The Path to a Democratic Supermajority

Democrats are on track to have more power in the next Congress than they’ve had since 2009. How can they navigate the divides in a party that now stretches from Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan to Adam Hamilton in Kansas? How do they prevent all their new voters in this election from flipping back in the next one? Can they turn this victory into a springboard to an even bigger and more durable Democratic majority in 2028 and beyond? We will have two episodes that try to answer these questions from different angles, one from the center of the party and one from the left. First, representing the more center view, we have Adam Jentleson, the founder and president of the Searchlight Institute, a Washington think tank. Jentleson is a veteran of the Senate; he served as deputy chief of staff to the former Senate majority leader Harry Reid and chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman. He’s also the author of two books, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” and “Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power,” which came out in September.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  So as we speak, Democrats are on track to win 56 seats in the Senate. Crazy. Sorry, I shouldn't have come right at the beginning.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Don't edit that out. Keep it. Unfiltered.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  So Democrats won far more power in the midterm election than really any of them thought possible. They're looking now towards 56 seats in the Senate, very possibly. You know, more than 250 in the House. They're going to have a majority of governors' mansions. It's an incredible place for them to be. But it's not where they ultimately want to go. They want the presidency. They want a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate. They want to be able to compete in places like Kansas and Texas and Alaska and Oklahoma in elections where Donald Trump has not done so much of the work for them. So how do they do that? And how do they nominate the divides in their party? The breadth now of a party that stretches from people like Abdul Sayed and Zohran Mamdani

• 1:48Speaker 01

  and AOC and Bernie Sanders on the left to people like, you know, Adam Hamilton and Mary Potola on the right. This week on the show, I want to do two episodes. One with somebody who's more from, you know, you could call it maybe the center swing of the party, the pragmatist swing of the party. And another with somebody much more from the left wing of the coalition. Because one, I want to see how much they actually differ. I think some of these disputes are, seem deeper when you say on Twitter, X, than they really are. And two, because I do think you see a synthesis between these wings beginning to emerge in both the way the party is running campaigns and the way they might govern in the coming years. Adam Jentleson is a founder and president of the Searchlight Institute.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  He's spent 20 years working in politics, served as a deputy chief of staff to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. He was a chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman, sort of more when Fetterman had just gotten elected before he took some of what is his current form. And Jentleson is also the author of two books, Kill Switch, The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, as well as Supermajority, which is a book that really grounds this conversation in his theory of what it would look like for Democrats to try to act, think and govern in the way that could once again make them an enduring supermajority party, a party able to compete anywhere in this country at any time. He joins me now.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Adam Jentleson, welcome to the show.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Thanks, Pam. Good to be here.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  So as we speak, Democrats are on track to win 56 seats in the Senate. That is a crazy number. A year ago, 51 seemed functionally out of reach. They're looking at between 250 and 260 in the House, depending on who you ask. Biggest majority since 2009, if not larger than that.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  I think you could call this the foothills of a supermajority. You've been thinking for a while and arguing for supermajority thinking. And so I want to know what supermajority thinking is and how it is, in your view, different than what Democrats were doing, at least before this particular cycle.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, supermajority thinking is thinking beyond the idea that the best we can do is win narrow majorities. It's a different way of thinking about electoral politics. It is an aspiration to represent more than the minimum number of people necessary to win an election. And that's been the experience of our politics the last 10 years, right? It's that elections are won by getting to 50 plus one. If you win control of the House or Senate, it's by a voter or two. And the best you can do is try to hold on to power for a couple of years, maybe before, before you turn it back over to the other side. And I think this has led to an incredibly unhealthy dynamic, both in our politics and the way that we operate as a government, but also in the way that we conduct political business interpersonally.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  I think it's incredibly unhealthy and divisive way of being as a country. And so supermajority thinking is saying, listen, I don't want to just get to 50 plus one because that will get me into power. I want to build a real mandate. I want to build a real big tent coalition and represent more people than the minimum necessary. Now, I think there's a moral argument for that, you know, in a democratic society that thrives on pluralism. That is a moral aspiration. There's also a sort of hard-nosed political aspect to it, too, which is that if you win power on a broader scale, you're going to be able to hold it for longer. You're going to hold power not just from one election to the next, but over a decade or more, which is the amount of time that you really need to enact a big, bold agenda that all Democrats want to see happen here.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  And the sort of touchstone era is the New Deal, right? I mean, this was the best example of a supermajority that we have in our recent history because Democrats took power, they held on to it for a long time. They were able to enact an agenda that reshaped the country. On a political level, it's aiming bigger. It's saying that the battleground can be the entire map of the country. There's not a single state in which we can't compete if we run candidates who reflect the states and districts that they're trying to win. And I think that's what you saw happen on Tuesday night. You know, Democrats were competing in states where we haven't had a Democratic member of Congress or a Democratic senator in decades. And, you know, that-

