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.

On a surprising number of points, there was broad consensus among participants about changes that would lead to stronger and more effective parties. This consensus establishes the core of a blueprint for healthier parties, though there remain some questions for further debate and research.

Participants from across the political spectrum described state and local party institutions as organizationally hollow.

• County and state parties are “run down,” one campaign activist said, operating out of facilities that are “not modern offices,” with most money flowing to digital ads rather than organizing infrastructure. A former Hill staffer described watching local committees become “a waste of time” and ”performative anger echo chambers.”
• “The tent goes up and down,” one participant noted. Party infrastructure materializes during election cycles and vanishes between them, while nonprofit organizations, including issue advocacy groups, maintain year-round operations and ongoing connections to members.
• Other participants noted “immense variation in state parties” and the need to examine why some remain functional while others have collapsed.

The dysfunction takes different forms: In Democratic-leaning areas, local parties are often simply inactive; in Republican areas, several participants noted that local committees have been captured by ideologically extreme activists. In other communities, new activists—particularly women energized by the 2017 Women’s March—revitalized local parties by running for precinct positions. But this revitalization has not occurred where entrenched machines persist.

Participants agreed that a high priority in building a healthier party system would be to strengthen the organizational capacity of existing and emerging political parties.

A key role for parties, historically and in theory, has been to develop paths for leaders both within the party and as candidates for office. The organizational crisis is also a human capital crisis. There is no clear pathway from local activism to state leadership to national influence, either within the party organization or as a candidate.

• One scholar framed it as a selection problem: Because “instrumental benefits [of participating in party work] are low and barriers are high, you get people who get a weird expressive benefit from participation.”
• An experienced party leader described talented members of Congress who retire early, frustrated by their inability to demonstrate value beyond television appearances: “Good people have been elected but retire early. We have to create opportunities for members to do good.”
• Another Hill veteran observed that members need ways “to regain their status as local party leaders through productive means,” but that rule changes have limited those opportunities.
• A scholar proposed political fellowships because “most people can’t afford to quit their jobs and run for office,” meaning working-class candidates are structurally excluded.
• Another attendee noted that parties no longer play a central role in recruiting political talent: “Candidate recruitment is driven by consultants going out and finding candidates—it’s not a strategic decision that gets made in a room.”

The result is a vicious cycle in which weak organizations cannot attract capable people, and without capable people, organizations cannot rebuild.

An essential merit of political parties, in theory, is that they have an interest in their own long-term health and the survival of the policies they advocate for beyond the terms of office of individual elected officials. Even when parties invest resources, those investments orient almost entirely toward the next election cycle.

• “Everything is in service of winning the next election,” one longtime activist noted, through negative polarization and base mobilization.
• “Party blobs are too short-term,” one participant noted: The loose networks of consultants, vendors, and activists operate on quarterly timeframes at best.
• A leader of an emerging party reported bluntly that “donors aren’t focused on mid- and long-term solutions right now.”

Rebuilding party capacity requires sustained investment over years, but every incentive rewards immediate electoral returns. There is “too much short-termism from donor communities,” one scholar noted, while another observed that this is a global pattern and that “mainstream parties are struggling globally” partly because they “have neglected party organization.” Here, too, state party organizations that lurch from election to election could learn from those that have a more sustained presence and longer-term perspective.

Political scientist Adam Bonica’s research indicates that in 2026, campaigns will spend more on fundraising infrastructure than on communicating with voters.

This projection captures the gathering’s strongest shared concern. Bonica presented data showing that more than 50 percent of money raised by parties now goes to consultants and fundraising operations rather than organizing or messaging. The tactics themselves are “borrowed from elder fraud schemes” and are designed to identify “marks” who can be repeatedly exploited. Approximately 90 percent of repeat small-dollar donors are over 70 years old.

• “It is a grift,” one former Democratic activist said.
• Others noted the long historical trajectory: Direct mail “drove the rise of the new right in the 1970s” and “was the central issue in the 2005 college Republican national chairman race.”
• A former director of a party committee connected fundraising to positioning: “You had to run to the right or left to fundraise for small dollars.”

The deeper problem is that parties are building relationships with supporters on a foundation of manipulation. “The party is a brand,” Bonica noted, “and you don’t build trust by scamming.” Hollow organizations have nothing to offer except financial transactions, and predatory fundraising further alienates the people parties need to rebuild.

