Let’s peer into a future where Democrats come to power in 2029 with a governing trifecta. In this crystal ball, the only thing we can’t see is how large their majorities will be. We just know they’ve won two national elections in a row.
They will try to pull this off. It’s what parties and candidates exist to do. And—thanks to Donald Trump and a decent roster of wannabe presidents—I think the odds are in their favor.
But victory could come in many sizes and shapes. A big question looming over our collective fate is how well Democrats will have to fare in all of the elections between now and 2029 to govern the country through the omnicrisis Trump will leave behind.
Could they make better use of a narrow Senate majority than Joe Biden did in 2021 and 2022? Or will they need a supermajority, like the one Barack Obama enjoyed in 2009 and 2010—the third largest in the entire post-New Deal era.
It goes without saying that more is better; anyone who might be president in 2029 would rather have whopping majorities than slim ones. Extra votes provide a buffer. They broaden the range and ambition of legislation that can become law. They reduce the risk of losing power in subsequent elections.
That Democrats should want and pursue the largest-possible majorities is trivially true. But do they need whopping majorities? Will they fail if they don’t get at least into the high 50s?
That’s the thesis of a new book called Supermajority by Adam Jentleson, the former Harry Reid aide, who later worked for John Fetterman, and now helms the moderate-branded Searchlight Institute.
In an op-ed ahead of its release, Jentleson asserts, “The narrow majorities to which [Democrats have] become accustomed will never be enough to restore a pluralistic democracy and defeat the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.”
He goes on to explain how he thinks Democrats can pull together a supermajority rather than a narrow one. His prescription for party building is basically correct, and uncontroversial. Indeed, Democrats are already doing what he wants.
But I reject this stipulation—that we’re doomed without a supermajority—as much too defeatist.
To restore pluralistic democracy, Democrats need just enough power to:
Abolish the filibuster;
Expand the Supreme Court;
Create at least two new states (but ideally more) out of existing territories of disenfranchised American citizens.
That’s it. This wouldn’t be the end of the project. But it’s the threshold. What’s necessary, but not sufficient. It can be done without a supermajority.
A wider berth would be better. Nobody disputes that. And there’s no inescapable tension between majoritymaxxing and priming Democrats to wield power once they claim it—or at least there shouldn’t be. But to the extent that one of these objectives must come at the expense of the other, democracymaxxing should take precedence.
Everyone has a role to play. Leaders of the progressive insurgency should feel a sense of obligation to disclaim candidates who might win Democratic primaries but lose general elections to fascists. Ambitious red-state Democrats should stand aside for independents who lack the party’s brand baggage, and thus stand better odds of winning statewide.
But it is the work of moderates to ferret out who in the party would stand in the way of democracy protection, and either disabuse them or expose them so that a) they can be targeted by viable primary challengers, and b) party leaders know how much of a buffer they’ll need.
This is, I’d argue, the most important work of all.
In 2021, Democrats had 50 Senate votes, but two of their members were vocal opponents of filibuster abolition. Credible reporting at the time suggested the real number was larger.
This is what cannot happen again. If Democrats come back to power with a narrow majority, at least 50 of them, but ideally all, need to be ready to act.
The Trump experience has hopefully shrunk this pusillanimous, outworn faction. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are gone. Fetterman will not be a senator in 2029. If the number of obstructors is zero, then Democrats can have a mere 50 votes on January 20, 2029 and still restore pluralistic democracy. More would be better. More would insure against illness, death, cold feet, and mischief. But commitment to purpose is the essential ingredient. With resolve, a 50-vote majority can become 54 over the course of a few months.
Here’s another load-bearing claim in Jentleson’s essay: “Even assuming we reform or abolish the filibuster, as we should, the courts will be waiting to strike down our agenda. We should pass court reform, but even then, we will need to replace conservative Supreme Court justices with liberals, a process that will probably take years.”
Wait, what? Years? Why? There are structural court-reform ideas kicking around the pro-democracy world that would take time to implement. But simply adding seats to the court should take days; filling those seats should take weeks; further democracy reforms could begin rolling out immediately thereafter—though some would require new precedents from the unrigged judiciary.
Most of us have no living memory of it; the rest have likely either forgotten, or else never considered its relevance to our crisis of democracy. But the government has dealt with simultaneous Supreme Court vacancies multiple times in its history. And the norm (insofar as anyone thought of it that way) was to run the confirmation processes for those justices simultaneously, rather than stagger them.
