How the Left Can Win a Supermajority

Adam Jentleson’s Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power challenges us to think longer term about what it would take to halt the steady march of right-wing authoritarianism and deliver durable but long-overdue relief for working Americans. Its premise is simple: the only way to get from here to a basically social democratic future (not his words) is to consistently win supermajorities in Congress, and the only way to do that is for Democrats to become competitive again in more red states.

Flipping a six-to-three Supreme Court means holding the Senate across multiple cycles, which means maintaining something near sixty seats. In 2009, Democrats held at least one Senate seat in thirty-six states, including Nebraska, Montana, Arkansas, West Virginia, and both Dakotas. Today they hold seats in just twenty-four.

Far too much Democratic strategy treats 270 electoral votes and fifty-one senators — or, on the Left, primarying centrist incumbents in solidly Democratic districts — as the objective. Picking off corporate Democrats in deep blue districts may be useful, but its strategic value pales beside beating more Republicans. Jentleson’s insistence that the real target must be 370 electoral votes and sixty senators should help to reframe debates across the coalition.

His formula for getting there is simple: embrace heterodoxy. Jentleson’s prescriptions contain insights the Left would do well to absorb, along with blind spots that ultimately limit the book’s strategic power.

The Working Class Is Not Left or Right

Jentleson, a former top aide to Harry Reid and now president of the centrist Searchlight Institute, frames the challenge through a two-by-two grid, with economic issues (moderate or progressive) on one axis and cultural issues (moderate or progressive) on the other. “Right away, an important point jumps out,” he writes: “No box contains a majority of voters. In the United States, no single ideology can assemble a majority, let alone a supermajority.” And voters who register as “moderate” are not centrists so much as people whose views don’t fit neatly into left or right categories.

Jentleson drives this point home vividly through his colorful descriptions of voters who embody a startling mix of left and right attitudes, like a twenty-four-year-old white Baptist in Nashville who cannot afford health insurance, hates the far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, wants Michelle Obama to be president because she embodies “humanitarian values,” thinks the United States should not be allied with Israel, has no problem with undocumented immigrants, and — wait for it — voted for Donald Trump.

And, Jentleson correctly notes, ideological eclecticism speaks with a distinct working-class accent. Taking “a roughly equal mix of liberal and conservative positions,” he explains, is far more common among Americans without a college degree, and college graduates tend to be the only group giving ideologically consistent answers across the issue spectrum. Since working-class voters made up 59 percent of the 2024 electorate and since Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters for decades, the fact that the Democratic Party is currently organized around the ideological habits of college graduates poses a grave structural problem that even the most successful efforts at turning out the base cannot solve.

The Patchwork Party

Jentleson offers an insightful, insider’s account of how Democrats switched from being viewed as the party of workers to the party of wokesters. Borrowing from the political scientist Ted Lowi, he argues that the Great Society’s shift from categorical, earned benefits — like Social Security and unemployment insurance — toward more discretionary, means-tested programs opened a vast field for advocacy, producing an interest-group ecosystem that absorbed functions the party used to perform itself.

His history of the Democracy Alliance, founded after 2004 by rich Democratic donors from George Soros to Rob Reiner, traces how the organization was conceived narrowly as a vehicle for beating Republicans but evolved after 2010 into a “movement building” project for progressives, growing to more than 160 groups — some of which, like the Working Families Party, even ran candidates against Democrats. The Democrats, in short, had outsourced the party’s core functions to organizations with little stake in winning general elections and every expectation of a policy return on their investment, organizations that would not hesitate to cut off candidates who defied them.

Candidate questionnaires became the shibboleth for winning endorsements and financial support from organizations in the progressive ecosystem that critics now collectively refer to as “the groups.” Jentleson’s illustrative case is the American Civil Liberties Union’s ten-page 2020 candidate questionnaire, a battery of yes-or-no checkboxes on a wide range of issues, backed by volunteers dispatched to press candidates at town halls. One of them even managed to extract a pledge from Bernie Sanders to let the Boston Marathon bomber vote.

Jentleson shows the impact of this kind of advocacy by tracing the distance between the Sanders of 2016, who dismissed open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal,” and the Sanders of 2020, who raised his hand for decriminalizing border crossings, reversed himself on guns, and sat silently at a campaign event in Flint while surrogates spoke on his behalf, with his campaign explaining that “he didn’t want to speak on behalf of people of color when there were people of color on the panel.” He won nine nominating contests instead of twenty-three, as many working-class areas he had dominated in the 2016 primaries switched to Joe Biden in 2020.

Which Heterodoxy?

Which brings us to the central limitation of the book: Jentleson’s plea for heterodoxy is onto something important, but by not specifying which kinds of heterodoxy are up to the twin tasks of defeating Republicans in red states and delivering transformative economic policies for working-class Americans, he winds up championing a range of politicians who actively stand in the way of Jentleson’s own vision.

Consider the roster of exemplars Jentleson gives. Mary Landrieu, whose Louisiana career opens the book, voted for George W. Bush’s tax cuts, voted to authorize the Iraq War, joined Republicans to permanently repeal the estate tax, and backed converting New Orleans’s public schools into a charter district over the objections of the teachers’ unions.

Joe Manchin, the former West Virginia senator, shot a climate bill with a rifle in a television ad. John Bel Edwards won the Louisiana governorship by embracing fossil fuels and touting his business-friendly credentials. Several members of Jentleson’s heterodox Senate class of 2009 he himself describes as “business-friendly and fiscally conservative.”