At their best, parties can connect citizens to governance, whether by advancing a policy agenda, helping people navigate governing choices, or even helping constituents access services. But convening participants agreed that a gulf has emerged between party activity and governing capacity: “Are parties decoupled from governance?” one scholar asked.

• A political scientist presented evidence that state-level party competition correlates with better outcomes, such as fewer opioid overdoses and fewer police killings. “Competition stimulates responsiveness in governance.”
• Another political scientist observed parties’ declining capacity to constrain presidential power and manage cultural conflicts—a governance function they historically performed.
• A former staff director for congressional committees described basic infrastructure gaps: “Most state legislatures have no system for handling constituent relations.”

Here, too, some state and national legislators can learn from others. “There are a lot of well-run states that don’t get credit,” one participant noted, citing Utah, Georgia, Arizona, and Virginia as examples of states that continue to produce competent administrators through political channels. But one philanthropic advisor noted that foundations had invested between $50 million and $60 million in congressional capacity-building over a decade with mixed results: “Increased funds end up going to comms.” Whether party dysfunction causes governance failure or governance failure causes party dysfunction remains contested.

“Eighty to ninety percent of congressional races aren’t competitive,” one participant reminded the group, asking, “What does it do to a party to not have to compete?”

• “The entire responsible party system,” as developed in the middle of the twentieth century, “depended on party competition—competition is essential,” a scholar noted.
• Another pushed the implication further: “You can structure the rules committee however you want, but what does that matter to people in uncompetitive districts?”

The leader of an emerging party suggested a strategic response by focusing on “unchallenged downballot races.” Whether noncompetition is a cause of party dysfunction or is a symptom of deeper forces—like geographic sorting, nationalization, and gerrymandering—remained contested. So too did potential solutions—redistricting reform, more parties, proportional representation, or fusion voting.

Multiple participants acknowledged that the quickly evolving structure of organized and social media affects how citizens understand parties and, in some cases, displaces party organizations. 

• Media is “on the outside but fits into everything,” one scholar noted. “The way people interact with politics was direct mail, then social media, and their image of the other party becomes even more distorted.”
• Information, fundraising, and polarization are intertwined: Supporters’ understanding of the opposing party becomes caricatured when the primary message is “Can you believe the crazy thing Trump/Dems did?” 

The question of whether local party presence can overcome nationalized media distortion or whether intensive local organizing has become structurally irrelevant divided participants without resolution.

Philanthropy, whether through foundations, large or small donors, advocacy organizations, or other nonprofits, could help strengthen parties, but in their current form they do not. 

• One longtime leader of such groups observed that “advocacy groups have become unbelievably accountable to philanthropy, which itself is in an extremely rigid ideological place.”
• Nonprofit groups are “presented to donors as the place connected to the voice of the people, but they’re still suffering from the same pathologies and disconnection as the parties,” according to another participant.
• Another scholar noted that many funders “empower local advocacy and organizing groups that challenge existing parties,” sometimes undermining rather than strengthening party capacity.

One participant proposed democracy vouchers, such as those offered for contributions to candidates in Seattle, specifically to “break the reliance ‘c3’ organization-building groups have on philanthropy.” Donors at all levels should be thoughtful about how their support of organizations that cannot be political parties, for legal reasons, affects the health of parties.

New America research published with Protect Democracy has shown that the structure of our winner-take-all elections shapes the political gerontocracy and limits opportunities for younger voices. Participants agreed that parties reinforce this gerontocracy and seem irrelevant to younger people.

• A public opinion researcher reported that young people “can’t imagine parties doing anything other than asking for money.” Their civic engagement occurs through channels—Twitch, Reddit, TikTok —that parties don’t occupy.
• Economic despair shapes political alienation. A professor reported that her students “say they’ve given up on Congress because they say they’re never going to own a house.”
• An organizational leader cautioned against condescension: “Strike ‘low-info voter’ as a term. They are swimming in information—and they’re smart.”

Whether the generational disconnect is a result of parties’ failure to reach young people (which is fixable through better outreach) or is a result of structural economic conditions that parties cannot address through organizational reform alone remains an open question.

While participants reached broad agreement on party dysfunction, they disagreed—sometimes fundamentally—about both the nature of political parties and the possibilities for reform. These disagreements are not merely tactical; they reflect unresolved questions that must be addressed before practical debates can be resolved.