• 6:07Speaker 01

  In Kansas in nearly a century.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right. I mean, I think it's, whoa, 1932.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, it's wild. And, you know, simple majority thinking is looking at Kansas and saying, there's no point in competing there because Trump won this state by double digits. Supermajority thinking is looking at Kansas and saying, we can win there if we run the right kind of candidate.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  So I think you're, in a way, selling this too softly.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Democrats didn't, it's not like they didn't want a Senate seat in Kansas. Their view on some of it was that there was nothing they could do about it.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Money is finite. You're not going to spend it in Kansas to lose. And one perspective on this election is the only thing that changed is Donald Trump is such a hideous president that he made possible things that should have been impossible. That, I think, may actually be, at least halfway, a true take on this election. I mean, Adam Hamilton does not win without Donald Trump. But what I think is interesting right now, what I think is sort of interesting about your take on politics right now is it's like Democrats now have their foot in the door.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  In places they didn't have it before. They're going to be able to raise money in places they couldn't raise it before. They're going to govern in Texas in a way they didn't get to govern for a long time. So what are you saying it should do differently as it tries to get from the foothills of the supermajority to like an actual 60 or 62 seats come 2029 in the Senate?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  They should not place any limit on the states that they can compete in. I think, you know, we should go back to Howard Dean's idea of a 50-state program. Yes, money is finite, but a lot of these states are not expensive places to run a campaign. You know, you look at a state-

• 7:47Speaker 01

  That brutal Montana ad market.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  There, in 2028, there are Senate races in North Dakota and South Dakota. You know, each of those states has about the same number of people as a congressional district, right? Functionally, and this sort of gets out of my area of expertise, but I, you know, I have worked on campaigns. It's not that expensive to run campaigns in states that don't have that many people, right? But you have to find the right kind of candidates.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  It means a candidate who fits the state, right? And it means breaking away from some of the rigidity that sort of captured our party in the last decade or so. The most refreshing thing about what happened on Tuesday to me is that I think you saw a movement away from a lot of the factional fighting that's really been dogging the party for the last 10 years. And I think some of that fighting and arguing may have been necessary to get to the point that we're at. Even as you argue with people, you might see that they have some points that are correct. And I think from the moderate wing, you know, there's been an embrace of economic populism on a scale that you haven't seen before. And I think that's really healthy. I think that you needed both things, right? James Talarico won in Texas by embracing the fossil fuel industry and saying, this is an industry that produces hundreds of thousands of working class jobs here in Texas. But he also ran aggressively on economic populism.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  And it was both of those things together.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And faith.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  I mean, you look at someone like Adam Hamilton, made no bones about being pro-life. He was an Episcopal minister. He wore his faith on his sleeve. He talked a lot about bipartisanship and not judging Republicans for their views. So, you know, this is a very different tone from a Democrat than we've seen-

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Not a 2018 resistance candidate.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You know, but on the other hand, you know, stuck to core liberal values like expanding healthcare, raising taxes on rich people, you know, and expanding the social-

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And protecting choice, as we're saying, right? He's sort of in this older school of Democrats who will sometimes have a personal view and a policy view that differ.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Right. We used to see, that used to be pretty common in the party. You had candidates who were personally pro-life, but, you know, voted pro-choice. And I think in some ways, this debate is basically over. I think it's resolved. I think that people have seen how this works in states like Texas and Iowa and Kansas. And, you know, look, it takes some give from both sides, right? I mean, you have candidates sort of moving to the right on some issues in a state like Texas or Iowa, but at the same time, running aggressively on economic populism. And, you know, that's a sort of combination that I think all factions of this party can get behind.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  You have, at different points, argued for something you call Big Ten absolutism.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  What is Big Ten absolutism?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Big Ten absolutism says the only litmus test is that there are no litmus tests. And that means that, you know, we should construct a Democratic Party that runs from DSA members in parts of Brooklyn that they call the commie corridor to, you know, Bobby Polito in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. And, you know, we shouldn't try to police out certain types of people because we disagree with them on certain issues.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Okay, but this feels a little bit like a dodge to that rule to me. Bobby Polito, I'm a huge Bobby Polito fan. This is a Bobby Polito stan account. But Bobby Polito is not that far to the right. Like, when you say there's no litmus tests-

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know about that. Bobby Polito has taken positions that would have gotten him chased out of the party, you know, in recent years, or, you know, a Josh Tur-.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Bobby Polito is not a white supremacist.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely not.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Bobby Polito, I don't even want to invoke his name in this context because when you say there's no litmus tests- I think that the obvious question here is, well, then what is the Democratic Party about? Can you be in this party and, you know, be genuinely anti-trans, not just, you know, have a particular view on sports, but you think discrimination against trans people should be allowed? Can you be in this party, this economically populist party, and think actually billionaires should have lower tax rates, right? When you say no litmus test, do you really mean that?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  I mean it within the context of what we stand for as Democrats.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so what do you stand for as Democrats?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So sure. So, I mean, you know, we as Democrats stand for steadily expanding the circle of civil rights protections to more and more people, right? And so every single Democrat in this big tent believes in aggressively protecting civil rights for trans adults across the board, right? Where there are some disagreements are on specific questions that apply to kids, where I think people of good faith can admit that there are complicated questions, a lot of which don't have easy answers, and which, as long as you come at from a place of compassion, can be addressed. And probably there's some more persuasion we need to do as a party to bring people along. But that's different. The Republican

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Party disputes the existence of trans people at all, and actively wants to roll back rights for trans Americans. So, you know, within this big tent rooted and anchored by core liberal principles, we need to say there is room for disagreement at the fringes of some of these issues. So every single Democrat in the big tent wants to move towards universal access to healthcare. Every single Democrat in the big tent wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. There are going to be differences in how we execute these things, the degree to which, you know, we go maximalist or try to move in a more moderate direction. These are disagreements we can hash out in a good faith way, but we're not going to chase people out for having those disagreements. And every single one of those issues that I just listed

