As the war in Iraq dragged on, arguments between Democrats and Republicans over prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program and ties to terrorist organizations burst out into the open in late 2005. The issue of how the Bush administration had used prewar intelligence resurfaced after vice presidential advisor "Scooter" Libby was indicted for lying to a grand jury investigating who had revealed the name of a covert CIA operative whose husband had questioned the existence of such a program. In a speech on November 11, 2005, shortly after the indictment, President Bush claimed that critics of prewar intelligence were undermining the war effort and the broader war on terrorism. Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman chimed in a few days later that criticism of administrative actions leading up to the invasion of Iraq was unjustified and immoral: "This kind of political doublespeak sends exactly the wrong message to our troops, to the Iraqis and to our terrorist enemies." Vice President Dick Cheney similarly accused the administration's critics of being "dishonest and reprehensible," and continued, "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false...This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate." The Democrats responded in kind. Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid of Utah pointed out that "rather than giving our troops a plan to move forward in Iraq and changing their failed course, they [administration supporters] continue to ignore the facts and lash out at those who raise legitimate questions about how the administration misused intelligence in its rush to war." Senator Ted Kennedy said that "the only thing dishonest and reprehensible is the way the administration distorted, misrepresented and manipulated the intelligence to justify a war America never should have fought." Senator John Kerry, who had lost to President Bush in 2004, claimed that the Vice President was "still misleading the American people" about the war and how we got into it." Democratic and Republican sparring over how we got into Iraq and how best to end our involvement there is illustrates the partisan rancor that now characterizes American politics. In 2005 and 2006, for example, the two parties wrangled bitterly, both in Washington and across the country, over abortion, same-sex marriage, Social Security reform, the Medicare prescription drug program, extension of tax cuts, changes in bankruptcy and tort law, extension of the USA Patriot Act, and the causes of and solutions for mounting federal budget deficits. Incivility has become the order of the day when party leaders and elected officials deal with one another. Opponents in Congress are accused of being scoundrels, or liars, or cowards. Conference committees to iron out differences between Senate and House versions of important bills increasingly freeze out members from the minority party. Presidents are accused by their partisan opponents of being plotting to undermine civil liberties, squash religious freedom, or enrich their friends. Federal judicial nominees are reviled by partisan opponents in the Senate and subjected to public castigation by advocacy groups associated with the opposition. In this environment, it is hardly surprising that cooperation across party lines is increasingly rare, not only in Congress but in state legislatures and city councils as well. American politics is no stranger to partisan politics and nasty relations between the parties; to one extent or another, Democratic and Republican leaders and activists have always been in the business of making the other party look bad. It's good politics. However, things seem to be getting worse, at least according to most veteran observers of American politics. Most say they have not seen this level of partisan acrimony in a very long time, and worry that bitter interparty combat is infusing nearly every aspect of political life in the United States. What accounts for the intense partisanship of American politics today? The consensus of political scientists, journalists, and commentators is that the near-dead heat that exists between the parties across the nation-in expressed party identification among voters, the close division of seats between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and in many state legislatures, and the very tight results in recent presidential elections-has convinced party leaders that the best way to win elections at all levels is to unite and mobilize the party's base and get it to the polls. Muting ideological and policy messages in a bid to win the votes of independents, most have concluded, risks alienating their own partisans and decreasing their turnout. Mobilizing key groups in the party's coalition and getting them to the polls is far easier than persuading lukewarm independents to vote for party candidates, and the outcome is more certain.

So, the first order of business for the parties has become the care and feeding of the party's base. And what better way to do this than to get partisans angry at the other party and worried about what it would do if it were to win? Democrats try to increase turnout among racial minorities, labor union members, hourly workers, environmentalists, and women by attacking Republicans for opposing affirmative action, being too friendly to large corporations, supporting unfair tax policies, rolling back environmental regulations, and undermining the right to abortion. Republicans try to mobilize their base of evangelical Christians, social conservatives, farmers, white southerners, people in the Mountain West, and the economically better-off by accusing Democrats of undermining the traditional family; blocking economic prosperity by supporting inefficient regulations and higher taxes; and sapping American strength abroad, thereby weakening the country in the fight against terrorism.Political parties are an important part of democratic political systems. How well they function and fulfill their responsibilities has a lot to do with determining the health and vitality of democratic polities. We will examine political parties in this chapter and ask whether heightened levels of interparty conflict make our system more or less responsive to the people and our government more or less able to fashion coherent and workable public policies.