Parties are expected to perform four distinct functions, one participant noted: electing people, recruiting people, holding members accountable, and governing. But these functions require contradictory skill sets and organizational structures: “The people who are good at electing people are historically bad at recruiting and maintaining people.” An organization optimized for winning the next election looks nothing like one optimized for long-term leadership development or deliberative policymaking.

The convening never resolved which function should be primary. Different participants implicitly operated from incompatible premises:

• If parties are primarily electoral machines, then centralized control over candidate selection makes sense, professional management matters most, and local committees should be evaluated on voter contact metrics.
• If parties are primarily membership organizations, then internal democracy and grassroots participation become paramount, and electoral effectiveness follows from authentic organizing.
• If parties are primarily governing institutions, then policy expertise, congressional capacity, and competent administration matter most.
• If parties are primarily civic organizations that build social capital, then the megachurch model becomes relevant: Parties should offer services and create spaces for nonpolitical connection.

Political parties need to function as coalitions that “set aside some of their differences.” This idea cuts two ways, however: Leadership must prevent interest groups from imposing purity tests while also picking candidates and ideas that motivate voters. One participant used the metaphor of “moons orbiting planet Democrat,” suggesting parties are solar systems where different elements need alignment at critical moments. A leader of an emerging party offered another analogy: “You don’t just start a record label—you need artists.” Parties need candidates at the center: “Coalitions form around people, not platforms.”

But when should elements align? Who decides? As one participant argued, “An element of a healthy party is when the party cares about doing all three things together”—electing, recruiting, and governing.

The next question concerns whether parties are simply making bad choices or whether they are behaving rationally given perverse constraints:

• If parties are making bad choices, then reform can happen through better leadership, changed incentives, improved rules, and strategic investments. They can fire predatory fundraising consultants, impose bylaws to strengthen local committees, and fund leadership development. The problems are internal and therefore fixable.
• If parties are acting with bounded rationality, then they are optimally adapted to a hostile environment—campaign finance laws, geographic polarization, media fragmentation, and donors’ short-term perspectives. Telling party leaders to “do better” is useless in this case; the environment must change first.

“Parties bear the brunt of a much more broken political system,” one participant said, implying that parties are victims, not villains. But the consensus description of fundraising as “borderline grifting” that “parties are letting happen” implies agency and choice. 

Several voices noted that mainstream parties in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany are also struggling, even though they aren’t burdened by the pathologies of American campaign finance incentives. Perhaps the U.S.-specific diagnosis is wrong, then, and something more global is happening—technological, economic, or cultural—that no party-level reform can address.

One respondent to our pre-convening survey acknowledged this bleakly: “I’m not persuaded that there is much any one person could do to foster a healthier party system (whatever that means)—certainly not the head of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] or RNC [Republican National Committee].” Another wrote: “I’m also over trying to find institutional fixes to social problems.”

These questions about the core purpose of parties and whether they can change themselves surfaced in concrete form across the practical debates that follow. Participants who emphasized different party functions reached different conclusions about structure: Those who believed in party agency supported internal reforms, while those who saw structural constraints emphasized environmental changes.

The question of who should control candidate selection exposed one of the convening’s deepest fault lines, revealing a tension between academic analysis and practitioner experience.

The Case for Centralized Control

Parties with more open and democratic internal processes tend to empower more extremist members and produce less representative candidates. When parties open nomination processes to broader participation, those who show up are not representative of the general electorate: They are either “cheerleader partisans” who already love the party or activists seeking to change it in ideologically extreme directions.

One scholar pointed to the 2016 Republican presidential primary: A Wall Street Journal poll found that although a majority of Republican voters could not see themselves voting for Donald Trump, the rules allowed him to win with a plurality. Internal ranked-choice voting or a brokered convention might have produced a different outcome. “The more internally democratic the party is, the more it gets captured by extremists,” the scholar noted.

Practitioners Defend Internal Democracy

A political operative who has worked Democratic conventions since 2008 pushed back from experience: “The Dem presidential nominating process is the greatest episode in small-d democracy in the world. Show me another party that has ceded its most important decision to the people.” The rules are transparent and genuinely participatory. “The process is there to be understood by anyone willing to engage.” 

The problem in 2024 was not the nomination process; it was that no primary occurred. One participant who worked in Democratic party politics has lobbied to change the delegate allocation formula and calendar to “prioritize general election swing states”—but within the existing democratic framework, not by returning to elite control.

