The Brutal Math Of Pro-Democracy Politics

Inside the mailbag: Third Way ... Big Lebowski ... JD Vance

(Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Adam G: As we all know the Democratic Party is widely disliked, with a 34% approval rating. The brand is tarnished, and it seems to me the only way to turn things around is what happens to companies in receivership - to restore confidence, there needs to be a major shakeup in leadership.

The problem is, typically, there is a challenge to the leadership following an election (when the Party loses seats or doesn't gain as many as predicted), and we can't really wait until November, 2026. By then, Trump will have entrenched his regime beyond extraction (if he hasn't already).

What do you think are the chances we'll manage to replace Schumer and Jeffries (and some others at the top) with some actual fighters, like Murphy and AOC (or similar) before 2026? And how would that happen, if it can?

Mid-session leadership elections are obviously rare, but they’re not that rare, at least in the GOP. House Republicans forced John Boehner out of power in 2015 then actually deposed Kevin McCarthy less than a decade later.

Now that’s partially a function of the fact that, by constitutional design, the Speaker is elected by the entire House, which means a tiny dissident faction can team up with the opposition party to vacate the chair. There’s a procedure for it written into the House rules each new term. By contrast, House and Senate minority and majority leaders are elected much more informally by party caucuses, and that makes them harder to dislodge.

An embattled House speaker with a 230 member majority will typically need to keep 218 of those members on side. The House majority leader can hang on with just 116 of them.

And it’s not just that the math is hard.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries derive much strength from the fact that they need support from only half their members to stay in power. They also both raise a lot of money for the party and its candidates. Jeffries derives additional support for a few decent reasons:

1. He’s relatively new at top, and relatively young as well;

2. House Democrats didn’t dramatically underperform in 2024—Jeffries could credibly argue that state-level failures in New York and North Carolina cost him the speakership;

3. He didn’t break faith with the Democratic electorate by voting to fund Trump’s government in March.

For all these reasons, and probably others, they will be hard to dislodge before the midterms. But if Schumer helps line up votes to fund Trump’s government again, and the anti-Trump protest movement rises against him, it could happen. It would require 24 members of the Democratic caucus to line up behind an alternative and call a leadership vote during a meeting—there’s no constitutional formalism around it.

BJ: It's so confusing: the more I read/listen, the more I wonder. How do the dems win anything without the big umbrella/stick/coalition that includes the progressives, the true & lite greens, the "centrists" (anti-crime? YIMBY? pro-union?), the discontented and horrified republicans and the - gawd help us all - "swing" voters, who seem so disconnected from democratic practice that they vote for whatever whoever will keep the sales tax down, the property values up, the rent stable, the crime and wages to a minimum and will talk to pollsters and The Run-Up explaining how their inconsistent and variable "interest" in elections is normal and something we should be listening to? (Dangling participles notwithstanding.)

What are we supposed to do to recalibrate/listen (in the Mamdani sense) and - yes - hate to admit it - but how do we FIGHT this shite? After listening to you and Matt talk about the options, he seemed to think lefties were a big part of the problem, but moderation seems to help about as much as strongly-worded letters. What do you (and others you talk to) think right now about this intractable-but-engaging challenge?

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days. Not sure if it’ll be in the form of a single essay or thoughts scattered over multiple pieces, but the short version is: There’s no way for Democrats to win in today’s America without uniting large factions that disagree in the abstract about the role of the state in the economic lives of citizens. I don’t think these differences are as huge as the people embroiled in factional warfare do, and they’re tiny compared to the differences between liberals and Republicans. But if the factions are intent on fighting each other, then it doesn’t really matter what I think.

I do think they should cop to it, though: Factional infighting around these disagreements is poisonous in the current context, and finding common ground—temporary or lasting—around more fundamental principles is the only way out.

Let me explain.

There are many, many people, most of them well meaning, who believe they could ignite a realignment, creating a modern version of the New Deal coalition, if they could just gain enough control over the Democratic Party to enact a worker-oriented agenda.

I suspect I would support many if not most of the policies they’d put in place, but I think that as of today, their theory of politics is just wrong.

