Is Anyone Actually in Charge of the Democratic Party? And Does It Matter?

This year's midterm elections are a test of whether a party can be a success and a failure at the same time.

It's hard to think of a worse recent year for the Democratic establishment. It's also hard to think of a better one.

The Democratic National Committee, ostensibly the nerve center of that establishment, was $2 million in debt as of July, its members in open revolt against their chairman, Ken Martin, a party lifer from Minnesota who was elected last year on a promise to expand the Democrats' appeal. This year's primaries played host to a rolling left-wing insurgency, in which progressives and socialists wrestled nominations away from incumbents and favorites of the party's elected leadership and donor class. Crucial Senate contests in Maine and Michigan became expensive, bruising civil wars. "The establishment Democratic Party is a failed enterprise," Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado -- hardly a bomb thrower -- said this month in an interview with the journalist David Sirota.

And yet this same party is, by most polling, the odds-on favorite to retake the House of Representatives next month. It's also as likely as not to win control of the Senate, a prize that seemed hopelessly out of reach a year ago, when the Democrats faced their lowest approval ratings in a quarter-century of polling. The main super PAC for Senate Democrats is raising more money than it ever has. Republicans are increasingly allocating resources to deep-red states and districts where they have not had to seriously defend seats in years. This is the odd koan hanging over Democratic politics this year: Is it possible for a party to be a failure and a success at the same time?

If the answer is yes -- and it is -- then it has a lot to do with the vagueness of what we mean when we talk about the Democratic Party and the establishment that in theory runs it. In political rhetoric, the party "establishment" is a noun or, more usually, an epithet that can mean practically anything and anyone -- from beleaguered apparatchiks like Martin to elected leaders like Chuck Schumer to talking heads like James Carville, from centrist purple-state senators who enrage liberals to liberal donors in San Francisco and Manhattan who enrage centrists. Are all these people the Democratic establishment? Are any of them?

In their 2024 book, "The Hollow Parties," the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld coin a term for the hazy geography of influence that, in very different ways, now constitutes the modern Democratic and Republican establishments: the "party blob." The formal party structures, they observe, are now overshadowed by advocacy organizations, campaign-consulting firms, donor networks, dark-money super PACs, partisan media and others that have, over time, informally taken on much of the work of selecting candidates and winning elections that once fell to the parties themselves.

These groups share partisan commitments but have no real accountability to voters or official party leaders. Their priorities and incentives are often more complicated than simply winning elections, and they can exist at cross-purposes. But their defining characteristic is their diffuseness. In the party blob, no one is really in charge.

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