The Sixth Party System: Dealignment and Parity

The New Deal coalition began to slowly disintegrate in the 1968 election (won by Republican Richard Nixon) and finally collapsed in 1980 with the Republican capture of the presidency and the Senate.1 The change in the party system was triggered by three major developments. First, strong support by the Democratic Party for the civil rights revolution-which brought new anti-discrimination laws, busing to achieve school integration, and, eventually, minority set-asides for government jobs and contracts and affirmative action programs in higher education-caused many white southerners and blue collar workers to switch their loyalties from the Democrats to the Republicans, even while African Americans became more loyal to the Democrats. 2 Second, the tendency of the Democrats to openly welcome feminists and gays into the fold, and support the spread of additional rights to them, as well as the tendency of the Democrats to become more strongly identified with the doctrine of strict separation of church and state, caused religious conservatives to abandon their support for the party. Third and finally, perceived Democratic Party opposition to the Vietnam War, especially during the Nixon years 1969 through 1973, caused many Americans who favored a strong national defense and an aggressive foreign policy to drift away as well.

After 1980, the pace of Democratic decline began to pick up, with Democrats losing their big advantage in control of governorships and state legislatures, as well as in party identification among the electorate. Democrats lost their majority in the Senate between 1981 to 1986, then saw Republicans take control of both houses of Congress between 1995 and 2001, and after the 2002 congressional elections. Democrats, moreover, held the presidency for only 12 years in the four decades spanning 1968 and 2008. Despite Democratic loses and Republican gains, the overall picture of the post-1980 period has been one of divided government at both the federal and state levels, a situation in which one party controls the executive and the other party controls all or part of the legislative branch.

The transition from the fifth party system to the sixth was not the classic party realignment that occurred after the elections of 1896 and 1932. In those earlier elections, a system dominated by one party was replaced in rather short order by a system dominated by the other party. This time, however, while the dominant Democratic party lost its overall lead, the former minority Republican Party did not emerge as the unchallenged, across-the-board leader in politics and governance, though some saw the seeds of a possible new Republican majority in the return of unified government to Washington after the 2002 congressional elections. Scholars, journalists, and politicians have come to call this particular process of party change, in which a dominant party declines without another taking its place, dealignment.3 The resulting sixth party system is one of near parity in which the Republican and Democratic parties are evenly divided in terms of elected offices held, the distribution of votes among the electorate, and party identification among Americans. In party terms, the United States had become a 50-50 nation . 4

The sixth party system may be highly volatile given the parity between the parties, higher levels of partisanship among party activists and strong identifiers, and a large block of voters who consider themselves to be independents without enduring loyalties to either party (see Chapter 5). Because the parties are so close in the number of elected offices they hold, even small swings in turnout can change which party controls the presidency and Congress. Because Democratic and Republican identifiers are divided so deeply on issues and ideology, partisan voters and party activists and leaders in both parties believe more is at stake in elections, increasing the emotional intensity of elections. And, because there are so many more independent voters than in the past, there are more voters who might swing toward the Democrats in one election, then toward the Republicans in the next election. Or, they might now and again support a maverick independent candidate or insurgent third party, upsetting the fine balance between Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats and Republicans

I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat.

-Will Rogers

The Democratic and Republican parties don't look much like parties in other rich democratic countries. In most of them, the political parties are hierarchically-structured organizations led by full-time party professionals and traditionally committed to a set of ideological principles. They also tend to have clearly defined membership requirements, centralized control over party nominations and electoral financing, and disciplinary authority over elected party members in the national parliament and cabinet ministries. The major American parties have almost none of these qualities, though the Republicans have become much more ideologically cohesive than has traditionally been the case in American politics.

The Organization of American Political Parties

The Republican and Democratic parties are not organizations in the usual sense of the term but rather loose collections of local and state parties, campaign committees, candidates and officeholders, and associated interest groups that get together every four years to nominate a presidential candidate. Unlike a corporation, a bureaucratic agency, a military organization, or even a political party in most other countries, the official leaders of the major American parties cannot issue orders that get passed down a chain of command.