A political scientist proposed a middle path: bottom-up flows of authority where party leaders are chosen by members but remain empowered to make strategic decisions. This is “probably the goal that the early reformers had in mind”—not that every member votes on everything, but that leadership is accountable to a membership base with real power.

Another noted that attention to nomination rules has atrophied: “The current Dem rules are a compromise from decades ago, and nothing has changed.” Getting good people onto rules and bylaws committees “could be a place for serious change.” But the calendar and delegate allocation—concrete, actionable reforms—received less attention than the abstract centralization-versus-democracy debate.

Before debating how parties should engage citizens, a prior question divided participants: whether most people want the kind of engagement reformers imagine.

The Participation Model

Research on megachurches and local organizing suggests people will commit substantial time and energy when they feel they are accomplishing something tangible and building rewarding relationships. But the parties offer little room for participation, other than through fundraising. 

“Most people experience politics as spectacle,” one participant noted, “and producers have the incentive to produce spectacle.” Some argued that if parties give people opportunities to solve problems, build relationships, and develop skills, they will take them. Megachurches succeed because they “invite people to take actions in which they solve problems themselves.” People can be transformed through participation. “Most people don’t understand what voice is,” until they have a truly participatory experience. This is particularly true for younger people, a pollster argued.

The Representation Model

A longtime organizational leader offered an alternative view: “Serving people and representing their interests is not the same as assuming people want to participate. A lot of people want to just live their damn lives, and trust that the system works.”

Reformers project their own enthusiasm onto voters who want something different: competent representation that delivers results. Voters may choose candidates who seem effective over candidates who only invite participation.

Why It Matters

If the participation model is right, parties should invest in participation infrastructure—lowering barriers, offering meaningful engagement, and building relationships. Interventions like community spaces, civic services, and megachurch-style programming make sense.

If the other view is right, parties should focus on governing competence and delivering material benefits, treating most voters as constituents rather than potential activists. The emphasis shifts to candidate quality, policy expertise, and demonstrated effectiveness.

This is not purely an either/or proposition. One participant’s finding that young people want “constituent services” but do not see elections as powerful suggests a possible synthesis: parties that deliver (representation model) while inviting those who want deeper engagement (participation model). But the resource allocation and strategic emphasis differ dramatically depending on which model is prioritized.

A recurring proposal in the convening was that parties should embed in civic life through services and community presence, even in activities that are not specifically election-related. That idea collided with principled objections about the proper boundaries of partisan activity.

The Case for Civic Integration

As noted above, megachurches and other community groups have succeeded by inviting people to solve problems, offering child care and food to lower barriers to participation, and building dense social networks. Several convening participants proposed specific constituent services parties could provide:

• “311 or ombudsman services” to help navigate complex government systems
• Help with accessing new services that use intimidating digital portals, and with filing and paying taxes

The vision behind these actions is that parties can become embedded in communities by doing things that make lives tangibly better and creating reciprocal relationships, much as parties did for newly arrived immigrant groups in the twentieth century.

The Case for Separation

A party operative objected on principle: “Please keep politics out of that. My most important job was softball and baseball coach.” He pointed out that in countries where parties sponsor youth sports and social activities, “it’s not good. They sponsor graduations, and there’s a different one for each party.” Constituent services already exist—provided by elected officials’ offices, not parties. “We get people passports” through congressional casework. This is good precisely because it is nonpartisan; people do not have to affiliate with a party to get help. “Government should be less partisan, not more.”

The deeper concern is that if parties become service providers, they risk creating clientelistic dependency rather than democratic citizenship. In such a scenario, people end up supporting the party not because they share its values but because they need help navigating bureaucracy. This is the logic of machine politics—effective at mobilization, but also corrupt and undemocratic.

The proliferation of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations has created a parallel infrastructure that sometimes complements and sometimes competes with parties. Participants were divided on whether this represents a healthy diversification of the party ecosystem or parasitic fragmentation.

Outside Groups as Competitors

Multiple participants argued that advocacy groups have become problematic competitors, drawing off resources and talent while lacking electoral accountability.