Check the history: Justice Hugo Black retired on September 17, 1971; Justice John Marshall Harlan II retired less than a week later on September 23, 1971. On October 21, Richard Nixon nominated William Rehnquist to replace Harlan and Lewis Powell to replace Black. The Senate confirmed Powell on December 6, Rehnquist on December 10. At this pace, we could have 13 justices by mid-April 2029.
Washington, DC, could then safely be granted statehood. If Puerto Rico chose to join the union, the Senate majority would (probably) jump to 54 by summer, and at least two of the newly elected senators would be out of cycle until after the 2030 midterm.
There are good reasons to want a supermajority, but the idea that we can’t revive democracy without a supermajority concedes too much. Unless the point is to run cover for uncounted moderates and incumbents who intend to stand in the way.
Other moderates have become fixated on elusive supermajorities through pretextual reasoning.
The centrist writer Damon Linker claims, “Dems had 60 seats in the Senate less than two decades ago. That seems impossible now because the party moved sharply left on cultural issues, including immigration, race, gender, crime, etc. Rather than reversing course, some would rather break the system.”
Linker restates a commonly held view in centrist politics, where history more or less begins with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and the supermajorities he enjoyed in his first two years were a product of optimal or near-optimal moderation. In this view, Democrats squandered power through hubris. They concluded demographics were destiny, shed their old-time religion, “moved sharply left,” and lost their majorities, which they can’t possibly win back unless they race to the right.
This is a tendentious and convenient telling. It’s also mostly ahistoric and (as to what is and isn’t possible) I think it’s likely wrong. There’s only one future, and we can’t see it. But Democrats can probably do more or less what they’re already doing and win a Senate supermajority in 2028. Maybe not literally 60 votes. But close.
Here’s a more parsimonious version of events: Long before Obama ran for president, the country was in the midst of a white working-class voter realignment into the GOP. Then George W. Bush’s incompetence and the Great Recession (along with, perhaps, a small assist from Obama and his unique political talents) temporarily bumped this trend into reverse. Democrats won back-to-back landslide elections, including, in 2008, on an agenda that was very progressive for the time! But the Great Recession wasn’t forever, and as old patterns and habits reemerged, we reverted to trend.
Most of the seats Linker laments losing were lost to Republican landslides in 2010 and 2014, when Obama led the party and the moderatism reigned.
I do concede this: Democrats had grown more progressive by 2016 than they were in 2008. They drifted left. Some of this was simply mission fulfillment. Obama didn’t fix everything that was broken or regressive about America. There was more work left to be done. But for the most part, Democrats were conforming to the preferences of their own voters, whose sincere beliefs many centrists simply disdain. As Republicans became more reactionary, Democrats became more educated, with a higher propensity to vote.
Their popular appeal has thus remained near its Obama-era potential. Joe Biden won millions more votes than Barack Obama. Democrats actually won more House seats (a decent proxy for popular appeal) in the 2018 midterms than they did in the analogous 2006 midterms. They lost Senate seats in 2018, because these citizens aren’t optimally distributed. Too many of them live in too few, bigger bluer states.
This surely sucks. And in some realpolitik, almost tautological sense, building a new supermajority will require Democrats to field candidates in red states who side with Republicans on discrete issues, even as Republicans in those same states can get away with being ideologically rigid.
Think James Talarico running as a pro-oil Democrat. Or Adam Hamilton running as a megachurch pastor in Kansas. But that’s the point. What Jentleson wants, and Linker views as impossible, is already happening!
Positioning is just one tactic. There are other limits, and more tactical maneuvers to consider. Republicans have spent billions of dollars fomenting right-wing hatred of self identified Democrats and liberals. Democrats should thus probably stand down altogether in certain red states and back independent candidates who broadly share their values. This is what the party tried to do in Montana, where a Senate seat is up for grabs in November, and an independent named Seth Bodnar shows real strengths as a politician. But the Democratic nominee, Alani Bankhead, refused to drop out ahead of the withdrawal deadline earlier this month. The field is now split.
That is how the potential for a 2029 supermajority gets frittered away. The claim that what imperils us is Democrats [which Democrats?] who simply refuse to “reverse course” [how exactly?] on “immigration, race, crime, etc.” doesn’t withstand real scrutiny.
There’s sadly no obvious way to ensure that every ambitious Democrat in every conceivable battleground is selfless and civic-minded. But keeping the factional peace should be easier than internet-poisoned progressives and centrists make it look. In many ways we’re witnessing it now.
