Don Blankenship, and how parties are defined

You have probably seen this one by now.  If you haven't, here it is, in all its... glory?



O...kay, then.  "China family," referencing Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, obligatory competent member of any Republican cabinet.

Getting fired in five, four, three...

Anyway, yeah.  That ad happened.  Also, Blankenship is a convicted criminal.  So, he's really checking all the boxes there.  In a McConnell versus Blankenship grudge match, whose side would you pick?  Popcorn all around!

How likely is Blankenship to get the GOP nomination to challenge Manchin?  Weirder things have happened.  Like, every day in the Trump era, but the only current poll we have puts Jenkins ahead with Blankenship coming in third, and PredictIt betting has his shares trading at just over a quarter.  My point for today, though, is just his presence on the scene because, for all of the spectacle, he isn't an anomaly, and we need to acknowledge that.

What is a political party?  Specifically, in the US?  We have a different party structure than other countries because we have different electoral laws.  Remember good, ole' Valdimir Orlando?  V.O. Key?  Parties are tripartite structures, composed of parties-in-government, parties-as-organizations, and parties-in-the-electorate, with our expanded understanding now including party networks as a part of party organizations.  It ain't just the DNC and the RNC now composing the party organizations-- it is all semi- and informally affiliated groups.

Right now, the GOP formal party organization, meaning the RNC, would love to say that Blankenship isn't a Republican.  The Republican Party-in-government, e.g. Mitch McConnell, would love to ban Blankenship from the party.

But, that's not the way it works.  There are electoral systems in which it does work that way.  In proportional representation systems, a party gets a proportion of seats in the legislature equal to its proportion of the vote, so it writes a list of names equal to the number of seats in the legislature.  If they hate you, they don't put your name on the list.  Sorry, Don, that you don't like my China family.  Why don't you and your West Virginia sister-wife go back to inbreeding your own!  (I have no idea who Blankenship's wife is, and I don't care.  It's West Virginia, though, so I'll just assume.)

Mitch McConnell, and those like him, would love to keep Blankenship and those of his ilk out of the candidate pool, but they can't, and that demonstrates an important point about party structures in the US.  They are relatively open.  Blankenship will probably lose, but candidates like him frequently win, and even when they lose, they get enough attention that the attention itself is part of what makes the Republican Party what it is today.

Parties, in general, would prefer to maximize votes, but the challenge is how you draw as many votes as possible from Group A without alienating Group B.  That is the point of "dog whistle" politics.  You use just enough racially-coded language to appeal to racists without pushing out the people who can't deal with truly over-the-top racism.  Blankenship, and others who go over-the-top, make it hard to perform that balancing act.  That doesn't mean the GOP loses.  See:  Trump, Donald.  However, the margins get slimmer, and there is less room for error.  Parties-in-the-electorate, in Key's terminology, are just coalitions.  Matt Grossman & Dave Hopkins are still wrong.  The Republican Party, and the "conservative" movement, are group coalitions too, not purity-seeking, principled... whatever.  Race, and the challenge within the party over how far to push the issue, is a matter of coalition maintenance, and one that only exists because the party is not a top-down structure.  Instead, it is defined by those who choose to join the party, run for office within the party, speak publicly, etc.

Don Blankenship is not a "party" guy in the sense that any other country would recognize.  He's just some convict.  Then again, he is part of a pattern, and that pattern defines the GOP because people like McConnell can't stop them from doing so.

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