• 12:57Speaker 02

  are things that draw a bright line between Democrats and Republicans. So yes, you know, we are liberals. Within that broad liberalism broadly defined, we should not be chasing people out of the party because disagreements on things that really come down to a matter of degree.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Is this an argument for the Democratic Party to moderate?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  No, absolutely not. Because I talk a lot in this book about this concept of heterodoxy. This is a word that I would like people to model, but I don't ever want to hear a candidate say, you know, if it's a candidate that describes themselves as heterodox, I'm going to come track them down. But I want them to model heterodoxy. You know, what it means, it's the opposite of orthodoxy. It is getting away from purity tests and getting away from rigid ideologies and just thinking for yourself and developing a mix of policy positions that reflects the heterodoxy of the American voter. And the reason this is important is that the American people do not form their worldviews strictly from a liberal perspective or a conservative perspective. They look at the world and they take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B, and they smush these positions together, and

• 14:00Speaker 02

  they get an incredibly unique mix. And one of the most educational things you can do if you're interested in politics is just to watch focus groups, because you will have a voter who says in one breath, something like, I want every tech CEO thrown in jail for what they're doing to our kids, and I also want everybody who came over the border illegally deported, right? Those are not moderate ideas on either front, ones from the left, ones from the right. You put them together, what you have is heterodoxy. So heterodoxy accommodates big, bold ideas in a way that moderation doesn't, but it does say you can't just come forward with a rigidly left-wing ideology. You're never going to win in a state like Montana.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this chart I saw from, I think it was J. Elliot Morris. And he was showing that you could see overperformance from Blue Dog Democrats, and you could see overperformance from DSA Democrats. And I think you can misinterpret that chart a bit because they are overperforming in very different kinds of districts, right? Overperformance in Kansas is meaningful to the size of the Democratic majority in a way that overperformance in Brooklyn may not be.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  That said, I do think something you see there is that almost more than most voters are liberal or conservative or moderate, they really, really, really don't like politics and party hacks.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And one thing that I think is interesting about the various ways you saw different Democrats breaking from Democratic molds, be it in who they were, right? I'm a pastor, I'm a seminarian, I'm a Paralympian, I'm a, you know, a Navy pilot, all the way to what they were saying, right? James Talarico running as a Christian populist who embraces the oil and gas industry, is that part of the message is simply like, I'm not like those Democrats over there.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  So how much is like the work here aligning to public opinion? And how much is it just like sending a signal that I'm independent from party opinion?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  It's much more the latter. I mean, authenticity means thinking for yourself. It means being independent. And so when you come to the voters, and it just so happens that all of your opinions line up exactly with the Democratic Party brand, voters are going to be rightly suspicious of you as an independent thinker, and they're going to rightly suspect that you're not a truly authentic thinker. And so this idea of authenticity is sort of, you know, the golden goose in American politics right now. It's what we're all chasing after, and we're all trying to to generate as politicians. But you don't get it, you know, by wearing Carhartts if you went to Hotchkiss. You know, you get it by being an independent thinker. Adam Hamilton came across as authentic to the voters of Kansas, right? Because that's

• 16:39Speaker 02

  who he is. And he talked about politics, and he talked about things in a moral language that resonated with people, brought in issues of faith and theories of faith that, you know, made people think, okay, I know what your values are. I recognize you. I recognize some of the way I look at the world in you, and I trust you to go to Washington and to make decisions based on values that I have in common.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  You've done some interesting research, building on big and more complex than normal survey design. But talk me through at least a little bit of that, that research, and what you all found about the way people's opinions organize in the real world versus the way the Democratic and Republican Parties kind of insist opinions should be organized.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Right. So one of the things that we found in our research is that there are issues that would never pop in sort of your average poll of top voter concerns, that nonetheless are extremely powerful signals to people that you have a heterodox point of view and that you don't think in a rigidly ideological way, right? So one example is the issue of what's called social promotion in schools, or the idea that you just promote kids to the next grade regardless of whether they failed the tests or not. Being against that is something that people don't expect to hear from Democrats these days. They think of Democrats as sort of everybody gets a trophy squishes. And so if you say, you know, if kids fail the requirements of their grade, they should not be promoted, that sends a

• 18:09Speaker 02

  really powerful signal to voters that you're a different kind of Democrat. Being against homeless encampments, right, is a very powerful signal. Being open to things like spanking, those issues are incredibly culturally loaded, but I think connect with voters on a values basis. So we don't always have to be talking about trans sports, or climate change, or the border security. There are lots of ways for people to develop these complicated appeals that reflect the complex way that voters interact with the world beyond these sort of, you know, four or five issues that we're always talking about.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  One thing I just noticed about that list was those were all issues where partly on cultural dimensions, the Democratic Parties moved left.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  When you did this research, did you find issues the Democratic Party was too far right?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you really can't go far enough on economics. I mean, people are very into Democrats proposing big, bold ideas on economics. The key is to just combine those economic points of view with some level of texture that shows you're not rigidly ideological on every single issue. And again, this is mostly about how you win in these more challenging states. If you're from Massachusetts, you know, be as liberal as you want. But if your listeners, you know, think to themselves, I'm sure there are issues that they diverge from sort of Democratic orthodoxy on. And I think that's true of candidates, too. It is more authentic to show the world issues where you disagree with your party, or where you disagree with your side's orthodoxy, than to pretend that you agree with them on every single issue down the line.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Is what we're talking about here heterodoxy, which is a slightly academicy word for voters don't have fully aligned with any party political opinions? Are we just talking about a Democratic Party that varies a lot by place? And what has kind of happened is that the media nationalized, the political money nationalized, we got social and algorithmic media. So everybody's kind of in the same thing, and the parties are this more of the same thing everywhere. And I can't really tell if in this environment, this media environment, you can really turn that clock back. Because maybe this ability to have politicians in a single party, who very dramatically, state to state to state,

