Introduction

The crisis in American democracy is inseparable from the failings of our political parties. Parties are essential to organizing citizens’ engagement in democracy, managing debate and compromise, nurturing candidates, and setting out competing national and local agendas. But our major parties have largely failed to fulfill these responsibilities, albeit in different ways. 

What would a healthier system of political parties look like—and how can we build it?

On October 10, 2025, New America’s Political Reform program brought together 42 political scientists and sociologists, political practitioners, and organizational leaders to consider these two questions. No such convening that we know of, with such a wide range of perspectives, has been held before.

American political parties are failing at their central task of facilitating people’s engagement in democracy because they are hollow as organizations, they interact with citizens primarily through predatory fundraising, they are unable to recruit and nurture talent or build durable coalitions, and they are disconnected from the communities they claim to represent. Yet for all their shortcomings, parties remain essential to democracy. Only parties can aggregate interests, structure political competition, facilitate internal and external compromise, recruit leaders, and translate electoral victories into governance. When parties are broken, democracy suffers.

The convening sought to develop a blueprint for a healthier system of political parties by finding points of agreement among people who see parties from different angles: political scientists who study party organization, practitioners who have worked within the parties and affiliated committees or built new parties, former congressional staffers who have watched party infrastructure erode, leaders in nonprofit and nonpartisan work who seek to improve democracy, and reformers pursuing structural changes to electoral rules. 

While the group was not tasked with issuing a formal report that reflected full consensus, there was broad agreement on several approaches to building a healthier party system, agreement on some questions that call for further research, and lingering debate on several other key questions.

The discussion also revealed how much we do not know about party organizations, what makes them functional or dysfunctional, and which interventions would help. In addition to identifying the changes that would help improve parties, this report will propose research, convenings, and pilot projects that could clarify interventions worth pursuing at scale.

While this research is made possible by philanthropic organizations and nonpartisan nonprofits, these institutions alone cannot fix political parties. The research, training and education, and civic infrastructure they provide are supporting activities, not substitutes for political action. What parties need—money, volunteers, candidates, favorable rules—lies outside philanthropic scope.

As the failings of American democracy have become ever more apparent over several decades, two approaches to structural renewal have emerged. One strategy sees party allegiances as obstacles to compromise and seeks to reduce the role of parties altogether. This tradition, deeply rooted in reformist critiques of political machines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and commonsense affirmations such as “I vote for the person, not the party,” seeks renewal in changes that would minimize the role of parties. The top-two primary, as practiced in California and Washington, for example—in which all candidates run on a single primary ballot and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation—exemplifies this anti-party approach. In systems like this, parties have no meaningful role in selecting the nominees that carry their name.

This anti-partisan reform strategy treats voters as atomized units with a set of policy preferences that may align with individual candidates and devalues the organizing and human relationships that help people engage with elections and other democratic opportunities. This misunderstands the nature of identity and allegiance. The alternative approach to democratic renewal starts from the premises that democratic decision-making is a form of collective action and that organized parties make collective action possible. While participants expressed varied ideas about how to restore the health of parties, all agreed that reform should embrace parties and improve them rather than bypassing them altogether.