bronze theory: an explanation of democratic party establishment failure
One of the things I like about competitive online games is the automated ranking system. Playing League of Legends, a 5v5 online game, there’s a lot of randomness, especially around how good your teammates are relative to your opponents. Winning more games than you lose results in promoting through various tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond are common rankings in various games. League of Legends now has “Iron” below Bronze, but to me, calling someone “Bronze” as an insult fits so much better with the metal’s association with being lower-ranked than Silver or Gold.
Being able to sort people into skill-based tiers is, in a strange way, rather comforting to me in its pure meritocratic nature, since there’s no equivalent for most things in the “real world.” I think I’m an okay driver, but I doubt I’d even be in the top 20% necessary to make the “Gold” equivalent for driving skill. Workplaces try to grade people’s performance, but that usually comes down more to how much a boss likes an employee (and how much of a flagrant suck-up they are) than actual job skill. But, at least with most jobs, there’s an attempt to promote those that excel at a job, and demote, retrain, or fire people who suck at it.
A glaring exception to this is is the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, an organization that seems hellbent on promoting people regardless of performance or ability. This has led me to come up with a theory.
Bronze Theory: the establishment wing of the Democratic Party fails because its candidates and staff lack skill. This is especially apparent in campaigns; I suspect it’s the same in actual legislative maneuvering and other aspects of governing, but I know a little bit about campaigning and next to nothing about governing. Put simply: graded like they were playing an online game, the people comprising the establishment wing of the Democratic Party are Bronze players.
Bronze Theory is opposed to other explanations for the establishment’s bad performance in elections: conspiratorial ideas that perhaps they’re losing on purpose, or that they’re conserving all their resources to fight the Left rather than Republicans. I’m not even arguing that further-left ideas are, necessarily, more popular than those held by the establishment wing, as convenient as that would be for my beliefs.
This may sound like a truism: they lose elections because they’re bad at elections? No shit. What I’m getting at isn’t simply that they’re bad at elections, but that they don’t seem to seek improvement at the skill, or use what filtering mechanisms they do have to find people who are more skilled than others. The actions of the establishment wing of the party seem to indicate that they don’t seem to think “skill at winning elections” is a real thing, or at least, that it shouldn’t influence who runs for office or works on those campaigns.
Before I go further, a bit of a pet peeve: a candidate isn’t, personally, the one making every decision and doing everything on a campaign. We’re not watching tennis, where one person is out there by themselves; when someone says “Mamdani is so good at social media,” what they mean is that the team including the people running his social media accounts, his writers, the videographer, the editors, etc. etc., are good at what they do. Mamdani is some combination of a figurehead and, at most, the person responsible for the hiring decisions that cascade down into the hiring decisions that result in a competent team. So, if I attack a Democratic politician or candidate as lacking skill, I usually mean that they lack the skill to acquire other skillful people to compose their team.
With that out of the way: an online game like League of Legends has the advantage of being able to test a player’s skill over hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of games. In contrast, tests of electoral skill (through elections) are infrequent. Unless there’s a drawn-out presidential primary campaign cycle with lots of smaller sub-contests (state primaries), it’s probably just going to come down to one big election after a drawn-out campaign.
Let’s dive into a couple examples: the most recent unsuccessful candidates for president from the Democratic party, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
For those too young to remember the political environment in 2007, Hillary Clinton was the establishment choice to be the next Democratic nominee for president. Barack Obama was the upstart favorite of young people newly involved in politics. I worked on the Obama campaign and wrote about the experience.
We’re not doing caucuses any more, thank God, but it can’t be emphasized enough that the Iowa caucus being important wasn’t a surprise or anything. Some low-tier candidates would move to Iowa for years for a better chance in the Iowa caucus. Hillary’s team knew how important it was for her to win in Iowa, and they were massively favored to do so.
