Who are the "Political Elites"?

Modeling the election game required introducing a notion of a "political elite" or "party elite". But who, exactly, are these people?

I'm going to try to answer this question by combing the literature, and providing a sort of "concordance" of relevant passages from various authors. The short answer seems to be: local and state party officials, people in the DCCC and RCCC (as well as in the RNC and DNC), people who serve as delegates to the national convention, "big donors", and ostensibly certain pundits.

Party elites posses some kind of resource which candidates (and potential candidates) try to acquire on a "first come, first serve" basis, after persuading the party elite 'gatekeeper' to back the inquiring candidate. This competition for party elite support constitutes the so-called "Invisible Primary", which happens at the presidential level, sometimes in Senate races, and very seldom for lower races.

It's unclear whether "party elites" also actively recruit people to run for office or not. [Addendum Sept 30, 2021: from a few case studies, it appears party elites do recruit people to run for office, but they are not the only manner by which candidates are recruited.] I would hypothesize, e.g., county and state party officials try to keep a roster of potential candidates to run for state legislature, or for recommendation for county offices.

Kirkpatrick Picks Delegates

Jean Kirkpatrick studies this in her book The New Presidential Elite (1976). For Kirkpatrick, delegates to the national convention constitute party elites, saying (pg 22, emphasis Kirkpatrick's):

Delegates to national conventions are interesting to students of politics because, for the period that they serve as delegates, they are members of the elite political class, persons whose decisions are felt throughout the political system.... The political elite is that political class that has more influence than others in the shaping of specified values through political processes. Collectively, they embody the human, social, and political characteristics of a national party. Collectively the delegates constitute a slice of American political life broad enough to include persons from every state and thick enough to include representatives of all political levels.

But the role "political elites" play is not limited to merely national convention attendance.

King Includes Local & State Officials, Donors

When potential candidates begin organizing potential primary campaigns, they begin by organizing resources. Political elites partake in the "invisible primary", as Aaron King's doctoral thesis notes (pg 27, or 40 of the pdf):

Money is just one type of resource that fuels a campaign. One must also concentrate on building a competitive organization – a resource where previous officeholders, and especially incumbents, have an inherent advantage. While financial contributors are an important part of this organization, this process also consists of recruiting personnel, from volunteers for grassroots efforts to a close group of trusted advisors (Thurber and Nelson 2000, Farrell, et al. 2001). Candidates will also attempt to get endorsements from influential members of the community such as business or union officials, and support from other elected politicians. While the average citizen may not be aware of these events taking place, political elites and activists will be paying close attention. In a way, this can be seen as an invisible primary (Aldrich 1980a, Cohen, et al. 2008) on a smaller scale than in presidential races. During this process, candidates are also trying to gain exposure both with the media and key political elites, and increasing name recognition across the state. If a candidate can establish himself or herself as a front-runner early on, he or she may be able to build off this momentum and gather even more resources.

Among party elites, King sporadically notes, includes donors and other officeholders (35). More often than not, party officials will sit on the sideline and wait until a nominee is official before pouring resources into a campaign, including the electoral wing of each national party organization, the National Republican Senatorial Committee or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Still, party officials, especially on the local level, may be involved behind the scenes to encourage, or even discourage, certain politicians to enter a race. (36)

Steger explicates what elites do for fun and profit the party

What do party elites "do" exactly? Wayne P. Steger, in his Party Elites in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaigns, note (pg 297–299)

Party elites facilitate candidates’ efforts to build strong personal networks of contributors and volunteers from the overlapping organizations and networks that form the modern political parties (e.g., Merrion 1995; Gimpel 1998). Candidates use endorsements in their fundraising appeals (Bimber and Davis 2003). Party elites frequently serve as headliners at fundraising events with or on behalf of presidential candidates (e.g., Novak 2006). Endorsements also limit the resources available to other candidates (e.g., Embrey 1995). Endorsements are used in campaign communications as candidates announce them at rallies and press conferences and display them in advertisements and web pages (Bimber and Davis 2003; Williams et al. 2008). Party elites also may be deployed as proxies in attacks on rivals, which is effective because party and officeholders are “credible” sources of criticism and may insulate the candidate from charges of negative campaigning (Garramone 1985). While some endorsements are more valuable than others, in terms of active support for the campaign, the aggregate pattern of endorsements provides an approximate indication of insider support for candidates’ campaign efforts. Candidates with more elite support are going to have an easier task raising money and building their campaign organizations than candidates lacking such support.

