Orhan Cam/Shutterstock
Note: This is the second in a series of blog posts that explore what it would take to usher in a new era of Democratic dominance. Read part 1, “Does Anyone Have a Plan?”
Does the phrase “electoral lock” ring a bell?
It will if you’re a political junkie of a certain age. That was the term for the insurmountable edge that Republicans briefly had in presidential elections during the 1980s. The “lock” came from the GOP advantage in enough big states — California among them — to give them a huge head start in the race for the White House.
Those grim days are long gone, of course. Save for the 2008 election, every presidential race has been breathtakingly close since 2000 — with 2024 looking like it will be yet another nail-biter.
Such close battles for the White House reflect the nation’s intensifying polarization. Political deadlock is here to stay, analysts tell us, which means that landslide presidential elections aren’t coming back any time soon.
But is that really true? And, more specifically, what would it look like for Democrats to break today’s impasse and establish their own electoral lock on the White House?
That’s a question I’ve seen few people engage in recent years — including in Democratic and progressive politics. Our side’s been too busy just trying to survive to think much beyond the next razor-thin election.
That said, as I discussed in my first post in this series, some strategists on the left certainly do have ideas for how Democrats can expand their majority. They fall roughly into two main schools of thought: those who embrace the New American Majority (NAM) thesis, which focuses on mobilizing more voters of color and young people; and those who believe the party should move to the center in key areas to win more moderate voters, particularly non-college-educated whites.
A case can be made that either of these visions could help Democrats consistently win the White House by narrow margins. But who says we need to choose between them? In practice, Joe Biden embraced elements of both these strategies to win in 2020, as Barack Obama did before him with even greater success. And, for sure, neither strategy alone offers a path to a supermajority — which would entail an electoral college lock, 60 seats in the U.S. Senate, a big edge in the House, and trifecta control of a majority of state governments. To achieve this kind of dominance, we need a bigger-tent strategy — one that both expands the Democratic base and persuades a large swath of moderate voters to join our cause.
In this post, I begin to look more closely at the electoral math of a supermajority, starting with the presidential map. My next post will explore the Senate and then I’ll move on to the House and states. Once I’ve sketched out in detail what a supermajority might look like, I’ll dig into the hard questions of how to achieve that endpoint through changes in ideology, strategy and infrastructure.
This is a thought exercise in possibility. Those of us who work in Democratic and progressive politics need a North Star as we slog away in a very scary moment. We should know what it might look like to win big — and to keep winning big.
I can’t think of a better place to start than imagining a Democratic lock on the White House.
The Electoral College Status Quo
The 2024 presidential election will be decided by a handful of battleground states, extending a pattern nearly unbroken since 2000. At first glance, the electoral map looks pretty good for Biden. If he holds all the states he carried in 2020, he’ll be reelected with room to spare, as you can see in Map 1. Of course, though, the situation is much scarier than it looks. If Biden loses Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia — states that he won last time by a combined total of just 42,918 votes — he’ll lose the election by four electoral votes.
Map 1: Repeat of 2020
Yet even if Democrats can deepen their gains with the same map in 2024, improving on Biden’s past performance, this is not a comfortable majority looking ahead to 2028 and beyond. There’s very little margin of error when things are so close.
Which raises the obvious question: Where else do Democrats have a good chance of winning a presidential race? And what are the best strategies for winning those states? The sooner we have answers to these questions, the sooner we can start making the investments needed to get the job done.
Where Else Democrats Can Win
Among the best candidates for pick-up states are those that Democrats have won in past presidential races. I'm thinking here of Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio. Obama won all four in 2008, and all except North Carolina in 2012. Clinton and Biden went on to lose all four in 2016 and 2020.
But there are glimmers of real hope here, starting with North Carolina. The state currently has a two-term Democratic governor and the last two presidential elections there have been very close. Trump won the state by just 1.3 points in 2020 and 3.6 points in 2016. And while Florida sure looks pretty red right now, let’s recall that in 2018, Democratic candidates for Senate and Governor both lost their races by less than 1 point while Biden lost the state by just 3.3 points. These close results don’t square with the new narrative that Florida is now a fixed red state. It’s not.
Iowa and Ohio are another story. While Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won reelection in 2018 by a comfortable margin, Trump won the state twice in a row by 8 points — the same margin that J.D. Vance beat Tim Ryan by last fall. Trump twice won Iowa by similar margins.
To win back Iowa and Ohio would require that Democrats dramatically improve their performance with non-college-educated white voters. That’s exactly the kind of effort that center-left strategists like Ruy Teixeira would like to see — and is definitely one key to building a Democratic supermajority in the Senate (more on that later). In the nearer term, though, it’s hard to make a case that either Ohio or Iowa should be a first priority as Democrats look to expand their electoral college majority. There’s just too big of a gap to close.
