This article describes efforts to understand how partisan actors respond to electoral losses differently across party lines, leading to different decisions for future nomination contests. I further focus on the events of the spring and summer of 2024, in which both parties were offered compelling reasons to reject their expected presidential nominee (a criminal conviction and a poor debate performance) but only the Democrats followed that path, while Republicans reaffirmed their support for a damaged candidate. These events demonstrate the relative power the two party organizations have but also their overall orientations toward elections and electability.

Political elites play an important role in determining who wins primaries, yet comparatively little is known about which voices in party networks matter when different intra-party signals are sent. We examine this question using an original dataset of Republican Senate and gubernatorial primaries in 2022, an election cycle with substantial intra-party conflict in primary elections. We demonstrate that Fox News appearances (media), Trump's endorsements (MAGA), campaign fundraising (money), and Twitter engagement (mentions) were all positively associated with vote share. We then assess the state of primary fields prior to Trump's endorsements, showing that endorsed candidates were outperforming their competitors prior to his involvement. Finally, we consider the state of primary fields after Trump endorsed, demonstrating that his support was associated with a thirteen percentage point increase in both fundraising share and polling which lasted through to the primary. These findings provide clarity on the relative weight of different signals in contested party nominations.

Presidential nominations are generally perceived to be under the control of primary voters and caucus-goers, with party organizations themselves largely powerless to steer outcomes. However, parties are highly active in the background, often switching contests between primaries and caucuses or vice versa in order to influence the nomination. Despite the popular narrative of parties becoming more internally democratic and abandoning caucuses, we find numerous instances of states moving from primaries to caucuses. We examine state party switches between caucuses and primaries between 1980 and 2024, testing various theories of party change. This approach yields few systematic conclusions. Therefore, we shift to examining contemporaneous coverage of state party switches using an inductive qualitative approach, revealing a complex and dynamic nomination system and a variety of reasons why state parties choose one form of contest over another. These findings catch state parties in the act of trying to control nomination contests in surprisingly overt ways.

A common explanation for Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 presidential election was that she catered to minorities at the expense of the broader electorate. How does such a loss narrative influence voters' interpretation of subsequent elections? In a conjoint experiment, white and Black Democratic respondents were randomly exposed to a vignette that ascribed Democrats' 2016 losses to their focus on identity politics. This narrative had an asymmetric effect on attitudes toward the 2020 election based on both race and gender. While it had no impact on white men's or Black women's understanding of why the Democrats lost the last presidential election or their candidate preferences for the next, it had a substantial impact on the electoral attitudes of white women and a moderate impact on those of Black men. Specifically, it shifted their support away from candidates committed to gender and racial equity and toward those emphasizing broad economic policies. The identity politics loss narrative thus may have acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy that advantaged white male candidates in the 2020 election.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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We examine Barack Obama's influence over the Democratic Party as an ex-president from three vantage points: his popularity among partisans, his control over party nominations, and his rhetorical influence over party platform stances. The findings are somewhat mixed. Compared with other contemporary presidents, Obama is far more popular among co-partisan voters. However, he has had only modest influence in presidential nominations, and, unlike other modern presidents, a waning influence on party platform stances. The findings are suggestive not only about Obama's own interests but also about institutional constraints of modern presidents.

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This was supposed to be a book about Republicans. In the summer of 2016, I had an idea for a book chronicling how the Republican Party dealt with their embarrassing loss to Hillary Clinton. Surely they were going to have to rethink how their presidential nomination system worked, why it utterly failed in 2016, and how a patently unelectable candidate like Donald Trump somehow got the nomination and cost them an election that was obviously theirs to win. It would be a difficult period of self-reflection for the GOP (Grand Old Party), and it seemed like something that would be fascinating to observe in action.

The previous chapters set the stage for this one. In those chapters, we saw party activists divided over the perceived lessons of 2016. We saw party officers arguing over matters of election interpretation and race. We saw party donors split into factions. We saw media narratives undermining how many Democrats, especially women, saw themselves as fitting into the party and what sorts of candidates they should support.

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The first debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination cycle occurred in June of 2019. It was spread across two nights to accommodate 20 candidates in the largest and most diverse presidential candidate field in American history. The last debate was held in March of 2020 in a CNN studio with no audience, consisting of two white men in their late 70s standing several yards apart to avoid virus transmission. Understanding how the former yielded to the latter requires getting a handle on a number of key topics. I’ll review some of those topics and explain just how they’re relevant to current American political parties. I describe them in the context of answering a key question: What is the Democratic Party? What are its constituent parts, and what motivates them? How do we distinguish it from the Republican Party, or even from the Democratic Party of the past? And what role do narratives play in guiding its behavior?

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Bear with me for a moment while I offer an example of a party that went through something like what Democrats went through in the wake of 2016. The example itself actually predates Twain, but its experiences bear a lot of similarities to recent political developments in the United States, and are instructive about what parties can and can’t do in response to a surprise electoral loss.

As the evidence in the past few chapters suggests, divisiveness within the Democratic Party was a source of substantial concern among party leaders and activists following the 2016 election, and many of the party’s decision in the wake of that loss were motivated by a desire to mitigate such factionalism in the future. These concerns were bolstered by media coverage following the election that suggested that internal divisions would likely plague the party for many years to come. “It’s clear that the party is divided, split on issues including free trade, health care, foreign affairs and Wall Street. They even disagree over the political wisdom of doing deals with Trump,” wrote Philip Elliott.1 Supporters of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and those of her primary rival Bernie Sanders continued to mistrust each other and blame each other for the party’s presidential loss.

The Democrats' decision to nominate Joe Biden for 2020 was hardly a fluke but rather a strategic choice by a party that had elevated electability above all other concerns. In Learning from Loss, one of the nation's leading political analysts offers unique insight into the Democratic Party at a moment of uncertainty. Between 2017 and 2020, Seth Masket spoke with Democratic Party activists and followed the behavior of party leaders and donors to learn how the party was interpreting the 2016 election and thinking about a nominee for 2020. Masket traces the persistence of party factions and shows how interpretations of 2016 shaped strategic choices for 2020. Although diverse narratives emerged to explain defeat in 2016 - ranging from a focus on 'identity politics' to concerns about Clinton as a flawed candidate - these narratives collectively cleared the path for Biden.