These fans don’t trust the process

Last night was another good primary night for the left wing of the Democratic party, with three House of Representatives candidates in New York City who had been endorsed by recently-elected mayor Zohran Mamdani all winning their races. In NY-7, State Assembly member Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso; in NY-10, community organizer Darializa Avila Chavlier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat; and in NY-13, former New York City comptroller and recent mayoral candidate Brad Lander defeated Rep. Dan Goldman. These are all heavily Democratic districts, where both the challengers and incumbents would be likely to (or actually) have voting records well to the left of the median Democrat in Congress. While these insurgent candidates did run to their opponents’ left on some key issues – most prominently, Israel – these races are in many ways a referendum on the Democratic Party itself.

Chevalier, in particular, became something of a lightning rod of national attention during the campaign for a variety of controversial past statements, including (but far from limited to) having called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and having written “fuck Kamala Harris” in response to a speech the former Vice President gave discouraging migration to the US. It is not unusual for a left-wing candidate to win a primary in a left-wing district. It is at least a little unusual for a candidate of any ideological stripe to win a party’s primary while expressing open hostility toward its two most recent standard-bearers.

I assume this was the background of former DNC Chairman Jamie Harrison’s subtweet from last night suggesting that people who hate the Democratic Party should not run in its primaries. This prompted some discussion of what “the Democratic Party” is in the first place. For Jamie Harrison, the party is its organization – to candidates who hate the Democratic Party, he says, “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) responded later in the evening by arguing that the Democratic Party is its voters, who are clearly sending a message to party leaders to “be bolder” via rejecting incumbents and other establishment-favored candidates in favor of more strident, outsider challengers.

Last night was also the first round of the NBA draft, which may have prompted elections analyst Sean Trende to intervene with a sports metaphor:

The parties are the permanent party officials and the candidates, who are management and players, respectively. Voters are more like fans. https://t.co/LlY6hHKG4P

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) June 24, 2026

This is a useful synthesis of the “party in organization” and “party in the electorate” perspectives on what people mean when they say “the Democrats” or “the Republicans.” But it also highlights the peculiarities of the US electoral system, and particularly the relative lack of control party organizations have over their ballot line.

Let’s run with this metaphor for a moment and think of parties like NBA teams. The party organization is everyone who is formally affiliated with the team. This includes the front office, which employs a general manager, an analytics team, scouts, public relations professionals, and so on. And it includes the players on the court (i.e. the candidates). The team needs fans (i.e. voters) in order to succeed. These fans will inevitably vary in how invested they are in the team. Some are diehards who follow its every move, others are more casual and only tune in for the playoffs. Either way, the vast majority of fans support and identify with the team without being formally affiliated with the organization.

But this is where the metaphor gets weird: imagine a system where players were selected in the NBA draft not by the front office – as a product of deliberation between the general manager, scouts, analytics team, coach, and other formal team members after a sustained period of meeting with/working out players in-person – but by fans, who voted primarily based on what they have heard about the players from following the news. New York has closed primaries, so for the purposes of the metaphor this fan vote is at least limited to season ticket holders, but in other states the fan vote is open to anyone who might care about who the team drafts.

In this system, the team can signal to the fans who it thinks would be a good player – who seems committed to helping the team accomplish its goals, who fits with the current roster construction, and so on – but at the end of the day it’s up to the fans whether to vote based on those cues. This is essentially the model described in The Party Decides, where parties lack formal control over their ballot line but, under standard conditions, party elites are still able to lead voters toward candidates that balance the party’s ideological and electoral goals.

When teams that have a healthy relationship with their fans want to adopt a particular strategy, they can generally expect to have the necessary buy-in. When the Philadelphia 76ers aggressively tanked for multiple years while building around their star center, Joel Embiid, they famously asked their fans to “trust the process,” and their fans obliged. 76ers fans were happy to lose for a few years in exchange for securing top draft picks including Markelle Fultz and Ben Simmons, who would in theory lead to longer term success.

Neither of those picks panned out, the Embiid-centric 76ers have never made a deep playoff run, and both of the general managers affiliated with “the process” have since been fired.

When the relationship between the team and their fans becomes strained, the fans are less likely to go along with the team’s plans. And in US politics if the fans decide that they don’t trust the team’s advice, there’s little the team can do to stop them from drafting their own players. Whether the fans are actually better at talent evaluation and roster construction is an open question.