To be sure, the classic boss-led urban and state political machines of American folklore-long identified with such names as Tammany Hall, "Boss Tweed" of New York, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, and Governor Huey Long of Louisiana-once existed, but these have disappeared from the cities and states where they held sway, mainly because of reforms that ended party control over government contracts and jobs. Political machines run by a "boss" have never existed at the national level. There have been leaders with clout, reputation, and vision, to be sure, who people wanted to follow, but never a boss who could issue commands. Even popular, charismatic, and skillful presidents, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, have had nearly as much trouble controlling the many diverse and independent groups and individuals within their own parties as they have had dealing with the opposition. George W. Bush discovered this in 2005 and 2006 when a significant number of Republican members of the House and Senate, loyal followers for most of his presidency, began to abandon him on Iraq, his plan to change Social Security, and immigration reform.

The ill-defined nature of Republican and Democratic party membership is another indicator of how different American political parties are from political parties in other countries, as well as from private organizations. What does it mean, in fact, to be a Republican or a Democrat in the United States? Americans do not join parties in the sense of paying dues and receiving a membership card. To Americans, being a member of a party may mean voting most of the time for the candidate of a party or choosing to become a candidate of one of them. Or it may mean voting in a party primary. Or it may mean contributing money to, or otherwise helping in, a local, state, or national campaign of one of the party candidates. Or it may just mean a general preference of one party over another most of the time. These are loose criteria for membership, to say the least-looser than for virtually any other organization that might be imagined.

various elements of the Democratic and Republican parties are relatively independent from one another and act in concert not on the basis of orders but on the basis of shared interests, sentiment, and the desire to win elections, 5 which can be quite a powerful coordinators of party activities, to be sure. (See Figure 9.2 for a graphical representation of these ideas.) Most important, perhaps, the parties do not control the nomination of candidates running under the party label--their most vital political role -or the flow of money that funds electoral campaigns or the behavior of its officeholders once elected.

In the past, party candidates were usually nominated in district, state, and national conventions, where party regulars played a major role. They are now almost exclusively nominated in primaries or grassroots caucuses in the states, where the party organizations help but do not run the show. Nomination comes to those who are best able to raise money, gain access to the media, form their own campaign organizations, and win the support of powerful interest and advocacy groups (such as the National Rifle Association in the GOP and the National Education Association in the Democratic party). To a very large extent, Democratic and Republican party organizations are there to help candidates in these efforts, not order them about. 6 It is because of this that many commentators have come to describe American political parties as being "candidate-centered." [Figure 9.2 about here]

Nominees are so independent they sometimes oppose party leaders and reject traditional party policies, and there is not much the party can do about it. Republicans were embarrassed, for example, when David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1988 where he proposed bills concerning race that made other Republicans extremely uncomfortable. He then campaigned for and won the Republican nomination for governor in 1990 (he lost in the general election), despite the opposition of state and national Republican officials.

In Germany, for example, individual candidates for the Bundestag are nominated by local party committees dominated by party regulars. Party lists for the general election are drawn up by state party organizations. Money for conducting electoral campaigns, moreover, is mostly raised and spent by the party organizations, not individual candidates. Finally, the campaign is waged between the parties and their alternative programs, not between individual candidates, and the electorate tends to make its choices based on feelings about the parties rather than about the candidates. Most of the western European democracies have similar party systems.

National Party Committees

The Democratic and Republican National Committees conduct the business of the party during the four years between national conventions. The national committees are made up of elected committeemen and committeewomen from each of the states, a sizable staff, and a chairperson. The national committees rarely meet. The real business of the committee is run by the party chair, assisted by the committee staff. The chair exercises little power when a president from the party is in office because the party chair is compelled to take direction from the White House. When the opposition controls the presidency, the party chair exercises more influence in party affairs, although the extent of that power is still not very great.