• 20:25Speaker 01

  was simply a function of the states existing in different informational universes, having very different political cultures, and having many, much more of their attachment to politics being local.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  You know what's something that varies region to region? The United States of America, you know? And I think this is a policy.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Majority thinking is a vision of politics that reflects that difference. And I think that we have sort of taken for granted for a long time that everything is nationalized. And I think part of what we're seeing is that that's not necessarily true. And a lot of the candidates who performed best on Tuesday were not ones who got a ton of national attention. And in a lot of ways, who shied away from national attention. I mean, you had folks like Rob Sand running for governor in Iowa, who just focused entirely on the state. Roy Cooper did not get remotely the amount of national attention as some candidates, but won that state of North Carolina by 20 points, right? Roy Cooper sort of embodies the Tar Heel persona, right? So I think that as, you know, things go in cycles, and there's undoubtedly been a cycle of nationalizing American politics, and that will always partly be true.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  But part of this is Democrats sort of contrasting themselves against that nationalization, right? Using that as a way to differentiate themselves from the party brand by breaking away from their party's orthodoxy and saying, I'm not that same kind of Democrat. I'm my own Democrat. I'm a Roy Cooper Democrat. I'm a Rob Sand Democrat. I'm a James Talarico Democrat, right? And so as nationalized and sort of homogeneous as things have become in our politics, that presents people with an opportunity because you can come across to voters in surprising ways if you say things that they don't expect to hear from a Democrat. And they, you know, they have a very fixed idea in their mind of what Democrats are. A lot of that is a function of Republican advertising and things that aren't true.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  So, you know, you can sort of play off those stereotypes.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  But not all of it.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Not all of it. Some, you know, it's often rooted in quotes and things that we've actually said. And, you know, woke one was a.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  And party discipline is actually imposed.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. You know, woke one is a goldmine for Republican researchers, not just because Democrats were saying these things, but because there were outside forces, you know, working on them to sort of take these positions and enforce this rigidity.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  I was emailing with David Hopkins, who is a political scientist at Boston University, wrote this great book, Polarized by Degrees, and another one called Red Fighting Blue, that's more about geography and politics. And one thing he said to me when I was asking about how durable the change in the political map might be, he said, look, all of my research and many others just shows that the geographic polarization is driven by more cultural issues being at the forefront of politics. And the way to reduce it, to be more competitive in more places, is to focus politics more on economics. And what's funny is right now, that feels to me like a uniting thought in the party.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  It's not really, that sounds like maybe a left wing thought that, you know, it should be about class conflict. But because the left actually has like a lot of also cultural commitments, it's not always. But the focus on affordability and the sort of pushing aside, you know, woke one was crazy, and the focus on Donald Trump, I think, created an ability in the party to put the version of itself forward that was the least polarizing.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And what's really interesting is I think the candidate who best embodies that approach is Zohran Mamdani. You know, when he was running for election, it became a joke how he could turn any question back to the subject of affordability. And, you know, at Searchlight, this is a theory of ours that we call crowding out, where it's very, very easy for other issues to creep into the picture for voters. As a politician, voters' attention is an extremely finite resource. You only can command their attention for a limited amount of time, and it takes time and money and effort to get that attention, right? And when you have their attention, if you say, okay, I want to do affordability, but I also kind of want to do these two or three other things, it's easy for that to cloud the picture for voters.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  There's really no way to over-focus on affordability. And I think that's an area of broad agreement that all factions of the Democratic Party can get behind. We just released a poll this week that shows that voters did think Democrats were more focused on affordability than Republicans, and that's a big reason why they weren't.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  They were.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  But, but when you ask voters, were they focused enough on affordability? Were they as focused as you wanted them to be? Even Democrats still fell short. So the best optimal strategy, right? If you could just sort of, you know, wave a magic wand, is to pick two or three issues on which you are strongest with voters and talk about that and nothing else. And then, once you get power, you're going to have to do a lot of things. There's a million things before Congress. You know, they run a big country. There's lots of pathways to make progress on legislation across a wide range of issues. The challenge of how to keep progress going along those tracks while keeping the public's attention focused on the things that are strongest for you politically is a challenge. But life is all about challenges. And that's a challenge that's worth aiming at as Democrats. And I think one of the things that we can do here

• 25:28Speaker 02

  is try to sort of start to differentiate between the issues where Democrats, you know, have strong, deeply held principles and are also politically popular, like healthcare, and issues where we want to make progress, but the public is more mixed, and look at pathways to keep advancing those issues, but not pushing them to the center of the conversation. And both things are possible.

