On Dogmas, Heterodoxy, and Supermajorities

A review of Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power

Dear readers,

Since the Democrats’ defeat to Donald Trump in 2024, many people in and around the party—including us—have been engaged in robust debates about how they should move forward. This month, longtime Democratic operative (and friend of TLV) Adam Jentleson made his own contribution to that debate with a new book, Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power.

In the book, Jentleson argues that his party cannot build a large, durable majority—or a supermajority—in Congress if it insists on imposing purity tests for its candidates. Jentleson says the Democrats need to reject that approach in favor of one that embraces “heterodoxy,” or allowing candidates to deviate from party orthodoxy to better fit their state or district to give themselves a better chance of winning.

Recently, Long View co-founder Ruy Teixeira penned a review of Jentleson’s book for the Wall Street Journal. While Ruy agrees with much of its arguments, he also believes that it comes up short in key ways. Below are some excerpts from that piece, which you can find here.

On “heterodoxy”

The theory running through the book…is quite simple. For purposes of political success and governance, Democrats can attain supermajorities—which Mr. Jentleson defines as 370 electoral votes, plus 55 to 60 senators, though there is some definitional slippage in the book—by practicing what he calls “heterodox” politics: that is, taking a mix of positions that don’t fit neatly into party orthodoxy but align with the way ordinary Americans think about the world. If that produces conflict within the party, so be it. In fact, so much the better, he thinks: If they want to win, the party’s leading figures have to disassociate themselves from Democratic positions that thrill some party faithful but alienate large numbers of persuadable voters.

Mr. Jentleson illustrates his argument with a tour through Democratic politics in the 21st century, seeking to explain how Democrats managed only one supermajority: the one ushered in by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. He emphasizes the heterodoxy practiced by Mr. Obama, who highlighted the importance of personal responsibility and lauded the two-parent family, saying his daughters shouldn’t benefit from affirmative action. Democratic politics since then, Mr. Jentleson argues, has evolved ever further from that model. Party leaders now consistently ignore the legitimate concerns at the core of Donald Trump’s appeal and anathematize all attempts to win back his voters. Party politics has hardened into “progressive orthodoxy” on race, gender, immigration, climate, policing, transgender issues and much else. As Mr. Jentleson notes, this orthodoxy was largely the creation of college-educated activists and party staffers, reinforced by the vast constellation of nonprofits and advocacy organizations that orbits the party.

He contrasts this rejection of heterodoxy with Mr. Trump’s fearless willingness to buck his party’s orthodoxy on a variety of issues—Iraq, trade, immigration, entitlement spending and (in his most recent campaign) abortion. Mr. Jentleson argues that Mr. Trump’s heterodoxy was crucial to his success, putting him on the 80% side of many 80-20 issues where Republicans had often found themselves on the 20% side. Many in Mr. Trump’s party accused him of saying things Democrats would say, but he didn’t care. Nor did the voters he was trying to reach.

The limits of Jentleson’s approach

Start with his signature supermajority concept. Mr. Obama’s supermajority, as Mr. Jentleson concedes, only lasted two years (generously defining it as a supermajority since he actually got only 365 electoral votes to go with his 58 to 60 Democratic senators). Similarly, Mr. Clinton’s supermajority, ushered in by the 1992 election, lasted only until it hit the buzzsaw of 1994. The decay rate of heterodoxy-based Democratic supermajorities seems extraordinarily fast. It seems there is much going on here that doesn’t fit into Mr. Jentleson’s argument.

Mr. Jentleson also fails to explain the glaring mismatch between many of the heterodox practices he describes and what today’s Democratic Party is capable of doing. For a book that aspires to give contemporary strategic advice, this is a flaw.

How Trump actually practiced heterodoxy

Consider Mr. Trump. As Mr. Jentleson argues, the 45th and 47th president directly and unapologetically broke from GOP orthodoxy on a range of issues. That ostentatious heterodoxy, the author contends, led to two presidential victories and enabled Mr. Trump to alter the center of gravity of the Republican Party. That success has Mr. Jentleson green with envy.

It’s worth noting, however, that Mr. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020 and, though he won in ’24, didn’t achieve an electoral landslide against Kamala Harris, among the worst presidential candidates in modern memory. And although Mr. Trump has remade the GOP in significant ways, Republicans have emphatically not achieved supermajority status. Even so, Mr. Jentleson has a point: Democrats would profit by imitating Mr. Trump.

Why Democrats struggle to emulate Trump

The trouble is, no Democratic politician…seems prepared to challenge Democratic orthodoxy on issues such as climate, trans rights, immigration enforcement, diversity mandates and affirmative action. Heterodoxy in the Trump model means picking fights within the party—lots of them—and unapologetically embracing some positions associated with the opposing party. Today’s Democrats would seemingly rather lose an election than adopt any position deemed conservative—the horror!—even if that position is popular and correct on the merits.

Which Democrats have actually practiced heterodoxy?

Mr. Jentleson rightly points to Mr. Clinton. Speaking at a meeting of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition a month after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Mr. Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas and likely Democratic presidential nominee, criticized the rapper-activist Sister Souljah for her incendiary remarks about the riots. […]

At the time, Democrats had earned a reputation for being soft on crime and public disorder. The public had also soured on their embrace of racial double standards. (Sound familiar?) Given what Mr. Clinton said and where he said it, his message was clear: Democrats under his leadership would not tolerate violence and inflammatory rhetoric, including any that came from members of his coalition.

Jackson and others attacked Mr. Clinton relentlessly for his apostasy. But ordinary voters, Mr. Jentleson reminds us, got the message and liked it. […]

Or take Robert Kennedy. Kennedy strenuously supported the civil-rights movement but opposed racial preferences. He saw no contradiction between those stances and publicly made the case for both. Kennedy stressed law and order so ardently, Mr. Jentleson relates, that Richard Nixon complained that people thought “Bobby is more of a law-and-order man than I am!” And Kennedy strongly disliked welfare that asked nothing of recipients; he believed in the overriding value of work and talked frequently of a “hand up” rather than a “handout.”

Dog-whistle heterodoxy

It’s surpassing difficult to imagine a prominent Democratic politician today challenging his party’s dogmas… The revealed preference of these politicians is to talk incessantly about “affordability” and that old standby, “kitchen-table issues.” About the closest they’ll come to heterodoxy is keeping silent about various unpopular stances associated with the party. Very occasionally, one will say something anodyne—border security is important, police are necessary—that implicitly criticizes the party’s wildest excesses. What they won’t do is pick fights with the party’s radicals and nutjobs. As for taking a position someone might reasonably call conservative, forget about it.

Call it dog-whistle heterodoxy. It’s so subtle that only the politically attuned, especially in the media, pick up the signals. Ordinary voters don’t hear it, and wouldn’t care if they did.

You can read the full review here, and you can also check out Ruy’s recent TLV piece that expands on this topic, “What This Country Needs Is More Conservative Democrats!”