How a 19th Century Akin Would Differ

Seth Masket wrote a really nice post about political parties and the Akin affair a couple days ago that I recommend. I want to push on this bit a little:

[I]t's a stretch to say that the "old time political bosses" had the power to dump nominees who became embarrassments. Yes, party bosses had a great deal of power to hand pick candidates and secure their nomination by controlling nominating conventions. But once a nominee had been selected, it was no small thing to remove them, which is why selecting the right nominee has always been such a crucial task. An Akin situation 150 years ago likely would have had similar results. It's not like some party boss would have kidnapped or murdered him. (I very much doubt that the kind of political violence portrayed in "Gangs of New York" was ever widespread in the United States, even in mid-1800s New York City.)

I don't disagree, but there are some procedural issues here that are worth thinking about. 150 years ago is before the Australian, state-printed ballot, as well as before direct primaries. During that era, the parties supplied ballots to voters, who just turned them in at the polls; you weren't getting a ballot from election officials and then marking which candidates to vote for. Nominations weren't officially registered and adjudicated by the government; they were purely internal choices of private organizations. But that meant that a nomination, once obtained, didn't really belong to a nominee in the way that it does now; there was no official, formally state-certified, nominee. The real limiting factor (and I'm basically just following Alan Ware's The American Direct Primary in all of this) seems to have been the actual printing of the ballots -- remember, by the party, not by the government. And even then if a local party group didn't like the nominee they could replace him by "knifing" him off the ballot or replacing him with a "paster" stuck on the ballot instead of the regular nominee. So presumably up to the point of printing the ballots it would be easy for the party's leaders to substitute a new candidate if everyone wanted to dump the old one, while after the ballots were printed it would be a much more complicated job, but certainly possible. The main point here is that as far as I know the nominee up until the Australian ballot was introduced had no government-sanctioned right to a ballot line at all.

What really changes things, I think, is giving the nominee enforceable legal rights to a ballot line, which is a consequence of the Australian ballot, really -- indeed, the direct primary is partially a consequence of the Australian ballot, because once you have a legal ballot line that you're fighting for then you need procedures that will get you an unambiguous nominee, and a primary election turned out to be a good solution to that. After that, what probably matters is the specific way that the (state) laws are written; it's certainly possible to write a law that allows state party committees to overturn the results of a primary whether the nominee likes it or not, but as far as I know such laws are rare or non-existent. I assume, however, that there is at least some variation across states on the key question of whether the line belongs to the nominee or to the party, but you would need a real election law expert to help with that one.

The rest of what Seth says I agree with completely. And even if parties retain complete legal authority, it's still likely that a nominee might have considerable political leverage. For example, in the 19th century scenarios it's possible that a party might dump Akin completely after nomination -- but if he wanted to fight on, at the very least any personal loyalists he had could if they had the money create their own ballots with Akin on them and attempt to circulate them. Even worse for the party, if a significant party faction -- in this case, the pro-lifers -- stuck with him after the party dumped him, they could certainly keep him in play by printing their own ballots or altering the party-supplied ones; the result would almost certainly mean losing the election (and could be worse -- the pro-Akin faction could threaten, for example, to circulate "Republican" ballots with Akin but without Mitt Romney, or perhaps without some other GOP candidates).

Indeed, that kind of chaos was exactly why strong party leaders supported first the Australian ballot and then direct primaries. The combination meant that the party only had to arrange for it's candidate to win the official nomination; it no longer would have to enforce that nomination in every county and town. That was a big win for the parties...as long as they could control the nomination. Unfortunately for them, primaries turned out to be sometimes very difficult to control, although I don't think we have clear evidence of exactly how important that was in the demise of the old 19th century version of strong parties.

But as for dumping candidates: 150 years ago, it would have been easier as far as procedures and the law were concerned -- but a candidate would still have had considerable leverage, at least if he retained support of a significant faction of the party or had other resources which would have allowed him to threaten to go on alone. The big difference, however, is that the lack of a government-certified ballot position would mean he would have lacked one significant resource in the fight against his party.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Aaron Douglas, 41. I don't know whether I currently think that BSG had the best-ever cast performance in a TV show...I sometimes think it's Claudius. BSG's edge? How deep the great performances go. Douglas is a big part of that. Terrific performance.