• 26:05Speaker 03

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• 27:53Speaker 01

  Running as the opposition party in an election when your party has no power, that's actually the easiest moment for variation.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Because you're really just talking about Donald Trump. And then, when you get asked, do you hold the least popular positions in the Democratic Party? You say no.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  It gets harder when you have to vote on bills that are being whipped. It gets harder when you have to vote on bills that have a lot of moral force behind them and, you know, are very tough decisions. And so I guess my question here is, how does supermajority thinking turn into supermajority governing? What is it to act like a supermajority in construction?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  You build political capital or to spend it. And I believe that very firmly. And what we've built for ourselves as Democrats right now is a lot of political capital. Now, we need to spend it in ways that show what we're about. We are on a first date with a lot of voters after this election. They are open to us, but they're not committed yet. And what we need to do is spend that capital in ways that show them why they should form a committed relationship with us, why they should stay in our coalition.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Not just a situation ship.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, we want to turn these folks into a long-term commitment here. And that is about doing things that all Democrats can agree on. And I think for all the factional fighting that's taken place within our party of the last decade or so, it's sort of masked the fact that there are broad areas of agreement from Bernie Sanders all the way to Adam Hamilton, right? And so what I would do in terms of governing with this power is to really try to focus on those areas of broad agreement. Those areas of common ground also happen to be the things that draw the strongest contrast with Republicans, right? Every single Democrat in this Big Ten caucus wants to expand healthcare access and achieve the goal of universal healthcare, right?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Not everybody's sold on doing that via single payer, but everybody's sold on that broad goal. So you can advance legislation that says, let's do things like lower the retirement age to age 50. Let's do things like Andy Kim's bill on Medikids, you know? Let's do things like free.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Creates kind of like a Medicare program for kids.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  That's right. You know, you can start to move towards this goal of universal healthcare that have agreement within the entire caucus. And that's both, you know, an expenditure of political capital that is useful. It's an investment because you're showing people what we will do if you give us more power.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  So it's interesting because the, the theory emerging here has a, like, an interesting paradox at its heart, which is, on the one hand, we're talking about a more focused Democratic Party, a party more focused on particularly its more popular issues, the version of itself that is less geographically and politically polarizing. On the other hand, the point of a big tent party, a party that includes Abdul Sayed and Adam Hamilton, Zohran Mamdani, and in some other condition, Joe Manchin, is that you will have more disagreement. This sort of both more focused party, but a party where you should expect more defection.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  So in this more big tent vision, how do you handle defection disagreement? Or maybe a different way to put it is, how has the Democratic Party been handling that? You were in the Senate. What kinds of things did you see when you were in the Senate in these moments? And how do you want to alter that approach?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  It's really about what will we do differently? Right? We came in in 2009 and we had 60 Senate seats at one point, you know, 250 plus seats in the House and a Democratic president, right? And we got a lot done, but we left a lot of people disappointed and we probably could have done more. And so I think a lot about that. And a big thing that we did in 2009 that I would not do again is sort of trying to get Republican engagement on every single thing that we did. You know, it's hard to go back to that moment in time and realize that there was actually a good chance of getting Republican support.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  It wasn't completely naive to think that that was possible. You know, this was the era when Mitch McConnell was turning into the Mitch McConnell that we all know today, but it wasn't clear he was gonna win. You know, he was aggressively whipping members of his caucus who wanted to work with Democrats and twisting their arms to get them not to do it. And he did win and he made us waste a year on sort of this side quest of trying to get Republican support. I think what Democrats should do differently now with this power is come in and aggressively pursue the agenda that the American people elected them to enact. And if Republicans want to join them, they absolutely should.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  That door should always be open, but we shouldn't treat it as a necessary precondition of getting things done, which is one of the things that really held us back in the Obama era.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I think there's a bunch of interesting lessons from the Obama era, but one worth thinking about here is they got a super majority, but it was actually like they had a bare majority.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  They had 60 votes. You needed 60 votes to break a filibuster so they could lose zero people, at least on things that weren't going through budget reconciliation, but most of the things weren't going through budget reconciliation. In a world where there was no filibuster and you could have passed Obamacare with a public option with 51 votes, you can lose Joe Lieberman. It doesn't matter. You can lose Ben Nelson. It doesn't matter. I think one reason the whipping has gotten so much more intense in the Senate in particular is because it is so hard to lose members under the current rules. But if you were able to act, you had a 55 vote majority and that mean you have five votes to spare, well, you could lose five members on every vote.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  But if you're not in that world, then it becomes so, so, so important, you hold everybody on everything and you can't do things that are risky. And so I think that's an interesting question here, whether or not the big tent we're talking about actually requires a more radical approach to the rules than we've seen Democrats willing to consider.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. I mean, look, I think there's a moral case for super majority thinking. I think it is a moral good to aspire to represent more people than you need to, to win an election. It's morally good to hold a majority that is broader than, you know, 51 or the minimum necessary you need to have power. But there's a politically hard-nosed pragmatic aspect to it too, which is that you need votes to spare to do things. And yeah, listen, I believe very strongly that we should get rid of the filibuster. This was the topic of my first book and you and I have discussed it at length. And part of the reason is I think it just creates a healthier system. You are able to deliver for the American people on the things that you said you were

• 34:49Speaker 02

  going to do, and then the American people can decide whether they like it or not. And you don't get to sort of hide behind this super majority threshold as insurance or as a cover. But the other thing that it does is it allows you to, you know, just from a caucus management perspective, looking at this as a Senate leader, if you only need 51, 52 votes to pass something, you can let people break away from the party. You can let them preserve their independence and it doesn't affect the final outcome. So, you know, and that's the kind of thing that allows them to continue to win reelection in these deep red states.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  This to me is a pretty subtle point, but I think it's very important, so I want to stand up for a little bit, which is when we talk about parties in the past, because the parties were so much less polarized and there was so much less penalty for voting with the other party, it was very normal. There was a lot more fluidity. And so you could be a Democrat who just routinely did not vote with the Democratic Party and that was normal and it was fine. And the Democratic leadership could accept that you acted like that because there were Republicans who did vote with the Democratic Party. But in this world where bipartisanship is not completely absent, but it is much rarer than it used to be, and you have constant filibustering in the Senate, the parties