Hillary ended up getting third, behind Obama and the now-disgraced John Edwards. Contemporary analysis said that her numbers were good enough to win in a normal year, but an unprecedented number of people showed up to register to caucus for the first time: that is, the Obama campaign was successful in registering relatively massive numbers of first-time caucus-goers. The campaign continued on for some time, but Obama winning in Iowa is the only reason it wasn’t a coronation for Hillary.
Eight years later, Hillary wins an unexpectedly-competitive race in the primary against Sanders, and then… we know what happened. I recommend the book Shattered for the blow-by-blow.
Discounting the joke of a Senate race in 2000 and her re-election in 2006, Hillary Clinton has underperformed or outright lost every campaign she’s ever run in. The establishment wing’s self-conception is one of a group of pragmatists who Get Things Done, who care more about winning than anything else. If that’s the case… what about Hillary Clinton makes for an appealing candidate? We had seen her put through tests of whether she’s good at winning elections well before 2016, and the answer was a resounding “no.”
Kamala Harris is a bit more complex, as she begins her career with something Hillary never really did: winning a competitive election. I’ll grant her supporters the good faith that, knowing what we knew at the time, running for president in 2020 was a fine idea. It’s noteworthy, though, that the competitive election she won was for California Attorney General; when Kamala ran for Senate, the top-two primary system resulted in her doubling up on the next-highest candidate, a fellow democrat. The general election was, according to Politico, “one of the least-exciting races in California history,” and Kamala won by 23 points. But hey, maybe that demonstrated some skill in navigating a crowded field, and could play out on a bigger stage. Let’s find out.
Her campaign for the presidency in 2020 can only be described in the most technical sense as for the “presidency in 2020,” because she dropped out in 2019. The New York Times account of her campaign just before she dropped out is so damning that it makes the case for my theory better than I can:
“In one instance after another, Ms. Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign…
“Many of her own advisers are now pointing a finger directly at Ms. Harris. In interviews several of them criticized her for going on the offensive against rivals, only to retreat, and for not firmly choosing a side in the party’s ideological feud between liberals and moderates. She also created an organization with a campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, who goes unchallenged in part because she is Ms. Harris’s sister, and a manager, Mr. Rodriguez, who could not be replaced without likely triggering the resignations of the candidate’s consulting team. Even at this late date, aides said it’s unclear who’s in charge of the campaign.”
Fortunately for all of us, we have a primary system that was able to uncover this in 2019, rather than simply crowning her as the candidate, and only realizing the incompetence of her and her closest allies when she loses to a Republican.
It’s not a “hindsight 20/20” thing to question the VP pick of Kamala on electoral grounds; it’s a pretty obvious chain of thought to ask, “who will run for president after Biden, whether it’s in 2024 or 2028?” Whatever promise she may have showed, Kamala was put to the test of whether she can put together an organization that can win a national campaign, and the answer was a resounding “absolutely the fuck not.”
In the post-election non-apology tour, “107 days” was spoken about once per sentence as an excuse for why, duh, it was impossible for Kamala to win with that short amount of time as the candidate. It was even the title of her memoir. I disagree with this analysis. If anything, Kamala benefited enormously from not having more time: she would have put together the organization herself, based on her advisors, rather than inheriting the Biden campaign which had already hired all the necessary staff.
Hopefully by now I’ve shown that the Democratic establishment doesn’t seem to select candidates (or candidates-to-be) based on demonstrated skill at winning elections. So what are they looking for instead? Two things:
First, fundraising: seven months before the Times piece about her campaign’s collapse, they wrote about “Kamala Harris’s Small-Dollar Fund-Raising Operation,” saying that “Ms. Harris has systematically constructed a database of donors and email addresses that raised several million dollars for her fellow Democrats, demonstrating an uncommon potency for a first-term senator.”
In Nevada, similarly, I heard stories about then-governor Steve Sisolak, who was so obsessed with fundraising that he would write his own fund-raising emails, then demand stats on how his fund-raising emails were doing compared to ones written by others in the party apparatus. He lost re-election in 2022, leaving office with Nevada still a right-to-work state despite strong union presence and Democratic rule in all three branches of government.
