A Never Trumper and a Democrat on Beating MAGA for Good
What is the average American voter thinking? He wants Michelle Obama to be the next President, has no problem with illegal immigrants, opposes the U.S. alliance with Israel, and voted for Donald Trump in 2024. (Meet Brice from Tennessee.) Or perhaps she would have voted for Joe Biden had he stayed in the race, but thought that Kamala Harris’s schedule wasn’t full enough, and therefore cast her ballot for Trump, too. (That’s Tiana from Pennsylvania.) Such voters—which is to say, most voters—defy the usual logic of the country’s partisan divide, refusing to fit neatly into an ideological camp.
Three-quarters of Americans do not identify as either “strongly liberal” or “strongly conservative.” They may call themselves “moderate,” but they often hold extreme views, just in ways that do not line up with either party’s orthodoxy. They like a little from column A, and a little from column B. They may favor both gun rights and abortion rights, for example, or support immigration but have reservations about transgender athletes. They bemoan political polarization in one breath and demonize certain candidates in the next.
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Call them wrong, or confused, or uninformed, but these are the voters who decide elections. In 2024, Trump outperformed with them, in part by positioning Democrats on the unpopular side of every major issue. He stood for jobs, border security, law and order, tax cuts, and peace; Democrats thus became the party of inflation, open borders, crime, higher taxes, and foreign wars. He shamelessly co-opted themes that had long helped Democrats with blue-collar workers, such as protecting Social Security and cracking down on Wall Street. When it came to abortion, which had been the Democrats’ strongest issue in the 2022 midterms after the Trump-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade, Trump resisted his own party’s hard-liners and staked out a position that swing voters preferred, suggesting that abortion policy be left up to the states. He succeeded in transforming the Republican platform by moving the Party toward the median voter on issues where it had been out of step. Meanwhile, the Democrats reflexively—and under pressure from activists—opposed him at every turn and raced further left, to show just how anti-Trump they could be. Even now, as Trump’s approval ratings hover around all-time lows and his coalition frays, the Democrats still don’t know how to tell voters who they are and what they’ll fight for. They’re squabbling over whether their path back to power runs through the middle or the left.
Two new books argue that this is the wrong debate to be having, since swing voters, with all their idiosyncrasies, don’t see politics through a lens of moderates versus progressives. The Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson, in “Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power,” takes the median voter’s heterodoxy as cause to field more heterodox candidates. Toeing the party line is one of the things that voters hate about politicians, he argues; showing some independence helps candidates appear more authentic and relatable. Sarah Longwell, a prominent Never Trump Republican strategist and the author of “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” acknowledges that Democrats will never convert most Trump voters, but contends that they need to develop better ways of communicating in order to convert some of them. She derives her recommendations from eight years of field research, having spent time studying voters and learning their emotional vernacular. Both strategists, despite having come up through opposing traditions, now share the goal of finding a formula that can defeat the MAGA movement—ideally so resoundingly that Trump’s form of politics stays discredited forever.
Longwell’s signature research tool is the focus group, the centerpiece of her popular podcast from the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion website she co-founded for fellow anti-Trump conservatives. In 2016, Longwell was one of many Republicans who viewed Trump as self-evidently unqualified to be President and who thought he would never win. After the election, she attended a small gathering in Washington, D.C., named “The Meeting of the Concerned,” which she said was more like “The Meeting of Sad Republicans”: a support group for conservatives who felt newly alienated. She connected with the former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and together they started looking to recruit a candidate to challenge Trump for the 2020 G.O.P. nomination. She commissioned some polling and focus groups in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state, but the results were disappointing: Republican voters strongly identified with Trump, thought he was doing a good job, excused his bad behavior, and treated criticism of him as an attack on themselves. Still, she fell in love with the focus-group process, likening it to “a tiny window into the soul of America” and labelling it “a cheat code for understanding politics,” as she writes in her book.
Her professional mentor, Rick Berman, a hard-knuckled Republican adman and lobbyist, passed down to her a parable for understanding how complicated, contradictory people actually make decisions: An executive is hiring an assistant. He interviews three women for the job. Afterward, he tells his colleagues in great detail about each candidate’s qualifications, and they ask him whom he’ll choose. He answers, “The one with the biggest tits.” The point of the story is that people don’t make logical decisions; their rational minds are constantly in tension with their baser instincts. In politics—according to Berman and, by extension, Longwell—the most convincing arguments play to love, sympathy, greed, fear, and anger.