Which brings us back to North Carolina and Florida, both of which are rapidly diversifying states with major urban centers — fertile terrain for a NAM mobilization strategy. According to data from Way to Win, Democrats have the potential in both states to mobilize many new Democratic voters — mainly people of color, but also young people and white progressives. Way to Way estimated that Democrats could expand their base in North Carolina by 964,022 voters — in a state that Trump won in 2020 by just 74,483 votes. In Florida, which Trump won by 371,000 votes, Way to Win thinks we could add 1.7 million voters.
Achieving that potential would require large and ongoing investments in grassroots groups in both states. While donors haven’t yet been willing to make this effort — and, in particular, seem to have given up on Florida — Map 2 underscores the potential payoff. If Democrats could reliably win both states, on top of those Biden won in 2020, we’d pretty much have an electoral lock.
Map 2. Status quo + FL and NC
Centering a NAM mobilization strategy in Florida and North Carolina doesn’t mean that Democrats can disregard moderate voters. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ landslide reelection victory in Florida, which included winning the Latino vote by a large margin, is a jarring example of recent Democratic slippage with voters of color, many of whom will support GOP candidates who connect with them on issues they care about. DeSantis’ rise also underscores how adept GOP leaders have become at harnessing the perceived extremism of the progressive left to fire up their own base.
In short, even in states that are primed for a NAM strategy, demography is not destiny. Democrats should go big on mobilization efforts to flip Florida and North Carolina, but that alone won’t be enough. They’ll also need to engage in persuasion and avoid appeals that may produce countermobilization on the right.
That same point holds more broadly. A NAM strategy can yield net gains in the electoral college only if it doesn't jeopardize the Democrats’ hold on the mostly white, must-win states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Remember, a core part of the MAGA strategy is to turn U.S. politics into an ethno-nationalist contest. We want to be careful not to provide fuel to that push. The Race-Class Narrative and other messaging work offer important guidance for Democrats on navigating this perilous terrain as we seek to build a multiracial coalition that can win across a range of states.
How to Really Lock up the Electoral College
Looking further into the future, a truly tantalizing scenario is that Democrats finally flip Texas — which, as Map 3 shows, would decisively shut Republicans out of the White House, possibly for decades to come. Could that really happen? It sure could, although it’s hard to know when. Beto O’Rourke clearly turned out to be a candidate ahead of his time — but maybe by only a few election cycles.
Consider the math. Trump won Texas by 631,221 votes in 2020, or 5.6 points, a narrower margin than his performance in either Ohio or Iowa. More than 2 million eligible Latinos in the state didn’t vote that year, while well over a million Black and young white voters also stayed on the sidelines. (Texas has the biggest Black population in the U.S.) Way to Win estimates that Democrats have the potential to activate 4 million more voters in Texas, while a 2022 memo by the Center for Voter Information points out that "Nearly three out of four Texans in the citizen voting-age population (CVAP) are a member of the New American Majority." (NAM is defined here to include non-whites, people of color, and unmarried women.) The memo notes further that only 38% of CVAP people of color in Texas are registered to vote.
Flipping Texas will only happen with increased and sustained investments in grassroots organizing. Right now, such money is hard to come by. The Democratic donor class isn’t known for either its long-term thinking or its commitment to funding bottom-up work. But this is starting to change, and if real money does flow to progressive infrastructure in Texas, it could help usher in the most consequential electoral shift in our lifetimes.
Map 3. 2020 + NC, FL, and TX
The caveat here is that Democrats would also have to do better with moderates in Texas, who account for about one-third of its Texas electorate — and hold onto the Latino vote. Biden won 67% of these voters in 2020 and O’Rourke also won a solid majority of Latinos. But alarm bells have lately been ringing about the Texas Latino vote and it can’t be taken for granted by Democrats.
Texas is the ultimate prize to lock up the electoral college. And it’s moving our way. Trump did 22% worse there in 2020 than in 2016 and nearly 50% worse than Romney did 8 years earlier. If Democratic donors really focus here and the party burnishes its brand among moderate voters, this trendline will move even faster.
Finally, to look at one last scenario, consider what the electoral map might look like if Democrats could fully operationalize both the NAM strategy and the best guidance on turning things around with non-college-educated white voters. These approaches are often depicted as mutually exclusive — the party needs to choose between them, many suggest. But I don't think that's true, as Obama showed with his strong performance among voters of color while also winning a solid share of non-college-educated whites. I'll dig more deeply into this area in future posts. For now, though, behold in Map 4 what total Democratic dominance of the electoral college might look like if Ohio and Iowa could be moved back into the Democratic column, in addition to the gains already discussed.
Map 4.
****
Winning and holding the White House is hugely important for all the obvious reasons. In particular, Democrats need to make Federal judicial appointments for many years to reverse the losses under Trump and George W. Bush.
But controlling the White House alone isn’t sufficient, of course. Congress is also key and Democrats face a particularly steep hill to climb on the Senate side. That challenge will be the focus of my next post.