The latest This Old Democracy features Tabatha Abu El-Haj on associational party building, the power of a ballot line, and what democratic accountability can look like in practice. Something is missing from American politics — and it's not a policy position or a charismatic leader. It's a structural connection between the people who hold office and the communities they claim to represent. Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a professor of law at Drexel University and a nationally recognized scholar of the First Amendment and the law of democracy, has a name for what's missing. She calls it associational party building, and it's the subject of both a paper recently released by New America under the title A Model for Associational Party Building and a rich conversation with host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy. The argument is deceptively simple: parties work best not as top-down electoral machines, but as living, rooted civic associations — embedded in the communities they represent, rich in face-to-face relationships, and accountable in ways that money alone can never manufacture. Abu El-Haj came to this view through an indirect route. She had spent years studying money in politics, but arrived at a sobering conclusion: you can't take money out of politics. So where does that leave ordinary people? "What they have is numbers on election day, but to exercise that power requires effective organization." She describes the problem with both major parties in terms that will feel familiar to most readers. The two major parties, she says — especially at the national level — "feel very disconnected from what the rest of us experience life as." They operate, in her telling, at a remove from ordinary people, inside echo chambers driven not just by moneyed elites but by professional ones too. An associational party is a remedy for that disconnection — one that starts bottom-up, invests in genuine community relationships, and gives ordinary members real encounters with the candidates and elected officials who depend on them. Here is where the theory connects most directly to election reform. What gives an associational party its distinctive power — beyond what any civic coalition can achieve on its own — is the ability to make its contribution to a candidate's victory visible and auditable. Without a separate line on the ballot, there's no way to prove, conclusively, how many votes came from your people. And without that proof, elected officials can always find a reason to take the meeting but ignore the ask. As we've written here frequently, fusion voting allows minor parties to show that proof without asking voters to waste a vote or spoil an election. Abu El-Haj's research draws on extensive interviews with organizers who built a new fusion party and experienced the shift from interest group to political party firsthand. The civic group leaders recounted how their relationships with legislators were transformed: "Before we were a part of the party, we would get access, but it would be like begging…. And then, you know, we would tell them, yeah, we delivered, but they were like, 'Yeah, we probably could have gotten those votes anyways. We could have hired other people to, it was just a matter of money.'" Once a party can point to a specific number of votes cast on its line in a specific district, that argument collapses. The contribution is no longer deniable. And from that shift — from invisible to auditable — real accountability becomes possible. The ballot line, she notes, also acts as organizational glue: in any coalition, tensions arise, but members who have tasted that kind of power don't easily walk away. Abu El-Haj is careful to note that her primary case study — the Working Families Party's experience in New York — was founded by unions and community organizing groups with deep roots in relational politics, and that not every new party effort starts from that foundation. But the core insight, she argues, applies broadly: to centrist parties trying to build a home for voters alienated from both major parties, to reform movements working to restore fusion voting, and as a cautionary lesson about what happens when parties don't do this work. She points to MAGA's rise as a case in point: it was able to emerge, she argues, in part because the old Republican elite "was not very well embedded" — and the same is true of the Democrats. "In the Bush-Clinton era," as she puts it, both parties were "disengaged." Churches, PTAs, civic associations, local unions — these are potential anchors for any party willing to do the slow, relational work. The model doesn't require a particular ideology. It requires a particular kind of commitment. "I hope that the leaders of those parties, when they get their ballot line in, will think about comparable ways to embed themselves." Go listen. It's one of the more useful conversations we've hosted about what democratic power actually...
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