The Supreme Court gave political parties their power back | Opinion

On the last two days of the Supreme Court's term, a flurry of decisions got overshadowed by the blockbuster birthright citizenship ruling. One case that slipped through the cracks deserves more attention: NRSC v. FEC, a campaign finance decision that will reshape how American elections are funded.

The court ruled that limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their own candidates are unconstitutional. The legal reasoning behind that outcome is sound, but it's not what's worth dwelling on here.

What matters more is the practical effect: America's political parties are about to get stronger, with far more control over their own candidates. That's a good thing, even if it doesn't feel like it yet.

Supreme Court ruling strengthens political parties

Until now, the Federal Election Campaign Act capped how much political parties could spend in coordination with their own candidates.

Political action committees and super PACs faced no such limits, but they couldn't coordinate spending with candidates the way parties can. That imbalance gave outside groups an outsized role in elections and pushed donors toward them instead of the parties.

Candidates grew more beholden to those outside groups than to their own parties, weakening party influence over their own nominees ‒ and producing more candidates who cosplay as Republicans or Democrats in pursuit of power rather than out of any real allegiance.

The court's decision came down 6-3 along ideological lines, ruling that these party coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment.

The dissent, authored by Justice Elena Kagan, pointed to the risk of corruption and circumvention of other campaign finance laws: "When a party makes such a coordinated expenditure, it essentially pays the candidate's bills ‒ stepping up to fund something the candidate would otherwise have to. Without limits on those expenditures, a candidate could ask a donor to make a substantial contribution to the party so as to finance his own campaign expenses. It would then be as though the candidate contribution limits did not exist."

Caps on individual donations to political parties remain in place, though. Those limits run higher than the caps on giving directly to candidates, but they still top out at $44,300 a year ‒ nowhere near enough for a wealthy individual to buy an election in the sense doomsday predictors imagine. The circumvention Kagan warns about is real, but it's no scenario where elections get bought outright by the wealthy.

Why strong political parties matter

Super PACs can spend unlimited money on candidates, but they're barred from coordinating that spending with the campaigns themselves. Before this ruling, that meant little incentive to give to parties over political action committees ‒ the PACs had the upper hand.

That changes now. Individual contribution limits to parties still stand, but parties hold a new advantage: They can coordinate directly with candidates in a way PACs never could. Donors giving to parties can now see that money put to direct use.

Why does it matter whether candidates get their money from PACs or from parties? Money flowing down from a party increases a candidate's accountability to that party. The alternative is capture by PACs whose priorities may diverge sharply from the party's own.

Those PACs often have agendas beyond producing electable candidates ‒ pulling a party further left or further right, whether through democratic socialist-aligned groups or MAGA-aligned ones, or narrower single-issue groups like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee's United Democracy Project.

Restoring the funding pipeline to the parties themselves lets parties decide their own platform, rather than ceding that ground to outside groups.

If we're operating under the current election primary system, the surest way to raise candidate quality is to return strength to the parties. Parties are simply better at picking general-election winners than primary voters are ‒ they understand electability in a way that primary voters, often the most committed partisans in the room, don't prioritize.

This cycle alone, voters in both parties have bucked the stronger general election choice in favor of a partisan "fighter."

Republican voters in Texas nominated state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a considerably weaker U.S. Senate candidate, over the establishment choice, John Cornyn. Democrats fell into the same trap. Maine voters nominated the scandal-plagued Graham Platner, an extremely weak challenger to Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

Give parties more control over their own nominating process, and mistakes like these become far less likely.

The case for letting voters have the outsized say doesn't hold up as well as it sounds. Primary electorates skew toward the most partisan voters, which pushes candidates toward extreme positions at the expense of electability. Small-dollar donors, who make up a minor and disproportionately partisan slice of the electorate, have the same effect. Much of the drift toward more extreme, more combative candidates in recent years traces back to that shift ‒ away from large donors and toward small ones.

Restoring power to the parties, and away from a small, partisan slice of voters, will produce higher-quality candidates. That shift should have a moderating effect ‒ parties rewarding electability over the kind of personal brand-building and outside-group capture that has driven candidates further from the center.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Supreme Court gave political parties their power back | Opinion

Reporting by Dace Potas, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 6, 2026 at 1:03 AM.