It’s not necessarily a permanent or insuperable fact of life in America, but for all of my time on Earth, self-identified conservatives have outnumbered self-identified liberals and progressives by a wide margin. It’s shrunk over that time from about two-to-one to about 50 percent. But it’s still too big to brush off as a branding problem. There are surely people in the country who call themselves “conservative” because they think the label reflects something righteous about themselves—even as in practice they are quite liberal. But they aren’t numerous enough to erase that deficit. There’s likewise no reason to think that tons of those conservatives are just burdened by false consciousness—that they will have a political awakening once a left-populist becomes the Democratic Party nominee. They are overwhelmingly rightists, with rule-or-ruin instincts about who counts as American—who can legitimately wield power. If they happened to be 20 percent of the country instead of 30-40, different alignments would be possible. But our demographic breakdown as of today is what it is.

People think of Barack Obama’s 2008 election as a modern landslide, but to me it was also illustrative of this imbalance. George W. Bush left office with an approval rating below 30 percent; the economy was headed for depression; his Republican successor, John McCain, was well known as a war hawk, running to lead a war-weary nation. Obama was viewed favorably upon his inauguration by almost 80 percent of the country. Yet McCain still racked up almost 46 percent of the vote.

The silver lining is that right-wing politics in the Trump era don’t have majoritarian appeal. It has immense minoritarian appeal, and it has enough power to coerce support from what would otherwise be fairly neutral actors. But the essence of MAGA is quite unpopular. If self-identified liberals and progressives and self-identified moderates aligned unreluctantly to protect the things they jointly care about (free and fair elections, civil equality, rule of law, etc.) they would win pretty easily. And if they used their power to expose and break the conservative movement, they might be able to change the math of ideological self-identification, experiment with new alignments, etc.

But as long as the two wings of the Democratic Party remain intent on defeating the other for total control, we’re in great danger.

Bill: 1) I keep hearing doom-sayers talking about Democrats attempts to even the playing field by redistricting won’t work. A guy named Dave Daley was on Greg Sargent’s pod last week telling us that California will, at best, even out Texas but Indiana, Ohio, and Florida will tip the scales back. Isn’t this all based on voter registration data (R+3, D+1) numbers? Aren’t they ignoring the political environment?

2.) Last week the New York Times ran a big feature on how Democrats continue to fall behind in new voter registration. I didn’t read it as I cancelled my subscription long ago. Should I, as someone allergic to fascism, be as worried as the headline suggests?

1. I think it’s altogether right for Democrats to tally up gerrymander-able seats on both sides and pencil out optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, so long as nobody’s pointing to the pessimistic scenarios to make the case for unilateral disarmament. There’s no sense in which fighting leaves Democrats worse off than not fighting here. Republicans are already off to the races.

   Estimating the partisan lean of new districts based on past voting patterns, I gather that in an all out war, Republicans would probably end up ahead by a small number of seats. But, as you suggest, that’s not the end of the story. If Democrats overperform in 2026 they could overwhelm Republican gerrymanders, even to the point where the whole escalatory cycle backfires on the GOP, and Republicans wish they’d never started down this road. They, of course, will try to prevent a landslide with aggressive voter-suppression and election-subversion tactics. But the point is, nobody can say for certain how it’ll all wash out. A computer can’t spit out an optimal gerrymander with total certainty for the same reason we can’t predict House control in advance: The future is unknowable.

2. It’s not nothing, but that piece was pretty sus. The cited data ran from 2020-2024—the years Democrats were stuck in an enthusiasm abyss and the fascist right was hungry for resurgence. If as time goes on, Democrats don’t start closing this gap, it might signal a deeper problem. But there are probably dozens of things that cause me to lose more sleep.

Austin Payne: It was pathetic seeing Tim Cook show up to the Oval Office to grovel and present Trump with an appeasement trophy. You can see the obvious sickness eating away at Trump's soul when he accepted the gift, then proceeded to publicly belittle Cook. The thing is, you can see the rationale from Apple's perspective (just kiss his ass, get slapped around a little, but at least you get a tariff carveout and protect your shareholder value). It's naive to think that American business leaders are coming to save us, especially if (see above) they're willing to choose the path of least resistance and maximized self-interest.

If you were a CEO of a similarly-sized corporation, would you have been forced to pull a Tim Cook? What avenues of resistance are available to you? Is it a given that the corporations ultimately side with the fascists, or are there alternative scenarios? What role does public opinion/the consumer have in this equation?