• 36:03Speaker 01

  have almost been forced into imposing much harsher party discipline because their room for coalition building is so constrained. But that then means when you get to election time, you don't have as many people who can honestly say, yeah, I'm a different kind of Democrat, because you're not a different kind of Democrat. You might want to be a different kind of Democrat, but Chuck Schumer or Harry Reid or whoever it is twisted your arm so you weren't one. And so weirdly, I think that part of the pathway here is getting serious about filibuster reform so that if you have 57 Democrats, that is seven Democrats on any vote in the Senate who can say, I think Chuck Schumer is wrong.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And I'm not gonna vote with him. And then they can go back to their constituencies and say, see, I voted against Chuck Schumer 50% of the time, or whatever it might be.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  I mean, super majority coalitions in an era of majority rule legislating is, I think, the healthiest dynamic. And it also happened to be the dynamic that was in place during the most productive periods of American history and during the times of greatest progressive achievement. You know, I mean, not to get deep into Senate history here, but the Senate was a majority rule institution for almost all of its existence, really up until the seventies and eighties, when the filibuster, as we know it, started to emerge and become more prevalent.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Except it wasn't majority rule on race, right? The filibuster was used to stop anti-Lynchings, civil rights laws, et cetera.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  And that was the exception that proved the rule.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Basically, on any other topic, any bill that came to the floor got a majority rule vote, except anything related to civil rights, very broadly defined. But at the same time, you had, you know, super majority Democratic control of Congress for most 20th century, and this was a healthy dynamic. And it allowed Democrats to pass things like the New Deal achievements, like Medicare, like the Voting Rights Act, but then have some of their party break away and define themselves as independent and, you know, authentic to themselves on issues where they disagreed with the national party. And that created a virtuous cycle that reinforced itself where we were getting big things done for the American people and you had parties that were sort of regionally distinct, sometimes

• 38:17Speaker 02

  in bad ways when it came to the South, but you know, also distinct in the West and the North and the Midwest. And they were able to sort of define themselves, not just by the national party brand.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  I think that to take the other side of the argument, just for the sake of argument, one case that more centristy Democrats will make for the filibuster is that if Democrats do get a big majority, you know, 57 votes, 60 votes, and they have the presidency, and then you don't have a filibuster, well, isn't it easier then for every like extremely left wing group who in truth, like Democrats are fairly sympathetic to, to come and say, you got to do my thing? And there's not this disciplining mechanism to say, well, we don't have the votes, because now you probably do have the votes in a time of, you know, fairly good party discipline.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  And that is how you get this dynamic where parties gain power and then repeatedly overreach. Or maybe a different way of asking the same question is if the filibuster is not the thing and your slim majorities are not the thing keeping you from overreaching in a way where you're doing what you want to do, not what the public wants you to do, what is keeping you from overreaching? What does create the discipline needed to create your kind of party?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  If you try to count the votes, it is actually quite hard to get to a majority in this country. And in fact, James Madison's faith in majority rule was undergirded by this notion that forming a majority in a country as big and diverse as America will always require you to assemble a coalition of different interests, right? And this was, you know, the time when the country was much smaller and remains true today. So it's not just that getting to a majority in the Senate will require you to get an Adam Hamilton or a Scott Cullum, you know, or a Josh Turek. Look at the rest of the caucus. You still have to get a Mark Warner, a Tim Kaine, a Chris Coons, right? So it's very difficult to build a majority coalition that ranges from Bernie Sanders

• 40:15Speaker 02

  to Mark Warner to Chris Coons to Scott Cullum to Adam Hamilton, right? And that in and of itself is a force that mitigates against these sort of radical swings. And you look at a bill like Medicare for All, right? Last I checked, it had something like 17 cosponsors. So I don't think that we are in danger of, if we move to a majority rule system, of having, you know, this sort of rush to the left and, you know, passing exclusively left wing positions, because you're still going to have to assemble a majority coalition that includes members who aren't far to the left. And really, at the end of the day, you have to decide, there's risk in both directions, right? The risk of the super majority threshold is gridlock.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And that's not a hypothetical risk. That's an extremely real risk. We live it every day. It's gotten impossible to get things done. It's so bad that, you know, the only way things pass in Congress is these mega bills where you lump everything together and just jam it through, which is like a nightmare for transparency or any semblance of regular order. So gridlock is real. That is a risk that has been realized. The risk on the other side is, yeah, you do have some overreach, but the upside to that is that the party in power actually gets to get things done. And when they do overreach, probably the American voters will respond and vote them out. But that to me is a much healthier system. It's a much more responsive system to the American people and it's a much more transparent system where each party says, here's what I want to do.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Now I'm gonna do it. Then you, the American voter, get to decide what you think about that.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  You know, there's going to be a big tension between the parts of the party that want to sort of just oppose and enforce accountability and investigation on Trump and the parts of the party maybe now coming from redder districts. They're gonna want to show they can work in a bipartisan fashion. They're gonna show they can get things done. You know, one place this is going to come out really quickly is there's this big bipartisan permitting bill moving forward. And you already see it beginning to split the Democratic Party because, you know, it makes it easier to build clean energy, but it also makes it easier to build dirty energy. It's good for affordability. People are debating, is it good for climate change? Most of the analyses I've seen say yes, but not everybody buys that. But also, I think there's just going to be this feeling like Mitch McConnell pioneered the strategy.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  You don't give the opposition president big bipartisan achievements. You don't show that Washington is working under the other side, right? You stop them and you show that Washington is gridlocked and dysfunctional under them, and that is how you win power. So how do you think about something like very direct and soon to come up like the permitting bill?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a dance like a butterfly sting like a bee aspect here, right? Where should you pass a bipartisan permitting reform bill that's never going to get a ton of national attention, but will bring down energy costs? And by the way, those lower energy costs will probably kick in somewhere around 2029 or 2030. So I think there's sort of a tactical and strategic advantage to getting this done and just getting it out of the way so that the next president doesn't run into the same permitting constraints that held back Biden's climate investments. That, I think, is a smart area to get something done that validates our promise of affordability and also sets up the next Democratic president for success. But then when there's a monumental fight like a Supreme Court seat opening up, which

