Paths to a Democratic Supermajority, Part 1: Does Anyone Have a Plan?

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Feb 9

Note: This is the first in a series of blog posts that explore what it would take to usher in a new era of Democratic dominance. Read part 2, “Scenarios for an "Electoral Lock" on the White House."

This may sound like a dumb question, but does anyone have a long-range plan for building a much larger Democratic governing majority?

I’m talking about an outcome whereby Democrats would reliably hold the White House, have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, enjoy a comfortable edge in the House, and have trifecta control of a majority of state governments.

That’s a mouthful, so let’s refer to this scenario as a Democratic supermajority.

And let me venture an answer to my question: No, nobody has a plan. At least not one I’ve seen during nearly three years of digging deeply into Democratic politics and progressive infrastructure.

To be sure, ideas and strategies abound for building a majority — especially in the electoral college. And I’ll say more in a minute about two leading frameworks that aim to achieve this goal. But that’s different than what I’m talking about — which is Democratic dominance across the board.

It’s not surprising there’s a scarcity of such ambitious thinking. We live in an era of razor-thin electoral margins and see-sawing political control. Why bother musing about, say, flipping Missouri when key battleground states are balanced on a knife’s edge?

Still, wouldn’t it be nice to know what real victory might look like — and to envision a path for getting there, however long that might take?

I think so. Even as we fight for incremental gains, we should be able to imagine how these gains could one day add up to a new era of Democratic dominance. And more than just imagine, we should postulate pathways backed by data and rigorous analysis — and invite critiques of these scenarios from all parts of the Democratic coalition to see what holds up to scrutiny. Developing such a long-range roadmap, however farfetched elements of it might seem right now, can help structure priorities, especially for donors ready to invest with an extended time frame.

That’s what this new blog series is all about. It’s a thought exercise in possibility.

In this first post, I take a look at two leading efforts to envision a permanent Democratic majority and explain why neither is a recipe for a supermajority.

Future posts will drill into what it might actually take to achieve a supermajority — in terms of ideology, infrastructure, money, and party discipline.

The New American Majority Thesis

Let’s start with the most energetic apostles of Democratic dominance — those who argue that a “New American Majority” is within clear reach in an era of rapid demographic change.

I’ll skip a detailed explanation of this vision, since so much has been written elsewhere spelling out its logic. But basically, the game plan is to mobilize large numbers of nonwhite and young Americans who now seldom or never vote and link these voters in coalition with progressive whites to win elections in ever more places. Moving Democrats to the left on such issues as climate change, racial justice, corporate power and healthcare is often core to the NAM thesis.

There’s a lot to like in this vision — starting with what's already happened in places like Virginia, Georgia and Arizona. In all three states, years of patient organizing coupled with demographic change has mobilized new Democratic voters and helped transform electoral landscapes.

Steve Philips has been among the most far-sighted strategists advancing the NAM thesis of victory, investing with his wife Susan Sandler in Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project way back in 2011 and writing two important books, “Brown is the New White” and “How We Win the Civil War.” (See my interview with him from 2021.) But in recent years, the NAM thesis has been embraced across the progressive world, shaping the work of funding intermediaries like Movement Voter Project and Way to Win, along with any number of super PACs and c4s, such as the Center for Voter Information. Many of Blue Tent’s recommendations channel the logic of the NAM thesis. We’ve urged donors to invest over the long term in organizing groups in key states.

That said, I don’t think of the NAM thesis as a supermajority vision. It may offer a persuasive path to an electoral college majority — by flipping a handful of diversifying states (e.g., Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina) while fortifying the “blue wall” in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Add in Texas someday — a state where more than 2 million eligible Latinos didn’t vote in 2020 — and Democrats could have a “lock” on the White House.

But the NAM strategy only gets us so far. It doesn’t offer a path for flipping enough predominantly white rural states to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate or controlling a much larger share of state governments as well as seats in the U.S. House.

There are also growing reasons to doubt the power of the strategy itself. Just look at Florida, a rapidly diversifying urban state where Democrats should be steadily gaining ground according to the NAM thesis. In fact, the opposite is happening, with Florida turning ever redder. Nevada, also diversifying and urban, has likewise become tougher terrain for Democrats.

Demography is not destiny. At least not yet.

Swing Center

The other big vision for enlarging the Democratic majority comes from center-left thinkers like Ruy Teixeira and those clustered around Third Way, a think tank in Washington. “Popularists” like David Schor and Sean McElwee, as well as bloggers like Matt Yglesias and Yascha Mounk, often get lumped in with these same folks, so I’ll discuss them together here.

Again, I’ll start on a positive note. I find Teixeira very persuasive when he’s sounding the alarm on Democratic travails with white working-class voters — and why the electoral math means we can’t ignore this group if we want to hold must-win states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Teixeira has more recently extended this critique to include nonwhite, working-class voters, painting an unnerving picture of growing Democratic weakness in this area. Third Way has likewise presented compelling data about the fragility of the Democratic coalition that calls into question the NAM thesis.

To these and other center-left thinkers, the way to improve Democratic fortunes is to moderate on social issues while also making clearer economic appeals to working-class voters. The popularists, meanwhile, offer a tactically driven vision for winning more elections: get behind policies that voters favor and stop talking about unpopular ideas. What unites these outlooks is the shared view that college-educated white progressives, who are well left of the median Democratic voter, shouldn’t play such a dominant role in shaping the party’s platform and brand.

This center-left playbook has met with plenty of pushback in recent years. For my purposes here, though, its main shortcoming is that it’s not a supermajority vision. Moving to the center to win more moderates would be a major net plus only if the party also sustained recent gains in mobilizing progressive constituencies. But I’ve never heard Teixeira or Third Way explain how to pull off that coalition balancing act.

Quite the contrary. Center-left moderates tend to depict the party’s left wing as mainly a drag on Democratic fortunes. They have little nice to say about the progressive organizers and donors who’ve patiently built electoral power in states like Georgia and Arizona, or helped secure razor-thin victories in Wisconsin and elsewhere. They seem to have no ideas for integrating the energy of the progressive base into an inclusive strategy for expanding the Democratic majority. In effect, they offer a zero-sum prescription that may yield electoral gains, but only by making trade-offs that would foreclose a larger political realignment.

A Bigger Tent

Are there other attempts out there to envision a Democratic supermajority? Probably, but I haven’t seen them. If you can think of frameworks I’m missing, get in touch.

As for why there’s a shortage of such big thinking, I do think it has a lot to do with Democrats being in survival mode for the past six years — and really since 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party. Getting to 51-49 feels like victory enough, never mind the pipe dream of 60-40.

Intra-party divisions also put in a crimp on our imaginations. Progressives and moderates often view the other camp as the problem. People have become entrenched in their outlooks and there’s not a lot of big-tent thinking out there.

But if you agree that neither a NAM base strategy nor a move to the center will yield a dominant Democratic governing majority, then a big-tent mentality is essential. Somehow, we need to figure out a way to fuse the progressive and moderate wings of the party into a unified political force that, in turn, can convert many more Americans to our cause.

Weirdly, not a lot of people seem interested in that project. But I am, even if it takes 20 years. And in the posts to come in this blog series, I’ll explore what a supermajority might look like and possible ways to get there.