What's Best, Appeasing Groups or Power To Make Changes for Them? {For Dems&Those Believing in Gov}

 

By Adam Jentleson

Mr. Jentleson is a former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.

The New York Times

When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”

Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.

Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.

Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.  

That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.

Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

 

Interest groups tend to be nonprofit organizations dedicated to advancing a single issue or set of related issues that they often hope to get on the Democrats’ agenda. At their best, these groups can be productive partners in building power and legislating. But many have grown too big, adopted overly expansive mandates and become disastrously cavalier about the basic realities of American politics in ways that end up undermining their own goals.

To cite a few examples, when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off. 

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

Ruthlessly prioritizing winning will make the groups mad, and that’s OK — in fact, it will be good for them. Groups have become too accustomed to enjoying access without holding themselves accountable; the question “is this tactic more likely to trigger backlash than to advance our goals?” is the single most important one, yet it seems to be rarely asked by many of the groups’ leaders or funders. Meanwhile, many of today’s lawmakers and leaders have come up at a time when alienating the groups is seen as anathema, but they should start seeing it as both right and necessary — a long overdue resetting of the relationship that will be healthy for all involved.

The groups also pollute the talent pipeline by training young people in magical thinking, teaching them to apply movement tactics to every issue instead of inculcating them with the disciplined practice of smart politics. This is primarily the fault of the leaders, not the youth, since many bosses claim to live in fear of being “canceled” by their young staff members. Yet having managed dozens of junior staffers in progressive institutions for more than a decade, I know it is possible to listen to and learn from their concerns and create a supportive work environment while also setting clear boundaries and expectations.

Building a supermajority will require fresh, talented workers who energetically embrace the challenge of seeking change through the political system. By contrast, urging young people to think they can simply change the system when it produces results they don’t like does them no favors. Walking to work on Capitol Hill often involves navigating numerous protests, which fade into background noise. By contrast, a think tank like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has probably never participated in a sit-in but has helped lift millions of people out of poverty by producing credible policy analysis and identifying pragmatic legislative changes that lawmakers can implement. Today, the organization’s model is considered unfashionable, derided as incrementalism in an era that valorizes maximalism.

The 2026 midterms will offer an opportunity for Democrats to make major gains in the House and the Senate. Mr. Trump is likely to be an unpopular president, and congressional Republicans consistently undermine their own advantages in pursuit of tax cuts for the wealthy. 

A winning strategy has to be more heterodox than the interest groups will allow. Many candidates who overperformed in swing districts were, simultaneously, economically populist, culturally conservative, anti-regulation and anti-corruption, reflecting the complexity of voters that the groups try to sand down. Working-class people feel cheated by major corporations, yet Amazon has been extremely popular — far more so than the federal government. Americans blame billionaires for economic unfairness and want to tax them at higher rates, but also look up to them and think they’re good for the economy. By wishing away these complexities, a coalition-first mind-set produces many candidates who are the inverse of what voters want — people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.

Democrats need to strip our messaging down to the studs and focus on the enduring issues that have stood the test of time. It is highly persuasive to give voters basic information in clear terms about Democrats’ positions on Social Security and Medicare, health care, prescription drug pricing, abortion rights and tax policy. Every interest group comes armed with polls of questionable quality showing their issue is popular — but we should focus on what’s been tried and tested.

One way to do this is for Democrats to stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun. This is where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.

Democrats should seek out issues that demonstrate their willingness to fight for their constituents and break with progressive orthodoxy. The emerging concept known as supply-side progressivism offers a good guide, embracing limited deregulation that advances liberal policy goals.

Democratic candidates such as Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington opposed regulations that prevent day care workers from peeling fresh fruit for kids and a mandate for new safety features on table saws that would have made the saws so expensive that people would simply use circular saws, likely resulting in more severed fingers. For Jared Golden of Maine, it was opposing a Biden administration rule meant to protect whales that would have hurt his state’s lobster industry. Border security has clearly emerged as a threshold issue for working-class voters, including Latinos; by taking a hard line, Dan Osborn (an independent candidate) in Nebraska and Ruben Gallego in Arizona ran well ahead of Ms. Harris. Except for Mr. Osborn (who still ran 13 points ahead of Ms. Harris), these candidates have won or are ahead in their races for the House and Senate. 

Our bench is strong, but if we let interest groups dictate the incentive structure for the second resistance as they did for the first, overperformers like Mr. Gallego and Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez will be pulled to the left in politically disastrous ways. Or they will simply be overlooked, as was the case in the 2020 presidential primary for candidates with strong electoral records like Amy Klobuchar or Steve Bullock.

Supermajority thinkers should concede nothing on righteousness. In politics, winning elections is the moral imperative. You go into this business to change people’s lives for the better. That means changing policy, and to change policy you have to win.

Those who would rather lose elections so that they can feel better about themselves leave the real suffering to the people they claim to fight for. No one wins when we lose. It is time to start winning again.