• 43:35Speaker 02

  could start to shift the balance back to a liberal majority, Democrats should go to the mat and hold that seat open, you know? And this, it's the right thing to do. We should not let this president, this mentally unstable lame duck president, fill another seat on the Supreme Court. That would be a bad thing for America. But it's also a fight that will absolutely rally our coalition together. So, and will show people the Democrats are willing to fight hard.

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• 45:54Speaker 01

  What do you do about places where you don't have agreement on directionality? So for instance, and also places where you have real conflict in terms of different values jamming into each other. So for instance, there could be some of these in bills that on the one hand, you know, if you restrict fossil fuel development, you can to some degree slow greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, maybe that's bad for affordability. Or a different version, Israel, there are genuinely just irreconcilably different views about whether or not the US should support the state of Israel. So, yeah, how do you see that?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  So let's anchor on Israel on that one. So what's happened over the last few years is you've seen a really distinct evolution among Democrats on that position specifically. Now, a lot of that has been driven by horrific outside events that have caused people to reevaluate stances that they had in the past, but it's also been driven by coalitional dynamics within the party. And I think the place where the party is moving to reflects that dynamic and is the right response to all of those forces acting on it. So I think that, you know, you gotta give some room for growth, for change, for evolution, you know, for the idea that activists may sometimes represent the leading edge of a

• 47:15Speaker 02

  moral issue, even if we disagree with some of their approaches or the maximalist stances they'll take on something. And then you process that through, you know, the legislative process, writing bills, seeing how many votes you can get for it, reflecting public opinion, changes in that, how is it evolving on an issue like Israel? But look, big tents are messy, right? Big coalitions are hard to steer. So it's not going to be a sort of easy or neat process. But the job of leaders and ultimately the job of a presidential candidate is to try to sort of allow some of those chemical reactions and those changes to take place within this body while generally trying to steer it towards a direction that is focused on the things we have in common and is broadly appealing to the American people and is continuing

• 47:58Speaker 02

  to invite more and more people into our coalition.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  So here's a good, specific question about that. You were chief of staff to John Fetterman.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Sure was.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  And you could say, you could look at John Fetterman and say, now there you have a heterodox Democrat.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Sure do.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  He has.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  There's a lot in that sure do right there. He has a lot of opinions that many other Democrats don't share.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  He kind of mixes and matches views in an increasingly unusual way. He showed up at President Trump's big midterm rally. Is John Fetterman, is he part of the big tent? Is he a model of a heterodox Democrat? How do you see John Fetterman now?

• 48:39Speaker 02

  I see Senator Fetterman as a cautionary tale. You know, I think that heterodoxy is an extremely powerful political force. I think we saw that in the election on Tuesday and candidates who embraced it, you know, did very, very well. But it can also turn on you if it becomes the entire point. For Fetterman, it's become clear that he's no longer guided by principle or broad goals that he's trying to achieve for the people of Pennsylvania, but just seeking fights. And, you know, that is heterodoxy gone wild. And I think it's become sort of sad because it's become the whole way he identifies himself in public and it's the entire goal of his life in public service right now.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  But I actually think this gets to something interesting. And Fetterman is an extreme case and you would understand better than me how much had to do with his stroke and other dimensions of his psychology. I've never quite known how to totally understand his arc. But one place where I have seen the relationship between politicians who are maintaining a distance from their own party's main brand, one place where I've seen that turn toxic is when the relationship between them and the mainstream of their party becomes fundamentally hostile, right? That happened to Joe Lieberman and the Democratic Party. That happened with, has happened very much with Fetterman and the Democratic Party.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Fetterman radiates a dislike of much of his own base. And to be fair, the Democratic base doesn't like John Fetterman.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's mutual.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And so one of the, I think, quite difficult things when you're, you know, a congressional leader trying to kind of manage these dynamics or just like somebody in them is, I mean, these are very tough issues. I was furious and said things that I kind of basically stand behind about how, I think, ugly the actions of Joe Lieberman were during the public option debate. And because people's worlds were in the balance. I mean, when you're talking about healthcare, when you're talking about authoritarianism, when you're talking about Israel, when you're talking about immigration, when you're talking about this range of, of issues, you know, when you're talking about discrimination. It's very hard to say sometimes, well, we all disagree to disagree because the stakes

• 51:00Speaker 01

  are so high. And I think it's harder in an era of social media, harder in an era of algorithmic media, harder in an era of nationalized groups, harder in an era of nationalized media, where it's not like, you know, Joe Manchin's decisions primarily get covered as in West Virginia, right? Like, you know, he becomes like known to every member of the Democratic Party when he is like pushing back. So that's part of the structure here that I think makes it tough. It's very hard to keep that cycle from escalating out of control. I don't think anybody has managed to hold together a big tent party in this era. And I don't think it's totally accidental. I think it reflects like how hard it is to keep those dynamics spiraling into enmity. I mean, you see, you are part of how hostile

