You are not a Democrat.

And neither am I.

Note: I’m probably going to write more about the implications of this, so … that’s why the last section feels a little under-realized. Anyway, carry on.

In America, we have parties, candidates, and voters.

Voters, however, are not “members” of any party. Membership would carry with it obligations — a membership fee, for example. And it would, as they say, have its privileges. Members would get some benefit from their membership. In the context of civic organizations, members typically have a say in the governance and priorities of the organization — they would get to shape the organization’s mission.

Voters sort of do that. But not really.

The other day, listening to some focus group, a Biden voter described himself as a “rank and file Democrat”, and at that moment, I thought, “But you’re not a rank and file Democrat. You hold no rank. There is no file. The Party spends half its time ignoring you, and the other half cajoling you into doing what it wants, if it notices you at all.”

It’s a strange thing to be not-a-member of an organization that can only achieve its goals if enough non-members do things for it.

It’s even stranger to hear, in the discourse, the use of the label “Democrats” to mean, at turns, pundits, politicians, party leaders, and voters — because quite clearly, they are not all the same kinds of actors. In the context of politics, the party leaders have collapsed the whole thing, bundling up the consultants, the commentators, the elected officials, and the voters as if they were all one great singular thing.

It’s as if the front office, the coaching staff, the home team commentator and the fans in the stands were all expected to put on jerseys and run a few plays.

Except that’s simply not how the actual game works, to the extent the game can be said to “work” at all.

And I think it’s actually really important to know the difference between being a member of the Democratic Party, and being a voter who usually votes for Democrats. I think it’s especially important if that Party is also going to stand on business as the party of democracy.

Because if you’re going to make that claim, you have to prove it.

You can’t join a club that won’t have you as a member.

With apologies to Groucho, the simple fact is — the vast majority of voters are not, in fact, members of any party.

In over a dozen states, voters are not required, and in some cases can’t, “enroll” with any party. The primaries are open; the only proxy for party preference is which ballot you selected in a primary. There is no way to confirm whether the ballot you selected in a primary matches up with your final choice in the general election, because your ballot is secret, and general elections are open — “enrolled” Democrats can vote for Republicans and vice versa. So even if you enroll, you can always defect, because you weren’t really a member to begin with.

And that’s because, enrollment is just not the same as membership. In the UK, you can in fact be a member of the Labour or Conservative (or Green or Reform or Lib Dem) parties. For a few quid a month (seriously!), you can join the Tories and after 3 months of continuous membership, you can hop a train up to Manchester and vote for your party leader. You get invited to local debates, get to weigh in on policy and local candidate selection, participate in various campaign groups, get connected with local party leaders, and as a paid-up member, you also get to stand for election as a Tory in your community. It’s a bit more expensive for the Labour party (bizarrely), but the benefits of membership are substantially the same.

I checked, just to be sure, and it’s true: I can not subscribe to a membership in the Democrat or Republican parties at all.

That’s not to say my messages aren’t full of solicitations of money - but the money mostly earns me more messages, more solicitations.

Here are my unknown messages as of the time of writing:

If you were an alien from another planet, and saw these messages, you would be forgiven for thinking, based on the urgency of the messages, and the informal, personal tone, and the request for money, money, money that I was an incredibly important party elite and member of the esteemed donor class.

Alas, I’m just a voter who donated to some campaigns through ActBlue, and lost the right to a peaceful inbox.

Here’s what I don’t get for my money: power.

I have no influence, I have no agency, I have no say. Except on Election Days.

And for my entire lifetime, there have been people telling me that my vote doesn’t count anyway. Because of the Electoral College, because I’ve always lived in blue states, because I’m just one of tens of millions, and my vote won’t change the outcome no matter what I do.

Thing is — my vote doesn’t really influence the choices I’m given either. I am often (almost always) forced to vote for a candidate I wouldn’t have picked, and because I live in New York, I get to vote for whoever is still left on the ballot by the time my primary runs around.

Who is a Democrat?

Let’s begin at the top. The paid leadership of the Democratic Party (the DNC) are Democrats. Various party elders — chiefly those who have held leadership positions in the party or have been elected to public office — are Democrats. Public officials who were elected as Democrats are Democrats. Candidates running on the Democratic line are Democrats. Then there are convention delegates.

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I really didn’t know how convention delegates are chosen. So I spent a whole evening trying to figure out how you get to participate as a delegate to the national nominating convention every 4 years.

The path, in essence is something like this:

• Get in early as a volunteer or staffer on a campaign that wins.

• Donate a lot of money to local candidates.

• Campaign to become a delegate to your state nominating convention. Here, the voters are other delegates. Ordinary “rank and file” voters who enroll as or usually vote for Democrats do not, generally, participate in the selection of these delegates.

• Then campaign among your fellow delegates to be selected to attend the national convention.

• Then buy yourself a ticket and book yourself a hotel room and get yourself to Chicago, or wherever.

• Where you will be - most of the time - statutorily obligated to vote for whoever won the primary in your state, at least in a first round of voting.

The people who follow this path — they, too, become Democrats.

I vote, exclusively, for Democrats. I am enrolled with the Democrats so I can be invited to vote in their primaries. As a New Yorker, I often vote in the General Election on the Working Families Party line, because I want them to still exist. But I’m still, usually, just voting for a Democrat, who was selected by the party, and funded by the party’s donors.¹

But — and it pains me to admit that I really only just came to terms with this reality — I am not a Democrat.

And most likely, neither are you.

