The Room Where it Happens: Party Activists and the 2016 Presidential Election

• In Event: Intraparty Politics: Groups, Networks, and Competition

Abstract

The outsized presence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as spoilers to establishment candidates throughout the 2016 primaries laid bare the tension between populism and privilege for both the Democratic and Republican parties in selecting a presidential nominee. These candidates, and their supporters, relished the opportunity to upend their affiliated party’s more pragmatist impulses and what they viewed as the privileged status of establishment candidates to advocate for competing, often populist, policy goals. Democratic delegates formally nominated the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, while Republican delegates formally nominated the political outsider, Donald Trump. These nominations were secured only after raucous, spirited debates among delegates at the start of each party’s conventions. In this way these groups and their preferred candidates behaved consistently with the policy demanders view of parties (Cohen, et al., 2008; Bawn, et al., 2012), which identifies parties as comprised of coalitions of groups with strong policy preferences that negotiate with one another for influence in the party decision-making and policy process.

This paper examines a specific set of groups within each party – convention delegates – using the 2016 Convention Delegate Study (CDS). We explore delegates’ beliefs, opinions, candidate preferences, and motivations, and also examine the role that groups play in delegate thinking and behavior. The CDS has been conducted in nearly every presidential election cycle since 1972. Thus, we both extend the time series of important questions for delegates and place their responses in the broader context of how parties have balanced competing group demands and populist messages across the decades. In this examination of an understudied group of political elites we provide a clear empirical measure of policy demanders within the parties, specifically how they prioritize issues and group affiliations, integrate factional goals into the party organization, and position parties in the decision-making processes of American politics more broadly.

Authors

• Rosalyn Cooperman, University of Mary Washington

• Gregory D. Shufeldt, Butler University

• Kimberly H. Conger, University of Cincinnati