Unity by addition

How the two party coalitions differ.

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

One of the side-effects of having only two major political parties is that they are both going to grow a bit unwieldy by necessity. If (almost) everyone in the country has to be stuffed into one party or the other, both organizations will naturally include a broad array of ideologies and backgrounds, leading to all manner of factional disputes.

Over the centuries, the Democratic Party has been riven by splits between the Fire-Eaters and the Copperheads, the Bourbon Democrats and the Silverites; the Republican Party has seen conflict between the Mugwumps, the Stalwarts, and the Half-Breeds. (Side point: party factions used to have much cooler names.)

Party strife, more than unity, has been the norm in American politics. This cycle, however, both parties march into November more or less in lockstep. Considering the long period of Republican civil war during the Obama era, and the stretch of Democratic soul-searching under Trump, it is perhaps the first time the two parties have been this united simultaneously since the presidency of George W. Bush (and even then both coalitions still found things to squabble over).

However, the two forms of unity have been achieved in very different ways, a reality underlined by the programming at both the Democratic and Republican conventions.

In the past two days at the DNC, the party has trotted out three presidential couples (Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe and Jill Biden) and two presidential grandsons (Jack Kennedy Schlossberg and Jason Carter), together representing the past six decades of Democratic leadership giving their blessing to Kamala Harris.

Everyone sounded so cheerful and coordinated that it was almost hard to remember all the bad bad circulating under the surface. The Carters and the Clintons don’t like each other. Clinton, Biden, and Obama ran against each other. Obama tapped Biden over Clinton and then Clinton over Biden. Then, Biden beat Harris in 2020 but effectively lost to her in 2024, with Obama reportedly on her side and the Clintons reportedly on his.

On top of those layers of personal rivalry, a significant degree of ideological diversity was also on display. Yesterday, Bernie Sanders — himself a onetime opponent of Clinton, Biden, and Harris — took the stage, offering his familiar exhortation about the “need to get big money out of our political process.”

“Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections,” Sanders declared.

The next speaker up? Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has plowed $323 million of his own fortune into his two campaigns, breaking the all-time record for self-financing. He even acknowledged his wealth from the DNC podium, mere minutes after Sanders trashed the uber-rich. “Take it from an actual billionaire,” Pritzker said, “Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”

At the RNC, it’s not as if no former Trump rivals took the stage. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis (although initially un-invited) both addressed the crowd, as did 2016 opponents like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But while Biden/Harris critics like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retained their ideological style even while rallying behind the party’s leaders, the price of admission for Trump’s critics was sanding down their ideologies or conforming to his entirely. (Indeed, Haley and DeSantis had in some ways already done so even while running against him.)

Trump critics like Jeb Bush and Jeff Flake were not at the RNC; for all intents and purposes, they have left the active ranks of the party. Certainly, there was no display of the party’s past celebrating its future like at the DNC, since no former Republican presidents or vice presidents (save Trump himself) attended the convention. Even the party’s less conformist current leaders weren’t given a speaking spot: while Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer spoke at the DNC on Tuesday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was given no parallel role at the RNC. (And when he did appear briefly on-screen during the roll call, he was booed by Trump supporters in the audience.)

Some of the exiled Republicans have even made the migration over to the DNC: Tuesday’s speakers included Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former press secretary, and John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona. (“I feel more at home here than in today’s Republican Party,” Giles said.) The Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, will join the list tonight. (I also saw former Trump attorney Michael Cohen wandering around the United Center several times on Tuesday and have been interested by the ideological diversity at several side-events. Yesterday, I found myself at a breakfast that was attended both by former Republican strategist Rick Wilson and Democratic spiritualist Marianne Williamson.)

The states from which the Republican DNC speakers hail are telling: Arizona, where Trump acolyte Kari Lake has gone out of her way to antagonize moderate Republicans (to her detriment), and Georgia, where Trump continues to attack Duncan’s former running mate Brian Kemp.

“[Giles] understands what Donald Trump represents and how Donald Trump has significantly damaged the Republican Party in the state of Arizona and across the country,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told me in Chicago on Tuesday.