Because we have no real influence (except maybe in primaries, or if we have enough money or connections), only a very mediated say (chiefly through polling), and very little power (mostly exercised by voting… anonymously).

The Meeting Before the Meeting

Rahm Emanuel says there’s basically two playbooks. Mid-terms are referenda on the party in power. Quadrennial elections are choices between two parties/candidates.

But he’s leaving out what my husband referred to as “the meeting before the meeting”. You know, primaries.

Voters do, in fact, get to decide something about their choices. In 2024, 16.6 million people voted for Democrats in the primary season. About 14.5 million of them voted for Joe Biden.

In 2020, nearly 37 million people voted in the Democratic primaries. 19 million voted for Biden.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because honestly, I didn’t know that until I sat down to write this.

Less than half of the people who voted for Democrats in the primaries in 2020 voted for Democrats in the primaries in 2024. Fewer people voted at all in the primaries in 2024 than voted just for Biden in the 2020 primaries.

If there was going to be a gigantic red flashing light on the dashboard of the Democratic Party that absolutely had to be it.

But just to the side of it, there should have been a post-it note, reminding people that almost half of Democrats in 2020 picked someone other than Biden. He won the majority of the primary votes, but he was helped by his opponents dropping out after South Carolina. I was an Elizabeth Warren fan, but she wasn’t even on the ballot by the time I got to cast mine. By the time most Democrats voted, the primary was simply a practice ballot for the general.

But mid-term primaries have started to look very different. According to an analysis reported by Elaine Kamarck for Brookings,

“In 2022, 162 incumbent members of Congress ran for re-election without facing a primary challenger. Thus, 284 incumbents or 64% of the seats where incumbents were up for election faced one or more primary challengers. The trend seems to be that incumbents are getting challenged in primaries more often. In 2004, for instance, only 25 percent of Democratic House incumbents and 20 percent of Republican House incumbents had a primary challenge. In that first decade of the 21st century, the Tea Party and then the MAGA forces did not exist and the Bernie Sanders movement in the Democratic Party had not gained the strength it had a decade later.

“Those numbers remained largely stable until 2010 when nearly 50 percent of Republican House incumbents faced a challenger. From 2010 on, the number of incumbents facing a challenge has remained high. This trend is testament to the increasing polarization of our politics, the increasing strength of factions within each political party, and the realization that contesting primaries was a very cost-effective way of changing political parties. Today we see far right, Trump Republicans seeking to remake the Republican party from within and more progressive Democrats doing the same in their party.” [emphasis mine]

Democrats Disappoint Their Customers at Their Peril

Primaries are the meeting before the meeting — the one where you decide what you’re going to talk about, and what you’re going to say, and who is going to present which items. The one where you game out how you’re going to get approval for your project, or eliminate an unnecessary task.

And those meetings might be more fraught in 2026 for the people who are, in fact, Democrats right now.

Since the loss of the 2024 election, Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters have not been especially happy with the Party. Around a third of them have been saying since the loss that they have an unfavorable view of the Party. And a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 41% of Democratic voters are unsatisfied with the Party leadership, and 62% think the leadership should be replaced.

Republicans have been in the throes of a Party reformation for over a decade; incumbents have been primaried at high rates, and gradually replaced with less centrist, more partisan candidates. What was a neo-con dominated-party yielded to the influence of a vocal Tea Party faction, which has been reshaped and replaced into a MAGA-aligned party.

There’s no reason to think the same could not happen to the Democrats (indeed, this is why the squad, and especially AOC so rattled the Democratic Party establishment, and why some folks are so absolutely freaked out by Mamdani’s candidacy in NYC). The only thing standing in the way of that reformation is, at least for now, the centrist faction of the Democratic Party leadership — the people most in thrall to the donor class, the “good billionaires”, and the consultants who developed an early addiction to triangulation and are still riding the “America is a center-right country, and voters just want order” dragon. They hold the keys to the kingdom, and they are not inclined to let go. They get to decide who the candidates will be — even before “rank and file Democrats” get a say. They get to decide when a candidate will be forced out — even if “rank and file Democrats” were saying he shouldn’t be in the race in the first place.

And the DNC in particular have been deploying antibodies against any kind of change lately. They drummed out David Hogg. And then two union leaders took their leave of the DNC.

As long as “strategists” stick to their theories, and as long as their strategies assume a pure contest between two teams that is mechanistic (raise this much money here, spend it at this time, use these message frames, select these channels, etc.) and not empirical, they are engaging in extremely risky behavior.

Call things what they are

Don’t confuse Democratic voters with Democratic-aligned pundits², or Democratic candidates or the Democratic party. We’re not all the same.

If we were really members of the party we’d have more choice and more say. Since we don’t, we’re not really members, we’re customers. If we’re customers, the party should offer us better choices, or else continue to lose market share. If we’re members the party should give us more of a say in the mission.

And if the Democratic Party wanted to be taken seriously as the party of, you know, democracy, then it would demonstrate that in its own governance. At a minimum, if the Party wanted to run a truly democratic primary process, it would be all on one day and there’d be ranked choice voting.

But since the Party definitely doesn’t want to do any of that, it’s going to be hard for voters to continue to see themselves as Democrats, and the Democrats as defenders of Democracy.

1. By the way, donors are not necessarily Democrats, even if they give to Democrats. Many big donors to the Democrats also give to not-Democrats, so. Not Democrats.

2. Who get paid to come to their retreats and tell them how to win over voters.