So I’m not a lawyer, and I’m definitely not a big CEO or corporate board defender. But it is hard to look at recent jurisprudence, against the backdrop of fiduciary obligation, and not see why men like Cook are prone at Trump’s feet. The message from the Supreme Court is quite clear: We’ll let Trump’s illegal actions stand pending litigation, and quite possibly forever.

If that’s the operating environment, of course corporate leaders will choose appeasement. It’s either that or lose tons of money. Now, of course, they could align to take Trump on. There is still a Chamber of Commerce and an NFIB. They know how to mount campaigns, they know how to influence courts and legislators, etc. And so my sympathy for the execs is extremely limited. But to the extent they had any patriotic inclination, Trump and his allies on the bench have teamed up to shatter it.

What I’d like to see is some creative thinking among firms and actors that aren’t at Trump’s mercy about how to squeeze the firms and actors who take the Tim Cook route. A couple weeks ago, I suggested to a lawyer friend that some smaller U.S.-based device manufacturer should sue Apple for buying Trump’s favor, on the same basic legal theory that powered the emoluments lawsuits during Trump’s first term. As a conduit for bribes, Trump’s DC hotel placed competitors at a disadvantage. Similarly, by paying a bribe, Cook received leniency that’s probably unavailable to smaller firms, putting them at a disadvantage.

I’d also obviously like to see Democrats speak with a louder voice. Small numbers of Democrats have fired warning shots at companies and firms engaged in or contemplating this kind of bribery. But unless those firms believe that a re-empowered Democratic Party will prioritize accountability, they’re going to act like Trump is the bigger threat. And that means all or nearly all Democrats need to join these efforts, not just a handful here and there.

Gary Paudler: Are we really so goddam stoopid and fragile that we glitch when we hear a few words and phrases that Republican consultants and Barely-Not-Republican (that is to say "Centrist, Moderate or Third-Way Democrats) tell us are to blame for our losses? Must we really accept that advice as having been proffered in good faith? That's the stench that arrives with Hakeem "Distraction Bot" Jeffries and Chuck "I'm Napping!" Schumer and lifts with the appearance of Sanders, Mamdani, Crockett, AOC, Tlaib, Jayapal or Frost. We haven't had a truly progressive leader but we know that we can't stand a progressive leader.

You’re alluding to the Third Way’s list of disfavored progressive terms and idioms, and you’re right to smell baselessness there. There’s nothing underneath it, those are just words and phrases that annoy the people who wrote the memo.

Their intuitions may be good, bad, or good as to some terms and bad as to others.

But every time these questions of jargon and political correctness arise, I can’t help but think of this scene from the most cited movie of my lifetime.

To some extent, I think Democrats view the challenge of mass appeal as Searching for Walter Sobchak: They need more burly veterans who don’t take shit lying down, but who are at the same time sensitive to the feelings of weaker people.

And then all the Third Way types respond: Just drop the nomenclature part!

But my impression is that, to the extent any of this matters, it isn’t nomenclature per se, but the sense that progressive environments are unwelcoming to people who haven’t kept up with the times. That if you join some progressive civic cause, someone like Sobchak (or, heaven forfend, a purple-haired nonbinary person!) will overhear you using some outmoded term and make a point of scolding you publicly: “Also, dude, Latino is not the preferred nomenclature…”

In my experience (lived experience???) even set-in-their-ways oldsters eventually come around, or come part way, to accepting new language norms. But along the road to acceptance, they will naturally become defensive if condescended to by younger, avant-garde people.

Elsewhere in Southern California, probably five or six years before the period depicted in Lebowski, my dad had a solo medical practice, which meant he was on call seven days a week, with two toddlers at home. So he teamed up with another specialist, who also had a young child, so they could trade weekends. This evolved into a decades-long partnership and lifelong friendship.

Early on, they set up standing Friday night phone calls to check in with each other about new patients, or with updates about old patients, and when my dad would brief his partner on new patients with East Asian ancestry, he defaulted to describing them as “oriental.” This was probably 1985, and inland California was provincial enough that my dad didn’t realize the term had become pejorative over the previous decade or two. One reason I’m certain my dad meant no offense is that his partner was an immigrant from Taiwan. Oops!

When Dr. Huang realized this wasn’t a slip—that my dad simply thought he was using acceptable nomenclature, and would keep using it—he interjected kindly and discreetly that people of East Asian ancestry had come to view “oriental” as a slur. My dad was mortified, apologized, and never used the term again.

