Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Parties Dominate Their Presidential Nominees

Presidential Nominees Don't Call the Shots. Parties Do.

January 14, 2014 at 10:23 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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I had better start with the main point here, since I'm going to backfill a bit to get to it: Parties matter more than individual candidates.

First, some context.