Our parties are dying — here's why it's worse news for Dems
American political parties are in disarray. Instead of being the engines that organize and drive our politics, their roles have been supplanted by partisan social media influencers, nonprofit political groups, super PACs, and the billionaires who fund them and consultant groups they hire.
A few generations ago, it was the political parties that organized politics. In many communities, there was an organic connection between the parties and their members. The parties provided structure and access and some benefits to those who belonged to and participated in their work.
That is no longer the case for most Americans. Today, the parties have become “brands” to which voters are asked to identify, and fundraising vehicles raising money for party operations and the consultant groups who now provide the “services” message testing, voter data files, advertising, and communications.
In other words, the connection between most voters and political parties is largely limited to a loose identification with the brand and to being on lists for fundraising emails, text messages, social media posts, or robocalls asking for money or votes. While these efforts do raise some funds, the amounts pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions contributed by billionaire donors who fill the coffers of the parties and the increasingly powerful liberal or conservative “unaffiliated” interest groups and political action committees.
It has been reported that in the 2024 presidential contest, one of these liberal independent committees raised and spent almost as much as the Kamala 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, with one spending a quarter of a billion dollars targeting Arab and Jewish voters with disinformation mailings and ads designed to suppress their votes. In the end, the billions spent by the campaigns and the independent groups deluged voters with messages and counter-messages, causing confusion and alienation.
Even when the parties provided funding to consultants to make personal contact with voters by hiring canvassers to go door-to-door or phone banks to call voter lists, the efforts were perfunctory and unconvincing because the canvassers or callers had no organic ties to the voters they were engaging. This is in marked contrast to decades ago, when the canvassers and callers were local elected party captains engaging their neighbors with whom they had personal ties.
This lack of organic connection with voters, the weakness of the party infrastructures, and the barrage of television, social media, and other forms of digital messaging are some of the reasons why party identification is at an all-time low, with 43% of Americans now identifying as independent, and Republicans and Democrats tied at 27% each.
The parties have also lost their role in governing their electoral operations to the billionaires and interest groups. Look at the role they played in defeating congressional Democratic incumbents in the last election or how billionaire donors are stepping over the will of Democratic voters in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race.
During the primary contest, these interests 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 the November election.
To date, Democratic officials haven’t criticized 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 has not 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 Democrats lost 1,200 federal and state legislative seats during the Obama era and suffered defeats in two of the last three presidential elections, I was initially optimistic to see two New York Times headlines last week, one of which read, “Democrats Are Mulling a 2026 Campaign Pivot: ‘We Need to Rethink Things.’”
It appears that autopsies are being conducted to understand why Democrats are losing. After reading the piece, however, it became clear that some of the groups conducting the autopsies are the very independent expenditure-funded consultants that are the source of the problem. Their solution: better message testing, better use of social media and digital messaging, etc. In other words, pay us more and we’ll dig the hole deeper. No lessons learned.
What needs to happen and is still not on the agenda is for the parties to reform and reconnect with and earn the trust of voters by rebuilding their state and local infrastructures. There is a push in that direction being made in the Democratic Party by some of its newly elected leaders. Spurred on by party reformers, they have greatly increased the funds being given to state parties, reducing the amounts sent to outside consultants. But as long as the billionaire-funded groups remain the dominant players in the political process, the Democratic reformers will continue to face an uphill battle to wrest back control over elections and party affairs.
Meanwhile, the Republican side appears to be a lost cause. President Donald Trump and his cult-like MAGA movement have been able to take advantage of the weakness of their party’s organization, forcing it to submit and transforming it into a wholly owned Trump subsidiary.
Republicans who opposed Trump’s conquest have either been demeaned and silenced or drifted away to form PACs that have focused their resources on “anti-Trump” advertising campaigns, which, while celebrated by some Democrats, have had no impact on rebuilding the Republican Party.
The bottom line is that American politics has become less a battle between two competing organized political parties and more a contest between billionaire-funded entities waging virtual campaigns attempting to lure voters to endorse 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.
- Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI). Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years; in 1984 and 1988 he served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.
Dave Mazzarella at work. Photo: Stars and Stripes