This is how things should go—both among political affiliates trying to broaden their appeal, and among mature adults in general. By contrast, if in making this same innocent mistake at the hospital one day 40 years ago, the resident trainees had responded by denouncing my dad in a letter to management and demanding he take sensitivity classes or whatever… well, he may not have been so receptive to the education.

To that end, we should probably place a small premium on maximally inclusive, generous, and pedestrian language. The upsides are real, and the downsides are tiny or nonexistent. (It’s also clearly not the biggest deal in the world. Republicans use all kinds of internet-poisoned jargon in their politicking and they’re doing just fine¹.)

But we should place a large premium on generosity of spirit. Speech norms change, understanding of history changes, but we should accept that it takes most people a bit of time to catch up. If it all unfurls as a jarring new set of expectations imposed on them by imperious sorts, they’re liable to rebel against it. To take a current example, the problem with kicking DNC meetings off with land acknowledgements isn’t that progressives are wrong about the vicious cleansing of native Americans, but that a lot of people who might want to try the Democratic Party on for size probably don’t want to engage in compulsory self-flagellation rituals as the price of acceptance.

So from where I sit, counter-scolds like the folks at Third Way should worry less about jargon than about where evolving language veers into norm policing. People who stand for office, or who are known to be avatars of the broad left, should try to speak plainly (so that most Americans will catch their meaning) but not sweat it too much if they lapse into p.c. speak. And we should all strive to achieve compassionate, mutual comprehension between people of good faith from different eras or cultures or parts of the country.

Gordon Reynolds: I have a question. What happens after Trump? When he’s gone, by whatever means, what will we have left to deal with? I don’t think he’ll be able to serve out his term. He looks awful, he increasingly sounds like my mother only a few years before she passed away. She had dementia. So does he. What happens when he finally passes his expiration date?

In the most literal sense it depends on whether you’re right about the imminence of Trump’s demise. If he dies before his term is out, JD Vance becomes president automatically (duh) and we get to learn just how personalist the MAGA cult really is. Vance is a more dangerous thinker than Trump, insofar as he’s capable of constructing political ideologies, as well as personal ones. Trump is a power-mad narcissist, which is a terrible trait for a political leader, but it also provides us some insulation from “destroy the village to save the village”-style atrocity-justification you’ll get from fanatics like Vance. Trump will at least stop to wonder how it’ll all look on television.

My sense of Vance is that he’s more ambitious than he is intelligent, but he’s plenty of both, and so his ambition has driven him toward different ideological beachheads at different times. He’s always dancing with the ones that brung him, and so as president he’d be a Thielite.

Not good!

More hopefully, though, he lacks Trump’s rizz and decades of star power. I think it’s very possible that the organized right will descend into bitter recriminations the moment Trump dies, because nobody waiting in the wings can reunify them in the purpose of exalting the leader. Not Vance. Not the Trump sons. Nobody.

Luke Christofferson: What are your actual expectations for ways this Supreme Court will stand up for America? Are there helpful ways for Dems to start putting pressure on them? Do you think they would change their behavior if taken of Court packing increased?

We’ve already established that the Supreme Court’s m.o. is to let Trump change the status quo, then hold the new status quo in place pending lengthy litigation, creating immense damage in the interim.

And we knew going in that the court is solicitous of Trump on the merits of cases, too.

So my actual expectations are quite low! Trump could lose some big-but-obvious cases on the merits. The birthright citizenship case, the case challenging his tariff authority, any cases that stem from his attempts to federalize elections. If Trump becomes more unpopular over time, perhaps the justices will weaken their presumption of regularity and get in the way of his abuse of emergency powers.

But generally, I think the court will absent itself at best, and collaborate with Trump at worst, and we should proceed as citizens under the assumption that the court isn’t going to get any less terrible in the near term than it has been.

That by no means absolves Democratic leaders of their obligation to try to change the justices’ incentives. They should promise a reckoning, using ominous language, and the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats should stand behind them.

1. Republicans also engage in far more sweeping and abusive forms of censure than progressives. They directly fire people, ban books, and censor museum exhibits, all to force right-think on unsuspecting Americans. But they tend to do it on behalf of white- and Eurocentric ideas, which insulates them from backlash, insofar as America remains majority white.