US policy in a dilemma

American political parties are in disarray. Instead of being the engines that organize and drive our politics, they have been replaced by bipartisan influencers on social media, nonprofit political groups, and super PACs, the billionaires who fund them and the consultancies that employ them. A few generations ago, political parties organized political life. In many societies, there was an organic connection between parties and their members. Parties provided structure, organization, access, and benefits to those who belonged to them and participated in their activities.

This is no longer the case for most Americans. Today, parties are merely "brands" that voters are required to identify with, and mere fundraising tools for their operations and for consulting firms that now provide so-called "services" such as letter review, voter databases, advertising, and communications. In other words, the relationship between most voters and political parties is largely limited to a loose association with a brand, and the receipt of mail, text messages, social media posts, or robocalls soliciting money or votes.

While these efforts do raise some money, these sums pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions provided by billionaires who fill the coffers of increasingly influential liberal or conservative "non-affiliated" political parties and interest groups, as well as political action committees.

One such liberal independent committee was found to have raised and spent nearly as much money as the Harris campaign spent in the 2024 presidential election (about $1 billion) on campaign messages that sometimes conflicted with the Harris campaign it was supposed to support. Republican independent groups did the same, with one group spending a quarter of a billion dollars targeting Arab and Jewish voters with disinformation campaigns and messages aimed at discouraging them from voting.

Ultimately, the billions spent by campaigns and independent groups overwhelmed voters with contradictory messages that caused confusion and alienation. Even when parties funded consultancies to hire people to engage directly with voters, through door-to-door teams (representatives visiting homes) or telephone calls, these efforts were largely cosmetic and unconvincing because these employees had no organic connection to the voters they were communicating with. This is in stark contrast to decades ago, when the representatives and callers were elected local party leaders who reached out to their neighbors with whom they had personal relationships.

This disconnect in voter communication, the weakness of party infrastructure, and the flood of television, social media, and other forms of digital messaging are some of the reasons why party affiliation has fallen to an all-time low, with 43% of Americans identifying as independents, while Republicans and Democrats are tied at 27% each. Furthermore, parties have lost their role in managing their electoral processes to billionaires and interest groups.

Consider the role they played in defeating Democratic congressmen in the recent elections, or how billionaire donors overrode the will of Democratic voters in the upcoming New York City mayoral race. During the primaries, these groups spent $30 million on propaganda to discredit and defeat progressive candidate Zahran Mamdani.

Now, despite Mamdani's decisive victory as the Democratic Party's nominee for mayor of New York, these billionaires are pooling their money to support an independent candidate in the November election. So far, Democratic officials have not criticized this move. The party has a rule stipulating that consultants who work against voters' Democratic candidates are ineligible for party-funded contracts. However, this penalty has not been applied to those groups that accepted contracts to defeat pro-Palestine Democratic lawmakers, a clear indication of the "official" party's vulnerability to the spending power of billionaires. After losing 1,200 seats in the federal and state legislatures during the Obama administration and suffering defeats in two of the last three presidential elections, I felt a sense of optimism when I read two headlines in the New York Times last week, one of which read: "Democrats Consider Shifting Their 2026 Election Strategy: We Need a Rethink."

It appears that reviews are underway to understand the reasons for the Democrats' defeat. However, after reading the article, it turns out that some of the groups conducting these reviews are the same consulting firms funded by independent spending that are at the root of the problem. Their solutions: more message testing, more use of social media and digital messaging, etc. In other words, "Pay us more and we'll do more research into the causes of the defeat."

No lessons learned. What needs to happen—and remains off the agenda—is for the parties to reform themselves, reconnect with voters, and earn their trust by rebuilding their infrastructure at the state and local levels. There is already a push in this direction within the Democratic Party by some of its newly elected leaders. Thanks to reformers within the party, funding for state parties has increased significantly, while the amounts allocated to outside consulting firms have decreased.

But as long as billionaire-funded groups remain the dominant players in the political process, Democratic reformers will continue to face an uphill battle to regain control of elections and party affairs. Meanwhile, the Republican situation appears hopeless. Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have exploited the party's organizational weakness, forcing it to yield, transforming it into a Trump-owned company. Republicans who opposed Trump's takeover were humiliated and silenced, or defected to form political action committees that focused their resources on anti-Trump advertising campaigns. While some Democrats praised these campaigns, they have had no impact on rebuilding the Republican Party.

The bottom line is that American politics is no longer a struggle between two organized, competing political parties. Rather, it is a competition between entities funded by billionaires waging virtual campaigns in an attempt to attract voters to support their "brands." Until serious efforts are made to regulate the destructive role of big money in politics, this situation, along with voter discontent and alienation, will continue.

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