• 51:44Speaker 01

  the fighting between quite liberal and then somewhat leftist people is on XM, on Twitter, and on Blue Sky and others. I mean, those are debates between people who are all the left of the median American voter by quite a lot. When you actually start getting into debates between like the people who are truly, you know, maybe even a little bit to the right of the median American voter, it gets very, very, very hard to hold a fundamental generosity together.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Right. It's gonna be hard, but it's worth it to try. And I think part of what underlies all of this for me is an embrace of this underlying tension, not tension in antagonistic sense, but tension in a, you know, just the idea that there is, there are complicated dynamics at play here. And there is going to be tension between pursuing goals and going as far as some folks on the left want you to go. But I think acknowledging those tensions and trying to deal with them in as constructive a way as possible is part of what's necessary for managing a big tent, super majority coalition. I think part of what we tried to do in the past is to wish them away and to say that there's no tension

• 52:56Speaker 02

  between American public opinion and all of the big things we want to do from a left perspective, right? And that's led us to, you know, into a bubble, basically, and to fall dramatically out of step with the American people. We're gonna get a lot of big things done if we keep going in this direction. And then we're also gonna be some disappointments, but it's gonna be worth it because we are going to change the face of this country and we're going to change the lives of millions of the American people if we can hold this big tent coalition together and, you know, do things like expand access to universal health care and expand the social safety net with the threat of AI coming down the pike.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Just also drawing on your background in the Senate here, one of the early decisions Democrats are gonna have to make is who leads him in the Senate. And, you know, I think Chuck Schumer has some real bragging rights after this election. He was, I mean, he had some recruiting misses, but he also, you know, brought in Roy Cooper, brought in Sherrod Brown, brought in Mary Potola, like, and they got a gigantic Senate majority under him. On the other hand, you've already seen, you know, say Abdul Sayed and Alyssa Slotkin, you know, the sitting and incoming Senator from Michigan and from very different parts of the party say they don't want Schumer to run again. There's a question of, you know, establishment versus anti-establishment age, like all these things are in the swirl of the Democratic Party. What should they do?

• 54:12Speaker 02

  Well, there's two decisions that need to be made. There's whether Schumer should be reelected as leader, and then there's whether he should run for reelection in 2028, right? One of the things that Joe Biden did was he said, I'm going to be a bridge to the future. And I think everybody took that to mean he was just gonna run for one term. And then he failed to be a bridge to the future and to the next generation. I think Schumer has an opportunity here to be the bridge to the next generation. And what he should, he, look, he, it's hard to argue with winning the biggest victory since Watergate when you ask, is he up to the job as leader? Like, that is an incredibly impressive achievement. We wouldn't be here without some of the recruiting successes he had, and a lot of the things

• 54:57Speaker 02

  he did behind the scenes, including, you know, investing $50 million in Michigan to help El Sayed win after a contentious primary.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Moving money into Mississippi, which a lot of people thought was crazy.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  He was on Mississippi before many people, right? These were very, very smart decisions that he made. And for those reasons, I do think he deserves to be reelected as leader. But obviously, there is this tension about, you know, are we still putting, you know, are we moving to the next generation of leaders if we have an octogenarian leading us? And I think the smart thing for him to do would be to get reelected as leader, but say that he's gonna pass the torch in the next generation and not run for reelection in 2028. This is what my former boss, Harry Reid, did announcing his retirement. It is something we see very rarely these days in politics, which is going out on top and going out gracefully. It's the right thing to do, I think. So there are gonna be some tough conversations. Democrats don't hold these elections until December. But I think, you

• 55:50Speaker 02

  know, really putting his money where his mouth is and saying, I will actually be that bridge to the next generation would be a smart thing for him to do.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  And that's a place to end. Then also our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  So I just finished a book called Bernie for Burlington by Dan Chiasin, which is a biography of Bernie's early years that I found incredibly revealing, very interesting, and honestly, how heterodox he was in his approach to politics. Great read.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Give me an example.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so at one point after he was reelected, there was a weapons plant outside Burlington. And the anti-war community in Burlington, which was very active, as you can imagine, staged a protest to try to shut down the weapons production facility. Bernie, having been elected as a socialist, sided with the workers at the plant against the anti-war activists. So, you know, there is a lot, a sort of class-first approach to Bernie's politics that I think got lost in the sort of modern era. But it was really fascinating to see how this was sort of a common thread through his early career. Second book is a book called Hollow Parties by political scientist Danny Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld,

• 57:00Speaker 02

  which is one of the most thoughtful illustrations of how the parties themselves have deteriorated over the last few decades. And that's left a space for, you know, activists and sort of the para-party infrastructure to try to fill. I talk about a lot of this in my own book, you know, there's sort of successes and failures of trying to fill that. But it looks at both parties, you know, from the 19th century up until modern times and shows how they deteriorated and left this massive vacuum in our political space. The third book is a work of fiction called The Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer. It is sort of the lost classic of American political novels. Billy Lee Brammer was an aide to

• 57:39Speaker 02

  LBJ and a journalist. And it's sort of this great synergy of like gonzo era atmospherics and LBJ politics. So having been thinking a lot about Texas recently, and, you know, being a big fan of political novels, I would highly recommend that one to people.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Adam Jensen, thank you very much.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.