Eye doctor this morning, so I'm not sure what kind of blogging pace I'll have, but there's plenty of good stuff:


1. Today's must-read: conservative columnist Philip Klein tells the truth about Todd Akin and the Republican Party -- and hopes that the blanket condemnation of Akin is the beginning of something new.

2. Today's other must-read: the great Ta-Nehisi Coates on race and Obama.

3. CJR's Jay Jones updates on the latest in fact-checking: fairness, not facts.

4. Matt Yglesias does a good job of explaining the ACA Medicare cuts. Really, the Romney position here is to be pro-waste, isn't it? I mean, there's a reason both Ryan and the Democrats wanted these cuts.

5. Ed Kilgore on welfare reform. Oh, and lazy mendacity: there's a link provided by the Republicans that he follows and finds that it undermines the case they're trying to make.

6. And this piece on tracking swearing around the US doesn't really deliver all that much, but is still well worth a look. From Megan Garber. While you're at it, see Alyssa Rosenberg on who (and where) is watching gay-inclusive television.

Akin and Party Money

I have a post up over at PP about parties and the Todd Akin flap; it's always fun for me when there's news that actually allows me to talk about how parties work.

There's tons of talk about this right now, and judging from the twitter traffic there's one specific part of the topic that I didn't really cover specifically and should revise and extend on: party money. So Benjiy Sarlin says "Something Todd Akin likely considering: Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell raised ungodly sums of grassroots money," while Mark Blumenthal tweets "Akin’s last cash-on-hand was ~$500K. Asking now, can small donors beat NRCC/CW?"

Here's the thing: "grassroots" money and "small donors" are, in most cases, mostly party money, and will therefore respond to party cues. So if the Republican Party network is united against Akin, then there are not going to be any positive cues, and there are not going to be any ungodly sums of money. On the other hand, if some party groups, including a significant subset of the GOP-aligned partisan press, stick with Akin, then he very well could benefit. In other words, while we shouldn't think of small money donations as entirely a function of other party actors' choices, it's likely that those other party actors are the more important variable here.

Unfortunately, unless I've fallen behind on the literature (possible! If so, please let me know, campaign finance and party network scholars!), we really don't know how much of the money spent in a typical House, Senate, or presidential race is in fact party money, properly understood. That's because it's an awful lot of work to figure out whether some individual donor is a party donor or not...well, that's not right; it's relatively straightforward for any specific individual donor, barring confusing coding by the FEC, but it's a lot of work to do that task for all donors.

We also don't really know a lot of the direction of influences here. For example, is a talk show host such as Sean Hannity perfectly free to choose what to do in this case, or does he really have no choice but to follow others within the party network? Or at least, are there strong incentives for him to fall in line, at least if others within the party network are unified? And do the same constraints influence the behavior of, say, Karl Rove? Or the Koch brothers? Don't assume you know the answer: it's possible that Republicans are happy to take cash from big money donors only if those donors are willing to support whatever the rest of the party decides. But it's certainly also possible that they are (at the very least) highly influential. We have quite a bit of good reporting on all of this, but few definitive answers. Same question about other groups within the party. For example, anti-abortion groups might be inclined to continue supporting Akin; what, if any, influence to other party actors have on them to keep their mouths shut? And what influence do anti-abortion groups have on other party actors? In practical terms: suppose organized anti-abortion groups support Akin but most other organized groups in the GOP want him out; how will that affect Akin's small-donor or "grassroots" fundraising?

It seems to me that party network scholars have begun to do a pretty good job of developing a conceptual framework and a vocabulary for answering some of these questions, but many of them are still unanswered (and of course that's the nature of it, since parties are not static, so answers that were correct fifteen years ago might be wrong by now). Usually, nominations are good chances to see how things work within parties, but extraordinary events such as this one can be very helpful.