Trump is a master of this technique. He flattened existing American anxieties about jobs, crime, drugs, and terrorism into one catchall fear: illegal immigration. He told a story that made emotional sense to many Americans, who didn’t always agree with him but liked that he appeared to be taking action. Not only were they willing to overlook his bad behavior but they also turned it into a positive—his caustic personality was core to how he got results. I had a similar realization while covering the 2024 Presidential race for the Washington Post. My colleagues and I would constantly meet voters who told us that they didn’t approve of Trump’s language or that they wished he would tweet less often. As we understood it, that meant there must be some point at which they would get fed up with him and turn away. In reality, they were telling us that they were carving out a permanent escape hatch for him; as long as he kept delivering on what they voted for, they would give his indiscretions a pass.
Tucked inside that ambivalence, Longwell hears an opportunity. In focus groups, Trump voters sounded less like committed ideologues than like people struggling to reconcile competing values. “You want people to do things the right way,” Longwell writes, “but at the same time, as a Christian, you should be accepting of people that are in need,” James, an evangelical from Missouri, said. Of illegal immigrants, Wendy from New Hampshire said, “If I was in their situation I would sneak in, too,” but, she added, “I can’t open my front door to just anybody.” To Longwell, such statements suggest that voters don’t want politicians to force them to choose between their hearts and their fears. But Democrats have often responded by dismissing their fears and attacking their motivations, as if to say, “Things aren’t as bad as you think, and, also, you’re kind of racist for thinking it,” instead of “We see what you see, we feel what you feel, and here’s how we’re going to fix it.” Longwell believes that neither party is currently giving voters the choice of being simultaneously tough and fair, secure and humane, protective and decent. Democrats, she argues, can’t offer a watered-down version of conservative border policies; they need to convince voters that they care about immigration even more than Republicans do, by telling a different story of strength. “Most voters aren’t looking for cruelty,” she writes. “They’re looking for control. Give them a way to feel safe that doesn’t require them to be cruel, and they’ll take it.”
Democrats start from a disadvantage, because voters historically favor Republicans on their two top priorities: the economy and safety. Democrats have to turn that around by talking about those concerns all the time, according to Longwell. Treat every issue as an economic issue. No speech should be less than seventy-five per cent about the economy. “Jeffrey Epstein is an economic issue,” Longwell writes. “It’s about elite corruption, sweetheart deals, and the abuse of those who don’t have the resources to defend themselves.” When Republicans try to change the subject to cultural issues and put the Democrats on the defense, Longwell recommends the “satisfy and steer”: give enough of an answer that it doesn’t sound like a dodge, then point out that Republicans are trying to distract voters from what matters and go back to talking about the cost of groceries. On trans rights, specifically, she advises Democrats to acknowledge that these questions are difficult and unresolved, and to speak with compassion for balancing the rights of trans people with concerns about girls’ and women’s sports and access to health care. Democratic politicians should talk about their faith more, since Republican voters almost always do. They should quit harping on “democracy,” an abstract concept that itself has become polarized, and instead say “America,” reminding voters of their shared purpose, values, and identity.
Longwell critiques Democrats with the advantage of not being one herself, encountering them more the way independent swing voters do. The first time she saw a Democratic facilitator give a talking stick (technically, a rock) to a discussion group, she said, “I knew this was the kind of thing you hippies did.” As someone who comes from the entrepreneurial, combative culture of Republican operatives, she thinks Democratic professionals are not helping themselves with land acknowledgments, or by agonizing over diversity and mental health. She says voters aren’t looking at politicians as moderate or progressive—they want to see them be aggressive. But that is not to say that they want a new version of Trump. “They want something else,” she writes, “something that doesn’t quite have a name yet.”
Jentleson imagines that leader in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson: a son of a bitch (the way politicians mean it, as a compliment) with the cunning and adaptability to build a supermajority coalition and achieve generational change. The Democratic strategist, who cut his teeth as a spokesman for the late Senate leader Harry Reid, published his first book, “Kill Switch,” in 2021. The book almost single-handedly moved the Democratic consensus in favor of terminating the filibuster, which he condemned as, in effect, instituting a sixty-vote threshold in the Senate, and as a racist relic that systematically favored Republican obstruction and thwarted both the Founders’ intentions and the will of the voters. The implicit villain in that critique was Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who refused to go along with changing the Senate rules, dooming many of Biden’s legislative ambitions.