Nomination campaigns exhibit varying degrees of uncertainty about how candidates will play with voters in the caucuses and primaries. Under conditions of uncertainty, elites can influence media coverage and commentary of the campaign. In an uncertain environment, journalists, editors, and producers look for cues about what to cover and how to cover it (Shaw and Sparrow 1999). Journalists pay close attention to polls and quarterly financial reports to figure out which candidates are leading, lagging, rising, and falling. But national news reports also frequently incorporate subjective elite judgments that are not reflected in objective indicators of the horse race (e.g., Cillizza 2006). This effect can be seen in the coverage of candidates who led in national polls prior to the primaries, but who were not treated like front-runners by the media (witness George Wallace in 1975; Jesse Jackson in late 1987; and Joe Lieberman in 2003). Party elites contribute to the perceptions conveyed to the public through their contact with reporters and through news reports of party elite support for candidates.

While the general public is inattentive to the presidential nomination campaign; party activists, campaign contributors, and organizations aligned with the parties are more likely to be exposed to this information. This matters because these attentive publics, along with the news media, provide candidates with the money and exposure needed to compete for the support of larger numbers of primary voters across the country. Endorsements also affect voting in later primaries indirectly through their effects on voters in early caucuses and primaries. Unlike the public at large, prospective voters in early caucus and primary states are exposed to a high volume of information provided by the news media and campaign advertisements. A study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center shows that most voters in the early caucuses and primaries were exposed to endorsement information during the 2000 PNCs (Jamieson et al. 2000). Further, the study found that endorsements did influence some votes in these elections, especially when endorsements are communicated to the public in campaign ads. This suggests that endorsements have the greatest potential effect in the early contested states in which candidates invest heavily in time and money. This matters because the early caucus and primary outcomes affect the vote in later states (e.g., Bartels 1988). Thus endorsements indirectly affect the primary vote by influencing candidates’ relative abilities to compete in the primaries and through the vote in the early caucuses and primaries.

Importantly, as Cohen (2008a) and Steger (2008a) both argue, party elites influence in the nomination campaign to the extent they unify or coalesce behind a candidate. Party elites dilute their impact when they refrain from making endorsements or when they divide their support for candidates. As elites divide their support for candidates, they send a mixed signal to each other and to their attentive partisan publics. Candidates who gain large numbers of endorsements are signaled to be ideologically acceptable and viable because they are receiving support from across the spectrum of the party’s elite membership. People tend to accept opinion leadership from credible sources (Zaller 1992). An individual endorser may not be a credible source for a given partisan, so an individual endorsement may or may not resonate with an individual party activist or contributor. When elites divide their support for presidential candidates, attentive publics, we can expect attentive party audiences to divide along lines similar to those among elites, giving credence to endorsements of preferred politicians while discounting those of less preferred or unfamiliar politicians. As more elite party officials endorse a candidate, the odds improve that a given party activist or identifier will find a credible endorser. When most elites coalesce behind a given candidate, the signal is unified as to which candidate is desirable, viable and electable.

In the "Party Elite Study", overseen by John S. Jackson, questionnaires were sent to a sample of nominating convention delegates, county chairs, national committee members, and the universe of state party chairs.

References

• John S. Jackson, The American Political Party System: Continuity and Change over Ten Presidential Elections. Brookings, 2015.
• Jean Kirkpatrick, The new presidential elite: Men and women in national politics. Russell Sage, 1976.
• Byron E. Shafer, Partisan Approaches to Postwar American Politics. New York: Chatham House, 1998.
• Aaron King's doctoral thesis.
• Wayne P. Steger, Party Elites in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaigns. American Review of Politics 28 (2008) doi:10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2008.28.0.293-318