Jentleson writes, “It’s time to shift our focus to building a supermajority,” but as he acknowledges later in the piece, the shift has already begun. “All of these candidates believe in expanding health care access, expanding the safety net and making the wealthy pay their fair share. By merging these core common Democratic values with the heterodoxy that wins in red areas, they are developing an agenda that unites the big tent.”
There’s really nothing to quibble with here. I would only propose broadening the frame, so that the grounds for big-tent unity stand in more precise contrast with fascism. Fascists can pretend to support expanding the safety net; they always pretend to be economic populists. But they hate freedom.
What unites the wings of the Democratic Party? Certain health-care reforms, yes. But at the greatest level of abstraction it’s the stuff the fascists are trying to extinguish: democracy, civil equality, economic fairness, the rule of law.
What divides the party? There are obviously raging disagreements over everything from program design to economic theory. But the main thing that divides them is saboteurs on the left and the center fringes who’d rather lose, or splinter the party, than share it with people who want too much or too little change. Who’d give the country over to fascists rather than hold tight to the things that make us free.
These include cosplay Marxist wreckers in the DSA, and the shills of the Third Way who will, in short order, blow $15 million on a donor-funded campaign against left-wing candidates.
They have no place in the tent. The models of cooperative partnership are the progressive and moderate leaders who collaborate on policy and campaign together. AOC and Pat Ryan. Bernie Sanders and Rebecca Cooke. The Democrats who should dine alone in the party cafeteria are the ones who watched Zohran Mamdani win the Democratic mayoral primary and still tried to get him kicked out of the party. When does Hillary Scholten intend to endorse Abdul el-Sayed?
Higher values are also easier to message than common-ground policy, which drags everyone into the mire of specifics. You all agree about health care? Does that mean you all want socialized medicine? Who’s gonna pay for it?!
A shared commitment to basic freedom is an easier sell.
The new class of Democrats will include more members who identify as “democratic socialists.” I wish they would not insist on this terminology. It is, in most cases, an unnecessary and counterproductive indulgence. “Socialism” is a freighted term in the U.S., and, with perhaps one exception, we’re talking about people who promote FDR-style progressive labor-liberalism. If they insist on calling that “democratic socialism”—for transgressive reasons, or in deference to Bernie Sanders, or as a gesture to the European roots of their vision for reform—then everyone will have more explaining to do.
But that’s why god invented politicians.
During the 2020 primary, Pete Buttigieg contrasted himself with Bernie Sanders not by calling for Sanders’s expulsion from the field, but by calling himself a “democratic capitalist.” Their ideological differences were right there on the surface, but so, too, was their overriding commitment to democracy. We will have to come to terms over how large a role the government should play in the economy, but we are fully united in the belief that if citizens aren’t happy with their economic lives—whether because capitalists have too much power, or because our public programs don’t work well—then they can vote to change things.
This cycle, Florida Democrats will run a former Republican (David Jolly) for governor and a democratic socialist (Angela Nixon) for Senate. In a better system of government, these two politicians would find their homes in different parties. But in our two-party system, for the pendency of the GOP’s fascist formation, they have to align in the united front. They can run against each other and lose. Or they can run together—on the basis of their greatest shared commitments, pulling together the most disparate wings of the pro-democracy movement—and stand a chance.
If they pull it off, Democrats will be one seat closer to a 2029 supermajority. But if they fall short, all is not lost. A supermajority is a worthy goal. It should not be the standard for success. And it cannot be a prerequisite for democratic renewal.
There’s a lot to agree with here but one thing that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough as a huge barrier to all if this is how beholden so many congresspeople are to their donors.
The problem here lies with any kind of ‘court reform’ where currently big business enjoys the fact that they pretty much get what they want at the expense of not just working people but everyone. Billionaires hold massive amounts of power and influence, and they’re not going to give it up.
Just in my home state of California there are plans to put hundreds of millions into business friendly ‘moderate’ campaigns, both R and D, and against a couple of ballot measures through billionaire funded non profits and PACs.
I don’t really know how this country can truly be a democracy until we find a way to get money out of politics.
Just a quick comment. Your description of the goals all democrats share -
"democracy, civil equality, economic fairness, the rule of law." seem to me, if you take one
more step back, to be all about fairness. Democracy is fairness of access to voting, civil equality is fair access to resources like schools and gov services, economic fairness has it in the
name, and rule of law is fairness in access and treatment by the law. It's all about fairness - like
what most of us learned in kindergarten or from our parents.