Who is the ‘establishment’?

Over the years I have grown far more appreciative of the political establishment. According to its supporters, the establishment acts as a lid on politics ideally preventing it from getting out of hand, and ensuring the legislative process works. At least, when the establishment is properly functioning. Many, myself included, see the rise of Donald Trump in the 2016 as an example of establishment failure. However, I haven’t seen a ton of research on this and obviously I want to know more to see if my beliefs held up under scrutiny. I have been given 3 open ended research projects this quarter, so naturally one of them was about this question.

However, I have run into a problem. How do I measure the strength of the establishment? It isn’t something I can go and find, and there are no commonly accepted parameters to use. There are a lot of important cases that you need to be able to explain when you are coming up with a way to measure establishment strength. Using several case studies, I have come to the conclusion that I will measure establishment strength based on how well incumbents do in their primaries. If many incumbents do poorly, I will interpret that as establishment weakness and vice versa.

To understand how I came to this way of parameterizing establishment strength consider the idea that parties’ goals are generally to win elections. Therefore election strength is likely a decent metric. However, how can I take a dataset of elections and tell who the incumbents are? Consider the following examples:

• In a general election, for example Obama and Romney’s election in 2012 who was the establishment candidate? Both candidates certainly had the backing of their political establishments.
• What about Clinton and Trump? Clinton had the support of the Democratic establishment from before the primary. However, by the final days of the election Trump certainly had the support of the Republican establishment as well (I’m reminded of this lovely photo).

Based on cases like these, I’ve come to the conclusion that the establishment on either side of the aisle aims to support their respective candidates in general elections and therefore general elections in my study are going to be considered moot. By October of an election year, essentially every candidate is an establishment candidate.

For another example that raises interesting questions, consider AOC’s first election. Clearly, when AOC primaried Joseph Crowley, an important member of the house leadership, it was a loss by the political establishment. However, if AOC herself faced a primary in 2022 and lost, would that be the revenge of the establishment, or another loss by the establishment? Somewhat counterintuitively, I am tempted to say it would be another establishment failure. AOC currently plays an important part in the party infrastructure after only a few years on the hill. She is on several important committees, assists various members with their campaigns, and raises money for the DNC.

There are a few more special cases I should mention:

• While it could seem like my method fails if other important members of the establishment supported a challenger to AOC these cases are impossible to identify in a simple way. Moreover, AOC like all incumbents will always have the machinery of the party, and allies in Congress to rely on.
• I will exclude races without an incumbent as while there sometimes are establishment candidates, it is impossible to identify who is and isn’t without studying each individual case. There is no metric I could use to measure this.
• Lastly, I am ignoring races with two incumbents. Generally these are caused by redistricting and are clearly are inter-establishment fights that will be excluded entirely.

So that’s how I am going to do it! I am going to consider the ‘establishment’ to consist of the people in Congress and see how well they do at winning primaries! While ‘establishment strength’ is a fuzzy concept, incumbent vote share is something easily available. It is not a perfect proxy, but hopefully it will serve me well enough for the purposes of this study.