Now recall the two-by-two grid Jentleson used to open the book. The quadrant holding the most working-class voters who feel like they have no home in either major party is the one that leans left on economics and right (or at least not progressive) on culture. But most of the heterodoxy his book models — at least in the contemporary era — consists of Democratic politicians who are both culturally and economically conservative. That is the quadrant Democrats in red states have been targeting for forty years, but it has created a major strategic problem for the party.

The heterodoxy of a Landrieu or a Manchin is certainly preferable to that of any Republican. But Manchin also torpedoed a rare shot at a broad economic program for workers not far from Jentleson’s own vision, and while Build Back Better had avoidable content and framing flaws that made it hard for working-class Americans to stomach, the man who killed it was Jentleson’s model heterodox Democrat. If the goal is more Democratic senators, that trade is worth making. If the goal is passing a New Deal–scale economic agenda to ensure economic security for all however, as Jentleson says his is, electing more Landrieus and Manchins amounts to a Pyrrhic victory, because they will undermine it at every step.

The trouble is not that heterodox Democrats pick unpopular economics. It is that they tend to pick the least consequential items from a long menu of popular ones. Capping insulin costs, cracking down on price gouging, and trimming drug prices all poll well and surely provide relief to working Americans, but working-class Americans need more than just cheaper goods; they also need more leverage to bargain for better pay and benefits, and good jobs at a family-sustaining wage.

And as we have found repeatedly in our research at the Center for Working-Class Politics, there is no tactical advantage to prioritizing more limited economic reforms over bold, visionary ones, so long as the latter are conceived in a way that taps into core working-class values of hard work and deservingness and, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to pay for Social Security through a regressive payroll tax, effectively inoculates the policies against conservative attacks.

Jentleson knows this, which is what makes the positive policy vision he offers at the end of the book somewhat frustrating. His American Security Guarantee promises social insurance sufficient to keep families from going hungry, access to public or private health care with expenses capped on a sliding scale according to income, and “a public service job if you cannot find work in the private sector.” He calls this platform heterodox, “embracing conservative values of personal responsibility, fiscal responsibility, and freedom of choice, while marshaling them toward the liberal end of ending poverty in the United States once and for all.” But those are not conservative values. They are working-class values, and they can be yoked to conservative, moderate, or progressive economics depending on how carefully it is done. This is exactly what FDR’s signature social programs and Bayard Rustin’s Freedom Budget did so well.

So the heterodoxy Democrats need is not a grab bag of positions signaling independence. It is far more specific: Sherrod Brown– and Marcy Kaptur–style economic populists who pair culturally resonant positioning with a willingness to name their own party’s forty-year failure to deliver a better quality of life for American workers, and a program bold enough to rebuild communities hollowed out by decades of deindustrialization. Anything less would amount to a redux of Bill Clinton’s Third Way, which Jentleson rightly faults for offering limited redistributive policies like the earned income and child tax credits in place of a vision for improving the lives of working Americans, and which, like its 1990s predecessor, would end up feeding the far right it claims to fight.

There Is No Substitute for Organization

A key gap in the book follows from its own diagnosis of the Democrats’ shortcomings. Jentleson establishes, convincingly, that the Democratic Party has been hollowed out and its functions outsourced to advocacy groups, consultants, and donor networks. Didi Kuo’s The Great Retreat makes a similar argument at greater length. But Jentleson’s remedy is addressed almost entirely to individual candidates: say what you actually believe, and welcome the fight when the groups come after you.

But what made Democrats viable in red states in the postwar era was not merely how they positioned themselves on the issues. It was the dense institutional web of civil society organizations that kept them embedded in and trusted by communities between elections. Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues documents how that social fabric operated in western Pennsylvania: Democratic-aligned labor unions sponsored the Little Leagues, ran the Labor Day parades, and published newsletters where people got political information they trusted. Being a “union man” was an identity, and it carried a quiet social expectation about which way to cast your ballot (i.e., Democratic).

But as deindustrialization began ravaging rust-belt communities, unions funneled shrinking resources into emergency political advocacy, the Little League sponsorships ended, parades were canceled, local publications were suspended, and union halls were shuttered or turned into food banks. Newman and Skocpol’s crucial finding is that these communities did not become more culturally conservative. They were culturally conservative in the 1960s too. What changed was the political orientation of the key institutions of civil society. Right-leaning evangelical churches and gun clubs filled the vacuum, and they now perform the same function that unions once did, circulating political common sense through dense social networks, only in the opposite direction.

With limited organic ties to local communities, heterodox Democrats in red states today can reach voters only through paid and social media. Given the extraordinary power of political polarization, they are unlikely to break through in a meaningful way without long-term, non-party-based community-building efforts. Rebuilding Democratic-aligned infrastructure in red states will take serious money and sustained commitment. Democratic campaigns spent billions in 2024 on advertising of uncertain value; a modest share redirected into a year-round presence in places the party has written off would be more valuable than any messaging memo could ever hope to be.

None of this diminishes what Jentleson gets right. “Settling for smaller but ideologically purer majorities,” he writes, “is a path to purgatory at best, and losing to fascism at worst.” Fifty-one senators cannot rebuild the American social contract; sixty might. But a supermajority is a means, and Supermajority is far clearer about how to assemble one than about what it can achieve. The type of heterodoxy we need is a transformative economic program tailored carefully to tap into core working-class values and a serious investment in civil society organizations to help counter the hegemony of the far-right in red state communities. Without these two elements, Democrats may win sixty seats and once again have little to show for it.