Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor with a net worth of $60 billion, now has a shot at being on the next debate stage in the Democratic presidential primary. With a donor base of one — himself — he did not reach the individual donor threshold that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) established last year in order to qualify. But last week, the DNC changed its rules, opening the door for Bloomberg to buy his way to a high enough polling threshold to participate.
It’s clear that DNC leadership is sometimes willing to engage in undemocratic maneuvering in the presidential primary process. But such efforts obscure something important about the nature of the Democratic Party: like the Republican Party, it is a bizarre hybrid of private political organization and public electoral system.
The United States has had a two-party system since the first half of the nineteenth century, and much ink has been spilled explaining why this is the case. Less ink, however, has been devoted to just how drastically the substance of US political parties has changed since then.
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