Although the national committees have little direct power, they have become increasingly important as campaign service organizations for party candidates running for national and state offices.7 In addition to substantial financial contributions to candidate campaign organizations, they do a wide variety of things to help. Out of their Washington, D.C. in-house TV and radio studios come attack ads aimed at the other party and its candidates, tailored to the particular district or state in which the ads will be used. Other ads extol the sponsoring party and its achievements. Direct mail campaigns are mounted to disseminate information and party positions on the issues and to make appeals for campaign contributions, increasingly using sophisticated data-mining techniques to allow very narrow targeting of messages to different groups of people.8 News releases are prepared for the media, as are campaign-oriented sound and video bites to be used as news clips on local radio and television. Each of the parties also produces training courses for potential candidates, complete with "how-to" manuals and videos. Each of the two parties has a Website where people can access information about the party, get news about the nefarious behavior of the opposition, and make monetary contributions to the party and party candidates.

To carry out these activities, both the Republican and Democratic National Committees have steadily increased the number of employees in their national offices, especially in the areas of finance, advertising, information technology, campaign planning, and video specialist and support personnel, and they expanded their budgets to carry out an ever-broader range of campaign activities for party candidates. Each of the national committees became a highly professionalized campaign organization, filled with highly skilled people able to provide party candidates with what they needed to wage first-rate electoral campaigns.

The consensus among political professionals, as well as political scientists, is that the Republicans have been more successful at building these campaign service machines than Democrats. 9 While the Democrats have been trying to catch up, they still lag behind the Republicans. 1

Core Supporters

The Republican and Democratic parties each have a set of core supporters-often called the party base-upon which it can count for votes, campaign contributions, and activists to advance the fortunes of the parties and their candidates for elected office. Much of the material on core supporters was examined in Chapter 5 but is worth repeating here. We saw earlier that the strongest Republican supporters may be found among whites, particularly in the South and Rocky Mountain West, conservative Christians and the most religiously committed-those who express a belief in God and say the regularly attend religious services-among all denominations, business people (whether small business owners or top executives in large corporations), ideological conservatives, people in rural areas, and those with the highest incomes. The strongest Democratic supporters may be found among African Americans, Jews, non-Cuban Hispanics, people who are secular in belief, people with post-graduate degrees, union households, ideological liberals, people living on the West Coast and the Northeast, and lower income people. Democrats find strong support, as well, among teachers and other government employees at the local, state, and national levels,11 and people living in university towns and science and technology research centers such as the Silicon Valley (stretching from San Jose to San Francisco), Austin, Seattle, Boulder, the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, and the Route 128 economic corridor around Boston and Cambridge.12

Increasingly in recent years, Republicans and Democrats have tried to win elections by first mobilizing these core supporters-often called "rallying-the-base"-by focusing on issues and symbolic gestures that will bring them to the polls, then trying to win a majority among those voters not automatically predisposed to one party or the other (Catholics are a good example, as are self-identified independents). In our 50-50 nation, where the numbers of Republican and Democratic core supporters are equal in strength, winning even a small majority among these less partisan groups, while mobilizing your own partisans, is the key to winning elections. Issue and ideological appeals are important in these efforts, a subject we examine in the next section.

Internal Divisions

Perhaps because it recently has been America's governing party at the national level with responsibility for putting real policies into place, a number of fissures have appeared in recent years within Republican ranks.14 There is a division, for example, between traditional "small government" Republicans, worried about the size of the federal budget and new intrusive programs, and "big government" Republicans who support important new programs such as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Libertarian-oriented Republicans who detest government interference in private lives disagree with many socially conservative Republicans about the role government should play in abortion and end-of-life decisions. Many business-oriented Republicans want government to support scientific research, including stem cell initiatives, appoint people to the courts who are concerned first and foremost about property rights and federal over-regulation of business, and ease up on immigration restrictions, while the more socially conservative tend to worry most about judicial nominees' stances on gay rights and abortion, and want the federal government to tighten up American borders. Finally, neo-conservative Republicans want the United States to be expansive in foreign affairs, using American economic and military power to spread democracy and American values, while more traditional Republicans, worried about the size and cost of such a policies, and lacking confidence in the ability of government to achieve desired results, believe a more modest foreign policy is appropriate.

¹⁴"Republican Fissures," The Economist (October 1, 2005), pp. 27-29.

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