In True Blues, Adam Hilton offers a comprehensive look into the process of layered reform that created the modern Democratic Party. Hilton shows how, rather than following a neat and orderly path, the disjointed development of today’s national “advocacy party” is a product of competition over the party’s internal workings and priorities. The product of reforms and counter-reforms, the advocacy party seeks to represent issue-oriented groups but is incapable of implementing policy and holding officeholders accountable. As a result, although they are central to the Democratic Party, activists and other outside groups are often left with little more than hollow promises from the “advocate-in-chief.”

To trace the development of the advocacy party, Hilton presents a theoretical framework based on three stages of reform (p. 9). First, a partisan crisis opens the door for entrepreneurs seeking to reform the party. Second, an “electoral test” offers the pro-reform faction an opportunity to solidify and build on these changes. A loss at the ballot box, however, affords counter-reformers an opportunity to unravel these reforms. Third, in the period between elections, the various factions engage in a contentious struggle to define both the structures and procedures of the party, as well as broader questions regarding what the party stands for and whom it claims to represent.

This model of entrepreneurial change is generally applicable to the pressures that parties face in the wake of an electoral upset and deserves more attention by scholars interested in party development. That said, the model’s greatest strength lies in its application to the series of reforms following the 1968 Democratic Convention. Indeed, a significant portion of the book revolves around this well-known story because of its prominent role not only in creating meaningful presidential primaries but also in the birth of the advocacy party. By initiating the reforms that would produce a hollow party, the Chicago convention and subsequent decade of contentious reform opened the door to greater participation without delivering the tools for enacting programmatic change.

Instead of confining his analysis to the usual story of presidential nominations, Hilton reminds us that the McGovern-Fraser Commission, and reform efforts more broadly, sought to revise much more than just the organization’s internal procedures. In seeking to diversify and welcome marginalized groups into the party, the insurgents struck at the very heart of the New Deal coalition that had defined the party for decades. For some reformers, the party could no longer harbor such contradictory allegiances, particularly if southern conservatives continued to block progressive policy change.

In addition to increasing participation, the “New Politics” movement advanced plans to empower grassroots activists with a greater say over national policy making and a mechanism to hold officeholders accountable. These ambitions were never realized because of George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon and growing opposition among those actors who had played kingmaker in the smoke-filled rooms of conventions past. State party elites, elected officials, and organized labor leaders actively opposed reforms that sought to disrupt the decentralized power structure of the party. Starting with the proposal to revise the party’s charter, the counter-reform movement successfully fought back efforts to create a “nationally integrated, programmatically liberal Democratic Party” (p. 112). Yet, by blocking the structural reforms designed to empower the grassroots with a stake in party decision making, these layered reforms essentially welcomed advocacy groups into the nominating process without providing any means for holding officeholders accountable. This development only further encouraged groups to rely on the executive branch, to mixed success, as a means for advancing their interests.

The second half of the book largely concerns how groups within the advocacy party have struggled to find policy success at the national level. With little options other than to appeal to the president, issue-oriented coalitions and ideological counter-reformers alike have continued to use the Democratic Party’s national conventions as the battleground for their legislative agenda. Hilton’s case study on full employment offers one such look into the challenges that groups, especially long-captured ones, encounter when they have little recourse outside the executive branch. Despite nominally supporting the issue during the 1976 primaries, President Carter ultimately proved to be one of the policy’s greatest opponents. Even though a full employment bill eventually passed, the final product was a symbolic gesture at best. Moreover, the full employment fight demonstrates that advocacy groups have few tools for holding officeholders to their campaign promises. That said, Hilton’s narrative hints at the potential for group accountability. Organized labor’s decision to sit out the 1972 general election and McGovern’s subsequent landslide defeat remind us that groups possess electoral resources that can be marshaled for or against a candidate, even if they lack the status of convention powerbroker.

During the 1980s, the Reagan Revolution again forced Democrats to reevaluate the identity of their party. After several decisive electoral defeats, the “New Democrats” positioned themselves as offering a third way that was neither old nor new. Bill Clinton’s rise in the party and success at the ballot box promised to institutionalize these values. Instead, New Democrats found themselves playing by the same rules as the advocacy groups but lacked the material resources and support base that others enjoyed. The decentralized party structure made lasting structural reform impossible, and policy victories like “ending welfare as we know it” were unsuccessful at reorienting the party’s identity.

The final empirical chapter concerns President Obama’s role as leader, beneficiary, and source of disappointment for the advocacy party. Obama’s approach to developing a standalone campaign organization, often at the expense of party building, reinforced the strategy for groups to pursue redress from the administrative state. This discussion serves as a natural conclusion to the theoretical development of the advocacy party but also raises new questions. Many groups, as Hilton notes, saw policy success during the Obama administration, despite frustration with the pace of progress. Like the Carter and Clinton case studies, the analysis of the Obama administration underscores the relative autonomy of the president. Short of idiosyncratic traits or ideological preferences, how should we make sense of any given choice the president makes, especially given the competing examples of groups both winning and losing?

Although it pays little explicit attention to the post-2016 Democratic Party, True Blues is nonetheless a compelling read for those pondering the major questions facing Democrats today. In discussing the 1972 labor–liberal rupture and the rise of the New Democrats in the 1980s, Hilton touches on many of the themes that continue to divide Democrats. Indeed, following electoral upsets in the 1970s and 1980s, the party wrestled with similar debates over the meaning of “identity politics” and the related challenge of recapturing blue-collar whites. Moreover, as we look to the Biden administration, Hilton’s study offers important context for the larger structural challenges facing those groups that extracted promises during the 2020 elections. Whether these groups see their priorities realized will largely depend on how President Biden responds, and they may have little say in the matter.