United States | News & Politics

It's also the best opportunity candidates get to frame issues and demonstrate vision. Conventional wisdom is that a contested primary is bad for the general, but that hasn't been true for decades. Election after election, a contested primary wins the general.

"The Democrats" are a lot less cohesive than you're giving them credit for. Yes, there's a national committee and several important figures within the party, but there is no single "leader of the Democratic Party" who dictates policy down to their underlings. Plenty of times we've seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.

The traditional American political system is very decentralised. Parties are more like labels that politicians adopt rather than actual vehicles for political control. Anyone is free to join any party and nobody needs the party's permission to stand for election.

Meanwhile, if you take a look at how political parties work in other countries, there's usually a person holding the title of "party leader", that usually being the president, leader of the opposition, prime minister, or holder of some other important state office. The party leader is in control of the entire party and all of the party's elected officials are expected to follow the party's official ideology as dictated by the leader. If they refuse, then they will be kicked out of the party. The party leadership has complete control over who is allowed in the party and who it nominates to stand for election.

The Democratic Party has several important leaders. Biden, of course, is the president and thus the most influential. But he's not the dictator of the party. He still has to negotiate and work with the likes of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakim Jefferies in the House for his agenda. And, of course, Biden doesn't have the power to dictate policy to the various state chapters of the party, which have their own local leaders setting agendas independent of what Biden wants.

Contrast this with the Republican Party, which in recent years has become a lot more hierarchical, with Trump as the undisputed party leader. Trump's power over the party is all informal, but informal power is still power and the reality is that Trump, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, can almost unilaterally dictate who the party nominates and what the party's policy platforms will be on a national scale. That sort of centralisation just isn't present in the Democratic Party.