“Local sectoral issue groups challenge existing parties,” one political scientist noted. They impose purity tests, push candidates toward positions that hurt them in general elections, and fragment party messaging. They are accountable to donors and issue constituencies, not to coalitions of voters or broader electoral needs. “The problem with the influence of c3/c4 groups is they don’t have accountability to the party. They’re presented to donors as the place connected to the voice of the people, but they’re still suffering from the same pathologies and disconnection as the parties.” 

A leader of such organizations identified the root of the issue in philanthropy itself, suggesting that groups funded to push specific agendas have incentives for ideological rigidity rather than coalition-building.

Outside Groups as Collaborators

In defense of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups, one activist stated that “TPUSA [Turning Point USA] and Indivisible innovated and brought people in.” They went on to note that “the groups care about things other than parties. It’s lazy to blame them and see them as hindrances when the parties should be evolving.”

A new party organizer noted that “a healthy ecosystem has diverse institutions with different functions. Not everything should be party-controlled.”

Within this broader disagreement, a specific question emerged: Should parties reclaim the work of policy development from outside groups?

Those in favor argued that party-developed policy creates electoral accountability and reduces dependence on groups with their own agendas. When the American Civil Liberties Union sends out candidate questionnaires, they are setting party policy without facing voters.

But others implied that the division of labor is appropriate. Parties lack policy expertise; groups have it. Trying to rebuild policy capacity within parties may be inefficient when specialized organizations already exist.

Why It Matters

If the view of groups as competitors to parties is right, donors should invest in rebuilding party policy capacity and reducing group influence over nominations and platforms. Interventions should strengthen parties relative to outside groups.

If the collaboration view is right, foundations should help parties and groups coordinate better rather than compete. Interventions should build ecosystem coherence—perhaps through convenings, shared infrastructure, or formal partnership models.

The Working Families Party (WFP) represents one synthesis: a party built through membership-based organizations, in which groups are integrated partners rather than external competitors. Whether such a model might work for parties in the ideological center remains an open question.

Tabatha Abu El-Haj and Didi Kuo, one of this paper’s authors, have argued that one way to revive nineteenth-century structures (local presence, membership organization, material benefits) without the corruption, racism, and sexism is through “associational party-building.” The WFP in New York demonstrates that this remains possible. Skeptics, however, questioned whether intensive local organizing can compete with nationalized media and politics.

The WFP’s formative years offer one useful model:

• Building through existing organizations: Rather than recruiting isolated individuals, the WFP partnered with unions, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), and community groups. This provided both initial membership and ongoing infrastructure.
• Creating social capital: Strong and weak ties connected leaders, members, and potential voters through overlapping networks.
• Securing material benefits: The WFP understood that “transactional politics” matters. Advocacy in favor of increasing the minimum wage, reforming the Rockefeller Drug Laws, and securing other tangible deliverables gave people reasons to stay involved.
• Maintaining internal democracy: Institutional and individual members participated in endorsement processes. Leaders “always had a pulse on what their members wanted” because decision-making was genuinely participatory. Although “all party policy formation and direction was top down,” leaders led while remaining responsive.

The WFP was powered by the electoral option of fusion voting—“a ballot line” that allowed it to endorse candidates who appeared on both Democratic and Working Families lines, giving members distinct identity and leverage.

Multiple participants suggested fusion voting might be a necessary enabling condition for associational party-building. Without a ballot line, factions lack the independence to hold major parties accountable. However, an emerging party leader noted that the New York State Assembly “raised the threshold for signature collection to kick [his party] off the ballot”—a reminder that major parties can actively suppress fusion voting if and when it threatens them.

The Skeptical View

Others questioned whether local, relationship-intensive organizing can compete with nationalized media and politics. “The influential people in [the] local community used to be involved in [the] local party, but that’s not true anymore,” one organizer said. Community leaders no longer see local committees as worth their time.

Several participants worried that the WFP example is not generalizable. It succeeded in New York City with (since weakened) fusion voting, in a dense urban environment with strong unions and community organizations, and at a particular political moment. Replicating it in suburban or rural areas, in right-to-work states without labor infrastructure, and in an era of weakened civil society would be more difficult. 

Notably, this debate proceeded with almost no systematic evidence. As one survey respondent observed, “There is almost no academic knowledge about the formation and operation of state party and faction ecosystems.”

Why It Matters

If the associational model works, it calls for experiments in associational party-building and fusion voting campaigns. The WFP model—or adaptations of it—becomes a template.

If skeptics are right, such investments will fail outside exceptional contexts. Resources should flow to interventions that work within nationalized politics rather than against it.

