| Julia Azari has a good item over at Mischiefs of Faction on electability and the Democratic presidential nomination process. There's a lot of good stuff here; I think she's probably correct that there's something about legitimacy, ideas about democracy, and parties that I for one don't really treat seriously enough. That said, I have a couple of things to dispute. One is that I think she underestimates the capacity of the Democratic Party to make and carry out choices: Some of the formal and informal processes we have in place – the "invisible" primaries of endorsements and fundraising, the intense retail politicking in Iowa and New Hampshire – are useful for determining which candidates belong in the top-tier, but not particularly great at distinguishing among top-tier, presidential caliber politicians. Perhaps. But in 1988 and 2004, the early going looked fairly similar for Democrats, and they seemed to sort it out reasonably well both times (yes, both Michael Dukakis and John Kerry lost in November and therefore wound up with reputations for being terrible candidates, but the fundamentals pointed to Republican victories in both of those elections, and Dukakis and Kerry both did OK compared to reasonable expectations). Risky candidates for the party — Gary Hart in 1988, Howard Dean in 2004 — were successfully rejected. To put it another way: Are Iowa and New Hampshire typical of the overall electorate? Of course not. But Democratic party actors know that, and they take it into account when interpreting the results. And after all, the interpretation of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, centered around the idea that Barack Obama showed he could appeal to white voters, turned out to be correct — or at least correct enough. So we'll see how the rest of the cycle plays out. The other part of this, and it's becoming my main theme of this cycle, is that we're too easily tempted to look at what parties do from the point of view of the candidates, when we really should be thinking about it from the party's point of view. If the process isn't that great at "distinguishing among top-tier, presidential caliber politicians," then that's not necessarily a flaw in the system, because from the party's point of view, it's a lot less important that the correct candidate be selected than that whoever is selected will be closely tied to the party. In other words, the process is twofold: Those who either refuse to accept the party coalition as it exists need to be rejected, and the rest of the candidates need to be bound as tightly as possible to the party. After that, it may just not be very important whether (say) Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton functions as a loyal Democrat if elected. And while Republicans in 2016 utterly failed at the first part of this — the winnowing — they turned out to be surprisingly successful at the binding portion of it. Donald Trump really is different from generic Republicans on some policy questions, and his lack of core competency is a big problem for the party, but they could do worse than having a president who, on most policy questions, parrots whatever Republican-aligned media says. We're a long way from Iowa, let alone the convention. And all of this is confounded by the fact that at the same time the party is busy binding its candidates, it is also busy hashing out internal disagreements and resetting the winning party coalition. The national party has a lot going on. It needs to collectively make progress on determining policy preferences on, say, both health care and climate, while at the same time determine whether health care or climate will have a higher priority, and also — again, at the same time — make sure whoever wins the nomination will abide by the collective decisions of the party. And the same processes — debates, policy and group forums, candidate policy positions, voting in the primaries and caucuses — are used for both. At least, that's what I think is going on. Azari, who is very sharp, sees it otherwise. So be sure to read her item as well. 1. Kim Yi Dionne at the Monkey Cage on the gender gap within political science. 2. Chris Baylor at A House Divided on political scientists working for Congress. 3. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen on China. | 
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