masses of voters, such as elected representatives of party committees from places like Kentucky and New York City. These factions should disagree and must ultimately settle some of their disagreements in primary campaigns. But they should also look for ways to mediate their conflicts, such as supporting different philosophies in different communities, running balanced slates, compromising on national legislation, or agreeing to take turns.
This is not an argument for moderation or centrism within the parties. Rather, we should expect debate and handle it productively.
These reforms are applicable to both parties. But I am especially concerned about the Democrats, not only because my own preferences align more with that side but also because the party that is further left should represent working-class voters. I have argued elsewhere (e.g., Levine 2026) that a serious threat to democracy across the developed world is a tendency for the left parties to represent upscale voters, leaving workers with nowhere to turn except to ethno-nationalism. The Democratic Party (such as it is) is actually a cluster of highly educated donors, candidates, and consultants. This is a particularly serious problem, and the solution must involve a different role for the party.
(These comments are informed by a recent Ash Center/Columbia World Projects meeting about Deliberation and Competition. Since Chatham House Rules applied, I am indebted to my fellow participants but I am not citing anyone specifically.)
See also: A System-Analysis of Democracy’s Crisis; why don’t young people like parties?; what if political parties structure our thinking for us?; two theories of American political parties; the Koch brothers network and the state of American parties; etc.
*A modest reform that I favor is fusion voting. Last fall, New Yorkers could vote for Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic Party candidate or as the Working Families Party candidate, which allowed voters to register an ideological preference while aggregating their votes behind one person. Mamdani voted for himself on the Working Families line while also leading the city’s Democrats.