It seems plainly obvious that money is important in politics, with both parties seeking it out to fund their campaigns, and left-liberals decrying the influence it has. While that’s certainly true, it’s shockingly difficult to translate money into votes, regardless of one’s politics: just recently, Angie Nixon was outspent 16-1 and won. Kshama Sawant, the anti-establishment (and, well, anti-just-about-everyone) candidate for House, got third place behind a Republican despite spending wildly more than him; she ended up spending more per vote than anyone in the primary.
Back to the 2020 cycle, there were two billionaires in the race on the Democratic side, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg. Neither was shy about spending: no one in Nevada could turn on a TV, computer, or radio without hearing from Tom Steyer. Bloomberg hired so aggressively that he ended up poaching staff from every state Democratic party to the extent that the leadership of those parties was pissed at his campaign, and he had to donate the max to every state party to attempt an apology. Tom Steyer finished seventh in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and third in South Carolina before dropping out. Bloomberg made the bizarre decision to skip campaigning in the early states so that he could focus on Super Tuesday, ending up with around 6% of the delegates from the day. Practically infinite money, and he couldn’t seem to buy good advice on how to allocate it. (At one point, his money went to a phone bank run with prison labor. That doesn’t factor into the point I’m making. It’s just worth remembering.)
The Democratic establishment’s emphasis on money gives a hint at why they might be so bad at elections: they think that if they throw money at a campaign, it will win. What they don’t seem to value are the hours put in by people who are not just volunteers, but cannot be effectively replaced by people paid to do the work. Read absolutely any post-election report where an insurgent defeats the establishment favorite, and you’ll see the same thing: the loser blanketed the airwaves, but no one ever saw their volunteers. Meanwhile, enthusiastic volunteers for the underdog were knocking doors. This is even more true in the age of phone scams, when making calls for a political candidate (much easier to do with a paid call center than it is to hire canvassers) has never been less useful.
The second thing the establishment seems to value is experience, or it being “their turn:” this is seen most plainly with how many losing candidates get “promoted” into losing at runs for higher office, but it’s seen internally on campaigns as well. As I discussed in my essay about working for the Nevada State Democratic Party, campaigning as a job is so punishing that it burns people out very quickly. If you make it through one cycle, you’re a veteran; if you make it through two, you’re an expert put in charge of a huge apparatus. My boss’s boss in Nevada was 21 years old, because he started working on campaigns at age 18.
So, when it comes to staff, there’s no real option to hire proven winners. You can hire the few experienced staffers that exist, or you can hire newbies; those newbies, if they make it six months, will be the grizzled veterans by the time the votes are cast.
I realize I’m flipping back and forth between what seem to be two different topics here: candidates and campaign staff. But in both cases, experience is valued over the results of that experience. For candidates, that’s probably due to internal power within the Democratic Party. For staff, it’s due to lack of other options.
The solution is different for the two groups, though: if the party wants to have effective staff for the long-term, it has to stop treating them so fucking bad in the short-term. But, since the party is so focused on short-term thinking, that nothing matters beyond the immediate election (the most important election of our lifetime), I doubt that will change. For candidates, the party has to look for promising younger people and kick old losers to the curb, even if they have high name recognition. Actually, especially if they have high name recognition, because people recognize the names in the sense of “boy do I ever hate [name of politician].”
I write this essay not out of any expectation, or even hope, that the establishment wing of the Democratic Party will change in any way. Instead, I write it in the hope that my electoralist comrades, especially in the Democratic Socialists of America, can use it to grow their knowledge of our political system. Just like we have to understand what happened when we fail, we have to understand the reasons behind our own success. One of the worst things that could happen to the DSA electoral project is not failure, exactly, but success to the extent that we replicate all the worst aspects of the current Democratic Party. So far, DSA candidates (especially Mamdani) are off to a good start in terms of displaying actual skill at campaigning. Let’s keep it that way.
