Brian Schutt: The decline of parties has led to decline in politics

It takes only a passive interest in politics over the last month to recognize that something is broken.

Former Gov. Mitch Daniels recently wrote in The Washington Post about the state governor’s race and the selection of Mike Braun in the primary. “Five percent of [Indiana residents] elected him,” Daniels wrote. “Seven percent preferred a different candidate, and 88% never had a say in the decision.”

Since then, 891 Republican delegates determined the next lieutenant governor, rejecting Braun’s preferred choice and instead choosing an even more polarizing figure, Micah Beckwith, to join the GOP ticket.

Shortly thereafter, an estimated 51.3 million people watched the first presidential debate, displaying for a nation the cognitive decline of current President Joe Biden and the revisionist history of former President Donald Trump. A Pew poll in April shows that 49% of American adults would replace both Biden and Trump as candidates if given the option.

Passionate differences in politics are nothing new. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” These different opinions lead to what Madison called “factions.”

He explained, “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

From the founding, the emergence of political parties served as an institutional approach to capturing different interests. Parties helped achieve the goal of creating durable governing majorities by platforming the most electable candidates best representative of an area. As a consequence, parties served as a moderating force on the most extreme members.

Parties weren’t meant to “solve” conflict. Instead, they created an operational method for internal compromise that, in turn, helped foster external compromise with the other party.

Space doesn’t allow me to diagnose the depth of causes that have led to increased polarization, the “Big Sort” and a weakening of the party system, but a major recent cause was the collateral damage from 2002’s McCain-Feingold “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.”

A motivation of the bill was to limit soft-money donations to national parties. As Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said during the floor debate in 2001, “We haven’t taken a penny of money out of politics; we’ve only taken the parties out of politics.”

In the decades since, money in politics has only increased, with much of it going to political action committees. One projection, by GroupM, expects political spending to be a record $15.9 billion on advertising alone in 2024, up more than 30% from the 2020 election cycle.

As resources go, so goes influence. From Stanford political scientist Didi Kuo: “Political parties remain critical to organizing democracy, but they are beleaguered. They used to be gatekeepers in politics.”

While change to the existing rules won’t happen this year, revisiting campaign finance laws is critical if parties are to regain their critical role in filtering candidates. One lesson from McCain-Feingold should be to make incremental changes in hopes of limiting the unintended consequences.

Beyond federal reform, instituting ideas like ranked-choice voting into the primary process could be beneficial. Advocates suggest that, where it’s instituted effectively, ranked-choice voting increases voter turnout, reduces negative campaigning and increases the likelihood of moderate candidates to participate.

While it’s not a panacea, this could be a step in the right direction of increasing the quality of candidates and conversation in our elections.•

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Schutt is co-founder of Homesense Heating & Cooling and Refinery46 and an American Enterprise Institute civic renewal fellow. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.

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