The below is a guest-post by “Daniel J. Galvin”:http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~djg249/index.html at Northwestern University. Dan has a forthcoming book on how Republican and Democratic presidents have adopted very different approaches to building their administrations versus building up the party apparatus during their time in office.
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As I’ve argued “here”:http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~djg249/Galvin_Changing_Course.pdf and “here”:http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~djg249/galvin_NYTimes.htm, the Democratic Party has worked long and hard over the last decade to reach the level of organizational functionality we’ve witnessed this year.
Prior to the late 1990s, and reaching at least as far back as the 1950s, Democrats tended to be remarkably complacent when it came to organizational matters. With deep and durable majorities in Congress, at the state level, and in the electorate, there was little incentive for Democratic presidents and party leaders to think long-term about building their party organization and equipping it to expand its reach. Their top priority was to make use of their majority now, not to build a new one for later. They were content to outsource critical electoral and financial activities to organized labor, urban party machines, and affiliated interest groups rather than to duplicate these activities in-house. Their approach was rational, at least for a time.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders made party-building investments central to their political strategies. Every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower – and every “out party”:http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Parties-Out-Party-Committees-1956-1993/dp/0300060084/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228337153&sr=1-2 RNC chairman in between – worked to strengthen their party’s structures and operations. In the hope of bringing the “emerging Republican majority” to fruition, these party leaders poured resources into campaign training workshops, new group outreach efforts, new candidate recruitment operations, new technologies, new methods of fundraising, new state party infrastructures, and so on. The “vertically integrated”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/magazine/25GROUNDWAR.html?ex=1398225600&en=07c8203349fbd15a&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND party organization Bush folded so successfully into his 2004 reelection campaign was, in part, a product of these party-building efforts undertaken over the course of many years. Bush’s grand hope of building a “permanent Republican majority”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/karl-rove motivated him to continue party building even as the GOP grew its numbers in Congress and reached parity or better with the Democrats at the state level.
Since the late 1990s, Democrats have responded to their newfound minority status in much the same way as their Republicans counterparts. Party leaders from Joe Andrew to Howard Dean made targeted investments in the party’s technological and physical infrastructure, in its human capital, and in its strategic operations. This wasn’t pure mimicry of the Republicans’ efforts – their investments were tailored to meet the needs of their more heterogeneous party constituency – but the purpose (majority building) was the same. Each new party leader built on the incremental gains made by his predecessors, with cumulative gains emerging over time. By the time Barack Obama took control of the party in the summer of ‘08, even many state Democratic parties (historically the biggest laggards of all) were in “much better shape”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/05/obama-and-dean-team-up-to_n_105419.html, thanks in no small part to Dean’s much-criticized “50-state strategy”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/magazine/01dean.html.
But now, with Obama’s impressive victory and larger Democratic majorities at all levels, it is an open question what the future will hold for the Democratic Party, organizationally speaking. Will Obama remain committed to party building?
Obama and his team have variously “indicated”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/berman that they “will”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/24/after-obama-how-dems-can_n_146116.html continue to fund the 50-state strategy. And the recent selection of the organization-minded Patrick Gaspard – political director for the Obama campaign and former political director for 1199 SEIU – as director of the White House Office of Political Affairs suggests that the president-elect may not perceive his party’s majorities to be as strong as they look, numerically. The Gaspard choice would seem to indicate that Obama wants someone to push a party-building agenda from within the White House: working with the new DNC chair, Gaspard would be the point-person in any effort to institutionalize the mechanics of the 2008 campaign in the party apparatus.
Obviously, we don’t know (and won’t for a while) how Obama perceives his party’s competitive standing or how strong his motivation will be to continue party building over the course of his term. But he clearly has a lot to build on: massive “donor lists”:http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/16/obama_data/, a “committed activist base”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=its_his_party_08, new “technologies”:http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/04/for_immediate_r_5.php to help activists canvass voters, energized “state parties”:http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/04/for_immediate_r_5.php, and for the first time in Democratic Party history, a functional national “voter file”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10573.html. That is, there may be a certain “path dependence” to party building in the Democratic Party, if only because the costs of continuing to invest in the party organization are now relatively cheap and the benefits seem potentially quite large, in 2012 and beyond.
Combine the state of the party organization Obama has inherited with his stated commitment to building a “new majority”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/us/politics/08text-obama.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1199880651-RfWPy3qmAMoBRP23Ar2TNw, and we could be witness to the first full-fledged Democratic party-building presidency in modern American history.
But if the Democrats’ newfound competitive strength encourages them to revert to their traditional ways – of viewing _policy_ rather than _organization_ as the primary means of party building, of prioritizing _message_ over _operations_ and _ideology_ over _campaign services_ – then the party’s recent organizational gains could easily fade.
Who Obama chooses to replace Dean at the DNC will send a strong signal of his intentions.