The fusion voting question is particularly consequential: If a ballot line is necessary for faction accountability, then structural reform (discussed in the following section) becomes a prerequisite for organizational reform, not an alternative to it.

As discussed earlier in this report, the gathering identified lack of competition as a core problem, but participants divided sharply on sequencing: Can structural reforms create competition, or do reforms require prior political success that noncompetition makes impossible?

This debate frames everything that follows. If structural reform is achievable, certain interventions make sense. If it requires organizational capacity that does not yet exist, different interventions take priority. If both are needed simultaneously, the resource and coordination demands multiply.

The Reform-First View

Lack of competition affects everything else. “Functionally, most places only have one party,” one participant noted. 

This is an argument for structural reform. Without competition, organizational investment is irrational—there is no electoral payoff for building capacity, recruiting talent, or engaging citizens. The rules must change first to create stakes worth organizing for.

Multiple survey respondents proposed specific structural reforms:

• Fusion voting to enable faction-building with electoral leverage
• Redistricting reform with independent commissions to create more competitive districts
• Proportional representation to ensure that minorities within districts can elect representatives
• Ranked-choice voting to produce more consensus candidates
• Open primaries to reduce partisan capture of nominations

The reform-first logic assumes that current rules entrench noncompetition. Incumbents in safe seats have no incentive to build party capacity, respond to constituents, or tolerate internal democracy. Changes to rules would change party behavior.

The Organizing-First View

Others emphasized a practical problem: Structural reforms require legislative victories, but legislators elected under current rules have little reason to change them.

To pass redistricting reform, legislative majorities are required. To win legislative majorities in gerrymandered districts, you need redistricting reform. To relegalize fusion voting, you need to win lawsuits overturning 100-year-old bans. Why would legislators do this?

Populist anti-system framing might provide a path. Reform campaigns that channel voter frustration at “the system” might succeed where good-government arguments fail. But it requires organizational capacity to run such campaigns.

Whether based on populist or good-government language, this approach calls for building faction strength and organizational capacity with available tools. Reform campaigns should aim to create political conditions that make reform possible, starting with fellowships, leadership development, local party grants, and civic infrastructure. A synthesis of the arguments recognizes that structural reform takes years or decades, while capacity-building can begin now.

The debates previously outlined cannot be resolved through argument alone. Throughout the gathering and in the pre-convening survey, participants identified specific gaps in research where competing theories could be adjudicated with the right data.

We assume that state parties have hollowed out, but we lack systematic knowledge of what they actually do. Some state parties were cited as functional (namely, Utah, Georgia, Arizona, and Virginia), but we don’t know what distinguishes them from dysfunctional ones or even how to measure the difference.

A scoping review would ask: What existing research describes state party activities and capacity? What data sources exist (Federal Election Commission filings, state disclosures, prior surveys)? What do practitioners know that has not been systematically documented? What variation exists that could be exploited for comparative analysis?

A similar, if not more acute, gap exists at the local level. While one participant, as noted earlier, said that local party committees become “performative anger echo chambers,” another described communities where new activists revitalized dormant parties after 2016. Both could be true in different places, but we do not know the distribution, the patterns, or the causes.

A scoping review would ask: What proportion of county parties are active or dormant? What do we know about who participates and why? What existing data or surveys could be assembled? What would a systematic mapping exercise require?

The centralization-versus-democracy debate generated strong claims but little U.S. evidence. Comparative work suggests internal democracy produces extremism; practitioners defend democratic processes as legitimate and functional. One survey respondent offered a detailed specification: State parties vary in how they select officers, structure local-state ties, and integrate elected officials, and these variations could be studied.

A scoping review would ask: What do we know about variation in state parties’ internal structures? Has anyone studied the relationship between internal organization and outcomes (candidate quality, electoral success, activist engagement)? What data would be needed to test competing claims?

These questions directly address whether parties should centralize authority or deepen member participation. How they are answered will have major implications for reform strategy.

If noncompetitive environments fail to develop political talent, that is a mechanism connecting lack of competition to governance failure—and an argument for prioritizing structural reform.

A scoping review would ask: What do we know about how competition affects who runs for office? Are there natural experiments involving redistricting or demographic shifts that could isolate the effects of competition? What data exist on candidate quality and career trajectories across competitive contexts?