Now, in “Supermajority,” Jentleson laments that the Democratic Party no longer has as many red-state senators like Manchin, who retired in 2025. Jentleson does not directly address his own evolution in the new book. But he clearly recognizes that his larger argument—which is that Democrats need to aim for three hundred and seventy electoral votes and a sixty-seat Senate supermajority, in order to overcome structural Republican advantages in the electoral map—is possible only if Democrats run candidates with more conservative positions in states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina.
In “Supermajority,” Jentleson’s examples of successful heterodox candidates include former President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont. Obama ran in 2008 championing fossil fuels, opposing gay marriage, and preaching personal responsibility—all views that sound out of bounds to Democrats now. Sanders, in Jentleson’s telling, ran to Hillary Clinton’s right on immigration, opposing a path to citizenship for the undocumented and rejecting the idea of decriminalizing border crossings. He also took heat from Black Lives Matter activists for emphasizing class over race. Sanders performed better than Clinton with non-college-educated whites who were increasingly deserting the Democrats. Jentleson thinks he would have won the general election in 2016. Of course, Republicans caricatured Sanders—and even Obama—as a socialist, but Jentleson argues that their views were more aligned with those of the average American, looking to them like fellow “moderates,” which really means that they were heterodox.
I came away unconvinced that politicians like these can manage to look moderate the way that heterodox voters do, since news coverage and attack ads inevitably define candidates by their most out-there positions. The cleanest—and most compelling—version of Jentleson’s argument is for politicians to match their constituents’ views or take broadly popular positions. Another of his so-called heterodox heroes, the former Democratic senator Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, supported offshore drilling, developing Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and building the Keystone XL pipeline before eventually losing reëlection in 2014; she was heterodox also in the sense that she represented a red state.
In 1980, thirteen senators were elected in states that voted for members of the other party for President. In 2024, there were only four. Have such crossovers declined because candidates have become more doctrinaire, or is it because voters have become more polarized? The feedback loop is hard to disentangle. Jentleson heaps blame on Democratic professionals and activists for frittering away the Obama coalition that scored three hundred and sixty-five electoral votes in 2008 and managed sixty Senate seats the next year. In his view, Party operatives, who tend to be young, coastal, and college-educated, put their own policy preferences ahead of the median voter, who is a white fiftysomething with a high-school education living in the suburbs. Democrats told themselves they could rely on diversifying demographics (Texas will turn blue!) and mobilizing their base rather than persuading swing voters. Donors propped up a clutter of interest groups with their own agendas, starving the institutional Party organization whose only objective should be to win elections.
In the 2022 midterm cycle, Jentleson went to work for the Democratic Senate primary campaign of John Fetterman, then the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, running in the Democratic Senate primary. Fetterman’s opponent, the then congressman Conor Lamb, was a lab-grown establishment favorite: a handsome former marine and prosecutor. Fetterman, by contrast, looked like a bouncer, wore shorts everywhere, and used slogans such as “Build shit in America” and “Workers, wages, and weed.” Fetterman dominated the primary and, despite having suffered a debilitating stroke, went on to beat the Republican Mehmet Oz by a comfortable five points. In office, however, Fetterman entered treatment for depression and later began behaving so erratically that Jentleson resigned as his chief of staff and alerted the senator’s doctor. Fetterman has rejected overtures from the Republican Party, but a Times-Philadelphia Inquirer poll from August found him more popular with Republicans than with Democrats, and last week he recorded a video for Trump’s midterm convention. Jentleson spends only one page on this obvious disappointment, faulting Fetterman for taking too much delight in conflict with the left and for becoming too credulous toward AIPAC. This year, Jentleson turned to Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, whose campaign ultimately imploded over sexual-assault allegations—well after Jentleson had submitted his “Supermajority” manuscript. Perhaps a future edition could include a chapter reflecting on whether these kinds of politicians also make for unreliable candidates.