In essence, the Democrats have achieved unity by addition, binding together disparate factions and even segments formerly outside their party. Republicans, meanwhile, have subtracted their way to party unity, simply cleaving off the leaders who dissent instead of searching for ways to work together. The GOP, as one reporter put it to me when I tested out this thesis on him, is experiencing “unity by amputation.”

Both forms of unity, to be clear, come with their drawbacks. The Republican unity leads to a smaller tent, a party so driven by the base that it can struggle at times to reach outsiders, as was Trump’s downfall in 2020. The Democratic unity, meanwhile, is fragile — containing so many disparate factions that it’s liable to collapse at any time.

Partially, they have simply remained unified by sweeping disputes under the rug. I caught up with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) outside of the United Center the other day, and asked her how the Congressional Progressive Caucus — which she chairs — felt about the Democratic platform’s language on Israel/Palestine (which some left-wing delegates had criticized). “We don’t take any positions on that as a caucus,” she replied. “We have a lot of different views.”

Asked if she personally felt Harris had struck the right balance on the issue, Jayapal responded: “I think we’re working on—we’re working on trying to get there. But, obviously, she’s been—I think she’s been doing what she can.”

If Harris does manage to win in November, and especially if she takes control of Congress with her, it remains an open question whether the party’s unity can last. Majorities, as the Republicans have learned most recently, can be harder to keep in line than minorities. I’ve asked several Democrats here what the party’s top legislative priority should be if they control a 2025 trifecta, and the lack of consenus is clear in the range of answers I’ve received: child care, voting rights, etc.

A Trump loss in 2024 may also mean that Democrats lose their most effective unifying force: Trump.

For now, though, Democrats are simply marveling that the unity has happened rather than fretting about how long it can last.

“I’ve never seen energy like this,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) told me, pausing briefly to say hello to a nearby Pete Buttigieg. “I’ve seen tough fault lines: Hillary and Barack, Bernie and Hillary. It’s not like we’re all in agreement about everything, but we are in agreement about the big things.”

How did they manage to avoid another factional dispute?

“Well, it was a series of unusual circumstances,” he granted, “but the practical effect of it is that we didn’t go to war with ourselves, and so now we’re ready to charge up the mountain together.”

With a party so varied that it stretches from billionaire-bashers to billionaires, and from progressive Democrats to moderate former Republicans, that lack of war may end up as more of a temporary ceasefire than a peace treaty.

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More notes from the United Center

• Of course, the big event last night was the Obamas, who captivated the room like none of the speakers before them — proving once again why they are the party’s most popular figures. As has been noted, unlike Biden’s strategy of rhetorically puffing Trump up as a threat to democracy, both Obamas (like Harris and Walz) chose the approach of cutting him down to size (uh, literally).

• Both Obamas included plenty of homages to their 2008 campaign: “Hope is making a comeback,” Michelle Obama declared, referring to it as a “familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long.” Her husband, meanwhile, was interrupted by chants of “yes she can.”

• “We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos,” Barack Obama added. “We’ve seen that movie — and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse.”

• Something else that was floating in my head as the couple spoke, though: there were parts of their speeches that felt a little odd, considering it is not 2008 and, in fact, 2024, where they are no longer outsiders from Chicago and now wealthy retirees. Michelle Obama, for example, said of her mother: “She and my father did not aspire to be wealthy. In fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed.” The Obamas now have a net worth estimated at least $70 million, between bestselling memoirs, a Netflix production deal, paid speeches, and the six-figure presidential pension.

• “[Harris] understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” the former First Lady added, although her daughters certainly will.

• Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff also spoke on Tuesday, regaling delegates with tales of his first dates with Kamala Harris. Emhoff did exactly what he was supposed to do — humanize Harris — and his speech, I thought, was one of the more authentic of the convention. Amid the sea of speechifying by professional politicians, any respite of humanity is appreciated: that’s why Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) impressed on Monday with an emotional story about Harris, and its’s why Emhoff came off well, speaking not about grand political theory but simply about his relationship with his wife.