The Life of ‘The Party Decides’

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The supreme weirdness of this year’s presidential race hit home with Marty Cohen, an associate professor of political science at James Madison University, in late February, when a writer for MTV declared him a “loser.”

Donald J. Trump had just won the Republican primaries in Nevada and South Carolina. Mr. Trump was well on his way to winning the GOP nomination over the protestations of party leaders, whose preferred candidate, Marco Rubio, had finished far behind the real-estate mogul.

In 2008, Mr. Cohen, along with Hans Noel and David Karol, his former graduate-school classmates at the University of California at Los Angeles, and their adviser, John Zaller, published a book called The Party Decides. They argued that, in recent decades, party insiders had been able to make or break presidential candidates.

The book presumed only to explain the party dynamics of a specific time period, say the authors, not to help political junkies fill out their betting cards. But campaign season is all about who’s up and who’s down, whose message is getting traction and whose is falling flat. Books are judged by their covers, sometimes literally.

In light of Mr. Trump, The Party Decides has become a punchline.

“All of the smart pundits read this book, which seemed very clever and reasonable until loose cannon Donald Trump came along and started steamrolling the GOP while Republican insiders looked on in helpless disbelief,” wrote Ezekiel Kweku, a writer for MTV’s website, marking Mr. Cohen and each of his co-authors in the “loser” column of his February 24 election-night scorecard.

“The thing may be headed for the bargain bin now,” he added.

It’s one thing to have your theory challenged by a researcher presenting countervailing data in an academic journal. It’s another to see it undermined in real time in front of a national audience. But such is the fate of scholars who dare to study presidential elections: They can collect data only once every four years, and must do so with the whole world looking over their shoulders.

A Stand-In for Political Scientists

The Party Decides began as a field paper Mr. Cohen wrote more than a decade and a half ago as part of his doctoral research. In 2001 he published an article with Mr. Noel, Mr. Karol, and Mr. Zaller that bore the relatively staid title “Beating Reform: The Resurgence of Parties in Presidential Nominations, 1980 to 2000.” Years later, when they expanded it into a book, they almost called it Beating Reform. But after consulting with colleagues in the field they opted for the grabbier title, which echoed the title of a seminal 1954 political-science work called The Voter Decides.

The 2008 book, published by the University of Chicago Press, was received mildly in academic circles, according to Mr. Zaller, who is still at UCLA. But it captured the interest of political journalists as they geared up for the 2016 presidential election.

Last April a writer for GQ called The Party Decides “an academic Da Vinci Code for figuring out the presidential primary process” and summarily predicted that the GOP race would come down to Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio, the establishment favorites. In September a writer for The New York Times used the book to anchor a story about how Mr. Trump’s unpopularity with party elites would probably sink his bid. (For their part, the authors made no such claims when interviewed by the Times. In fact, they warned that Republican elites might have a hard time stopping Mr. Trump.)

The book kept popping up in the popular media, first as a mantra for those anxious about Mr. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican party; then, increasingly, as a proxy for the conventional wisdom Mr. Trump was laying to waste.

An explainer explained it on Vox. A critic in The Washington Post blamed it for sowing Republican complacency. Nate Silver defended it on FiveThirtyEight. The Economist recently counted more than 700 mentions of The Party Decides in the news since 2011, a tally comparable to citations of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

The authors have mixed feelings about the extent to which their book has been sucked into the media circus surrounding Mr. Trump’s improbable run.

Mr. Cohen says he has found it amusing. So has Mr. Noel, who is now an associate professor at Georgetown University. “If Donald Trump has taught us anything,” he says, “it’s that as long as they spell your name right and give you media coverage, it’s not so bad.”

Indeed, the Chicago press saw sales of the book more than triple over the past year. Mr. Cohen says he was quietly hoping that the candidate himself would mock it at some point. “That would really spike sales,” he says.

Mr. Zaller, however, seems more ambivalent. The senior scholar of the group, and the most cautious in talking to reporters about his work, says he never set out to write a mainstream text. “Our peers in the profession are what’s important to us,” says Mr. Zaller. “We’re writing for them.”

While he believes The Party Decides has gotten “a very respectful hearing” over all, Mr. Zaller says he is uncomfortable with how some pundits have treated the book as a stand-in for the wisdom of the entire political-science profession.

“People were writing about ‘the political scientists,’” he says. “And it was always The Party Decides, one book, us: a political scientist, me, who had never written about parties before, and three graduate students.”

Trump the Outlier?

The four scholars are still mulling whether to collaborate on a second edition — one that would incorporate the lessons of Mr. Trump’s candidacy as well as changes in the world, particularly in the news media, that may have eroded the power of party insiders in recent elections.

But they are not yet willing to concede defeat. As an examination of recent patterns in American party politics, The Party Decides remains sound. Mr. Karol and Mr. Noel both taught the book in their courses this spring, even as Mr. Trump continued to flout the will of GOP insiders. They say it was useful as a way to contextualize the strangeness of Mr. Trump’s success and try to figure out how and why the party failed to stop him. And the authors point out that the apparent success of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee on the Democratic side, fits the book’s thesis to a T.

“Academics basically realize that no theory that’s interesting is going to capture every case,” says Mr. Karol, who is an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland at College Park.

And Mr. Trump may yet prove to be an outlier. Some of the book’s authors even venture so far as to predict that will be the case.

They’ll know more in four years, when the next data set comes in.

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.