A survey respondent posed the following questions: “Why don’t more people get involved in local party work? What are the barriers and how can they be overcome?” One political scientist offered a hypothesis: When instrumental benefits are low and barriers high, “you get weirdos.” But we do not know systematically what barriers to participation matter or how to lower them.

A scoping review would ask: What research exists on motivations for party activism? What do we know about barriers (time, culture, awareness, perceived efficacy)? Have any interventions been tested? What would a rigorous study of barriers and inducements require?

The gathering achieved strong consensus that predatory fundraising damages parties, but a survey respondent pointed out the need for a more precise understanding: “How does reliance on mega-donors versus broad grassroots fundraising affect public trust and perceptions of corruption, and how do those perceptions feed back into turnout, trust in institutions, and party strength?”

A scoping review would ask: What evidence exists on fundraising’s effects beyond immediate revenue? Have different fundraising models been compared? What data exist on donor experience and its downstream effects? Could experimental or quasi-experimental designs isolate fundraising’s impact on trust?

If predatory fundraising significantly damages party brand and suppresses engagement, “banning bad vendors” becomes a strategic imperative, not just an ethical preference.

We know that “many of our leaders come out of states,” but “we don’t know what the pipelines are,” one researcher noted. Ideas such as political fellowships and state party leadership development programs were suggested. But we lack systematic knowledge of what pathways actually produce effective leaders or which interventions support talent development.

A scoping review would ask: What do we know about career trajectories of state and local political leaders? What role do formal programs versus informal networks play? What research exists on leadership development in political contexts compared to the corporate or nonprofit realms? What data could support career pathway analysis?

A survey respondent captured the gap precisely: “Everybody who looks at actual dynamics of party committees, DNC or state parties, observes the petty rivalries that look like high school student government, but nobody has actually gone beyond that observation to explain just how those dynamics work and what it means.” One expert noted that even basic information about party structures, such as DNC membership lists and state party bylaws, are opaque.

A scoping review would ask: What research exists on internal party committee dynamics? What ethnographic or interview-based work has been done? How do formal structures relate to actual power distribution? What would a systematic study of committee functioning require?

The debates and research gaps described previously suggest several directions for philanthropic and nonprofit investment. Rather than fully developed program designs, this section identifies general types of interventions that emerged from the discussion and warrant further exploration. 

These interventions involve nonpartisan activities in which 501(c)(3) organizations can play a role in research, education, training, convening, and building civic infrastructure.

Multiple participants observed that parties have lost the civic presence they once had. For example, local parties no longer sponsor softball teams, help with taxes, or provide spaces where community members encounter one another outside electoral contexts. The megachurch comparison surfaced repeatedly: Institutions that thrive do so by lowering barriers to participation (by providing child care and food and holding meetings at convenient times), inviting people to solve problems together, and building relationships that persist beyond any single event.

Interventions to address parties’ lack of civil presence:

• Develop community spaces: Civic organizations can build physical spaces where residents can gather. These would not be explicitly partisan, but might create the connective tissue that healthy political communities require. This might mean converting vacant spaces, subsidizing meeting facilities, or supporting organizations that provide civic gathering functions.
• Strengthen constituent services: Nonprofits could pilot nonpartisan approaches to help citizens navigate government, such as benefits enrollment, tax assistance, and permit applications. From these pilots, we might learn whether service provision builds civic trust and engagement. 
• Test ways to make civic participation easier: What if meetings offered child care? What if training happened on weekends in accessible locations? What inducements or accommodations actually increase participation from underrepresented groups?

These interventions test whether the participation model has validity—whether people would engage more in civic and political life if barriers were lower and invitations more compelling. They also test whether civic engagement can be rebuilt from nonpartisan foundations or whether it requires an explicitly political structure.

The gathering surfaced broad agreement that the political talent pipeline is broken. Working-class candidates cannot afford to quit jobs and campaign. Young people interested in political careers lack clear pathways. The people who end up in party leadership positions are often those who get “weird expressive benefits” from participation rather than those with broad skills and community roots.

