Cite as: 530 U. S. 567 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
n. 22 (quoting L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 791 (1978)). See also Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U. S. 609, 623 (1984).
In no area is the political association's right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee. That process often determines the party's positions on the most significant public policy issues of the day, and even when those positions are predetermined it is the nominee who becomes the party's ambassador to the general electorate in winning it over to the party's views. See Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U. S. 351, 372 (1997) (Stevens, J., dissenting) ("But a party's choice of a candidate is the most effective way in which that party can communicate to the voters what the party represents and, thereby, attract voter interest and support"). Some political parties—such as President Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, the La Follette Progressives of 1924, the Henry Wallace Progressives of 1948, and the George Wallace American Independent Party of 1968—are virtually inseparable from their nominees (and tend not to outlast them). See generally E. Kruschke, Encyclopedia of Third Parties in the United States (1991).
Unsurprisingly, our cases vigorously affirm the special place the First Amendment reserves for, and the special protection it accords, the process by which a political party "select[s] a standard bearer who best represents the party's ideologies and preferences." Eu, supra, at 224 (internal quotation marks omitted). The moment of choosing the party's nominee, we have said, is "the crucial juncture at which the appeal to common principles may be translated into concerted action, and hence to political power in the community." Tashjian, 479 U. S., at 216; see also id., at 235- 236 (Scalia, J., dissenting) ("The ability of the members of the Republican Party to select their own candidate . . . unquestionably implicates an associational freedom"); Timmons, 520 U. S., at 359 ("[T]he New Party, and not some-
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