The strangest thing about the Democrats’ move to replace Joe Biden on their presidential ticket was that it took so long.
Biden has been an intensely unpopular president and increasingly incapable of making a forceful case for himself.
In the 12 months before he dropped out, he never once had a lead over Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, and his job approval often hovered below 40%.
And yet, no serious Democrat rose to challenge him in the primaries, and party elites were in abject denial about his prospects until the public was confronted with incontrovertible evidence of his decline in the June debate.
How could the Democrats have let things get that far without moving to select a more electable candidate?
Putting the question that way should lead us to wonder about the Republicans, too.
Donald Trump is also terribly unpopular and poorly suited to building a broad national coalition.
He was the only president since the emergence of modern polling whose approval rating never topped 50%, and then he lost his bid for re-election.
If the Democrats really screw up, he might just win by a whisker, but he has no prospect of proving broadly popular.
How could the Republicans have run him again?
Both parties could commit such malpractice because “the Democrats” and “the Republicans” — in the sense of organized institutional bodies of political professionals who make judgments aimed at maximizing electoral victory on behalf of coalitions of voters and interests — barely exist at all.
Since the 1960s, both parties (though led by the Democrats) have increasingly contracted out their core function of candidate selection to primary electorates focused not on broadening the party’s reach but on sharpening its ideological edges.
Meanwhile, both parties (though led by the Republicans) have farmed out their core work of organizing, building voter lists and mobilizing supporters to independent outside groups with easier access to money but fewer incentives to make broad appeals.
As a practical matter, this has meant that every election cycle begins by asking the most partisan and least practical voters in the country who and what they want to see.
It’s no surprise that the result is a circus of frantic performative outrage that leaves most Americans exhausted and cynical.
Such a politics has been terrible for the parties themselves.
We have not had a majority party in America since the 1990s.
Nearly every election has been very close, and none has yielded a durable majority.
Yet because both parties are in the grip of their activist fringes, neither has grasped that what it’s doing isn’t working.
After every election, the party that barely won has treated its victory as the dawn of a new era it was destined to dominate, and then watched it all fall apart in the very next election cycle.
Over time, many primary voters and outside activist groups have become openly hostile to the parties as institutions and worked to delegitimize them.
This bizarre self-immolation reached a peak in 2016, when both parties seemed at risk of handing their presidential nominations to candidates — Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — who openly detested the party they were seeking to lead.
Republicans actually did choose that candidate, and the Democrats barely avoided the same fate.
That difference between the parties has persisted.
Both have gotten weaker, but Democrats have held on to a shred of institutional capacity.
They didn’t nominate Sanders in 2016 or 2020.
In 2020, some of their key constituencies (especially black voters) were willing to take the advice of factional and party leaders and choose a candidate who could unite the party and win the general election.
And this year they eventually gathered the will to push out their unelectable incumbent.
But even this they could only manage at the very brink of political suicide, and only up to a point: In picking an alternative candidate, Democrats chose the path of least resistance, knowing their capacity for collective action was limited.
The waning of the parties has been terrible for the country, too.
Strong parties actually restrain partisanship, because they need to elect candidates all over the country and so have to make broad appeals.
That’s why our era of weak parties has been an age of vicious polarization.
Effective parties also habituate politicians in the kind of coalition-building that is essential not only to winning elections but to governing.
Our political culture increasingly lacks those crucial habits.
There is no simple way to reverse the damage we have done to the parties.
But there are steps we can take incrementally by experimenting with reforms of the primary system, giving elected officials and political professionals more of a formal role in candidate selection and allowing more campaign money to flow through the parties rather than around them.
Before any moves in this direction could be possible, though, we would have to recognize that we need, and lack, functional political parties.
This dispiriting election year doesn’t look likely to do much good for our country, but maybe it will at least help that lesson sink in.
Yuval Levin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, “American Covenant: How the Constitution unified our nation — and could again,” is now out.