The Party Is Not Over

Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET on July 23, 2024.

The smoke-filled room is back! Praise the Lord—and pray the system works. To be technically accurate, there is no actual room, and if there were, it would not be smoky. Nonetheless, we have witnessed the extraordinary reassertion of a principle whose disappearance has been nothing short of calamitous for American politics. To wit: Nominations belong to parties, not to candidates.

If you have read a biography of Abraham Lincoln, you may recall that his entire record as a federal officeholder before the presidency was a single two-year term representing Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives. What you may not recall is: Why only two years? Did Lincoln lack ambition or talent? Face defeat by a stronger opponent? Retire in disgrace? None of the above. In Illinois, the Whig party machine had set up a rotation scheme in which party loyalists took turns occupying the party’s only safe House seat. When his turn ended, Lincoln went home.

Peculiar as this seems today, for most of U.S. history, it was taken for granted that nominations were party property. From the time of Martin Van Buren, who basically invented the modern U.S. political party, Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life. The parties identified, trained, and promoted qualified and reliable politicians; built political coalitions and brokered deals across diverse ideologies and constituencies; organized officeholders to work together in government; maintained institutional knowledge and ensured strategic continuity over time. All of those political tasks were, and still are, essential.