The political-history chapters of “Supermajority”—in which Jentleson assesses Democratic Presidential politics from F.D.R. to Bill Clinton, arguing for the triumph of heterodoxy at every juncture—further complicate his case. Jentleson emphasizes that F.D.R. and L.B.J. won in electoral landslides only by making heartbreaking compromises—Roosevelt by incorporating segregation into the New Deal to bring along Southern Democrats, and Johnson by suppressing a challenge to Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Convention, allowing him to hold the Party together and pass the Voting Rights Act the following year. Those tough choices, however, might say less about the leaders who made them than they do about how differently the two-party system worked back then. Roosevelt had to compromise with Southern segregationists because at that time they belonged, paradoxically, to the same party as Northern liberals. Both parties emerged from the progressive era as messy coalitions of diverse constituencies and interests, not uniform ideologies. The effect, across decades, was usually to push both parties toward the center, as much to satisfy their internal competing interests as to cobble together a general-election majority. From this perspective, heterodoxy sounds more like a descriptive observation of how things used to work than a practicable path in today’s polarized politics.
The old party system did not change by accident. It was brought down by a secret plot hatched in a Chicago motel room in 1961, when twenty-two activists bet they could dislodge the moderate parties that underpinned F.D.R.’s “New Deal consensus” and transform the G.O.P. into a conservative party versus a liberal Democratic Party. The conspiracy turned into the 1964 Presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, and although he gave L.B.J. his landslide victory, he inspired a generation of conservative activists and set in motion the movement that led to the Reagan Revolution and the ideological sorting of the parties that keeps deepening to this day. The Republicans’ march toward right-wing homogeneity left the Democrats little choice but to take the inverse.
Jentleson doesn’t address that side of the story; he is strictly concerned with the Democrats. He recounts how L.B.J. pushed through the Voting Rights Act, knowing full well it would cost his party the solid South and facilitate Republican inroads with Northern whites (what became Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”). Johnson decided that the price was worth paying to realize America’s founding ideal of democratic equality for the first time, dismissing advisers’ warnings with, “Well, what the hell’s the Presidency for?”
The civil-rights backlash and the Vietnam War combined to unravel Johnson and his party in 1968. Jentleson surfaces another, lesser-known miscalculation that has burdened the Democrats ever since. F.D.R., whose sphinx-like flexibility Jentleson interprets, too, as a kind of heterodoxy, had been careful to set up the New Deal based on earned benefits. The G.I. Bill rewarded military service. The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration paid wages for work. The Tennessee Valley Authority built infrastructure. Above all, Social Security was pay in, pay out—a virtuous circle that would keep it popular in perpetuity. By contrast, Johnson’s “Great Society” expanded the social safety net into status benefits: Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid and food stamps for the poor, and discrimination protections for minorities in housing and employment. These benefits, because they were not available to everyone, introduced questions about fairness—which Jentleson argues gave Republicans their own recipe to achieve supermajorities by stoking those resentments and layering them with racism. (The same resistance to federal aid to Black Americans doomed the first Reconstruction.) Jentleson compares the power of fusing race and these questions of fairness to detonating a nuclear warhead.
His solution is that Democrats need to take the fairness questions seriously in order to cleave them away from racial resentments. For that reason, Jentleson prefers universal programs to status-based ones. He recommends a Democratic platform built around an “American Security Guarantee”: social insurance when you need it; your choice of public or private health care on a sliding scale based on income; and a public-service job for those who can’t find private-sector employment. After two hundred pages of diagnosing the Democrats’ problems, Jentleson devotes a single page to this solution, leaving many questions unanswered. Who pays for the social insurance? Why adjust health-care costs for income if the point is to be universal? What would all the public-sector employees do?
Jentleson may need another full-length book to develop this proposal. But he is already following Longwell’s advice by trying to unite Democrats around the concept of making themselves more amenable to swing voters without abandoning their principles. Progressives, moderates, independents, ex-Republicans, and all the other unhappy Trump antagonists who make up what Longwell calls the “pro-democracy coalition” should spend less time litigating who belongs inside or outside the tent and more time coming up with ideas that everyone can get behind. “What if instead of an interminable, self-defeating intracoalition struggle session, we change the conversation to what we’re going to build next?” Longwell writes. “Forget about fighting over the best way to build the coalition and instead focus on what the coalition can come together to build.” ♦