Possible interventions to develop the talent pipeline: 

• Fellowship and scholarship models: Support individuals to pursue political careers without requiring personal wealth. This might look like campaign fellowships (salary replacement during campaigns), public service scholarships, or stipend programs for participation in leadership development. The legal architecture matters: Support before candidacy declaration differs from campaign contributions.
• Leadership training programs: Offer nonpartisan training in skills that political leaders need—organizing, public speaking, coalition-building, policy analysis, campaign management. Some state parties run such programs, but we do not know which ones do and whether they are effective. 
• Document and support pathways to leadership: Research can show how effective political leaders are actually developed, and new programs could open those pathways to people currently excluded. If informal networks matter more than formal programs, interventions might focus on network-building rather than curriculum.

This direction tests whether financial and structural barriers constrain political talent. If talented people exist but cannot access political careers, removing barriers should expand and diversify the candidate pool. If the problem is culture, incentives, or the nature of modern politics, pipeline investments may disappoint.

The U.S. political system has thinned out. There are fewer organized groups or caucuses within parties, and less infrastructure for people who do not fit neatly into existing coalitions. Extremist factions have built organizational capacity, such as the Tea Party networks and issue activist groups on the left and right, while moderate and heterodox factions often lack comparable infrastructure.

Ideas that might encourage new factions: 

• Convene emerging coalitions: Host gatherings where people exploring new political formations can meet potential allies, learn from successful faction-builders, and develop organizational skills. These would be educational rather than explicitly political—that is, teaching about organization-building, not advocating for particular positions.
• Organizational development training: Offer nonpartisan training in how to build and sustain political organizations—membership recruitment, fundraising, internal governance, coalition management. This knowledge exists but is not widely accessible to people trying to build new formations.
• Cross-ideological dialogue: Support conversations across factional lines about shared challenges in political organization. People building organizations on the left and right face similar problems; learning across ideological differences could accelerate organizational development without requiring political agreement.

This direction tests whether faction-building can be supported through educational and convening infrastructure, and whether more factions would produce healthier political competition. The Working Families Party example suggests intentional faction-building is possible; the question is whether that model—or variations of it—can be replicated.

Throughout the gathering, participants raised structural reforms that might create conditions for healthier parties: fusion voting to enable faction accountability, redistricting reform to create competitive elections, and changes to primary systems and nomination calendars. These represent a different theory of change—altering the rules within which parties operate rather than building capacity within existing rules.

Ideas that would prioritize structural reforms leading to healthier parties:

• Research on reform effects: Engage in rigorous study of how different electoral rules affect party behavior, candidate quality, and political competition. This evidence base informs reform debates without advocating for particular positions.
• Voter education: Sponsor nonpartisan education about how electoral systems work, what alternatives exist, and what tradeoffs different systems involve. Informed citizens can make their own judgments about reform.
• Experiential learning: Support opportunities for people to experience alternative systems, such as ranked-choice voting in local organizations, participatory budgeting processes, and deliberative forums. Experience with alternatives may shape preferences in ways that information alone does not.

The gathering did not resolve whether structural reform is a prerequisite to organizational improvement or whether organizational capacity must be built first to win structural reforms. Both tracks may be necessary. This report focuses on organizational and civic interventions that foundations can directly support while acknowledging that structural reform represents important complementary work that other actors—advocacy organizations, political campaigns, reform movements—must pursue.

Political parties are essential to democracy. They recruit candidates, mobilize voters, aggregate interests, and translate electoral victories into governance. When parties are healthy, they connect citizens to political power and hold leaders accountable. When they are not, democracy suffers. 

Participants in this convening agreed that U.S. parties are not healthy, even as they brought differing perspectives about causes, mechanisms, and remedies. State and local party infrastructure has eroded. The talent pipeline has narrowed. Short-term electoral thinking crowds out long-term capacity-building. Citizens experience parties primarily as sources of fundraising spam rather than as organizations that represent their interests and earn their trust.

Making parties healthier is not the only path to making democracy healthier, but it is a necessary one. Structural reforms to electoral rules, campaign finance, and redistricting matter—but parties will remain the organizations that contest elections and govern. Movement-building and civic engagement matter—but without parties to channel that energy into political power, engagement dissipates.

The questions identified in this report matter because under any theory of political reform—structural changes to electoral rules, movement-building, or policy development—parties remain the essential organizing units of electoral politics and representative government. If they function poorly, democracy functions poorly. Understanding why they function poorly, and what might help, is important work.

The scholars and practitioners who participated in our discussion remain engaged with these questions. The research agenda is underdeveloped but tractable. The intervention space is underexplored but promising. This is a problem area where serious intellectual work remains to be done—and where that work could inform consequential action.