Losing Dogmas, Winning Elections: Adam Jentleson on How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Supermajority

“One believes in democracy and the rule of law, and right now, the other doesn’t.” — Adam Jentleson Yesterday, William Hitchcock explained FDR’s ability to build and maintain supermajorities. Today, Adam Jentleson — Harry Reid’s former deputy chief of staff and chief of staff to John Fetterman — talks about how the Democrats can build lasting power in the 21st century. The strategy is laid out in Supermajority, Jentleson’s follow-up to the acclaimed Kill Switch. Is the Democratic Party too woke? “We are still too rigid” is Jentleson’s euphemistic take on the dramatic class flip in American politics. JFK won two-thirds of working-class voters in 1960, Jentleson reminds us, while Kamala Harris lost two-thirds in 2024. His prescription is FDR-style heterodoxy. Dems need to hold to their core commitments (healthcare, the safety net, progressive taxation, civil rights) while broadening their base in red states. His examples of tent wideners include a Kansan megachurch pastor, a pro-drilling Alaskan candidate, and an Iowan hopeful whose flat “no” on trans sports silenced a right-wing radio host. The model for winning back the working class, Jentleson argues, is Bernie Sanders circa 2016, an economic populist, but to Hillary Clinton’s right on immigration and guns. The much maligned John Fetterman, Jentleson’s old boss, is the cautionary tale. It’s what happens, Jentleson warns, when the fighting “becomes the entire point” and a politician comes unmoored from principle. Jon Ossoff, Jentleson suggests, seems the anti-Fetterman in writing his own speeches and appearing authentic rather than opportunistic. Ossoff certainly isn’t FDR, but he might be the best chance the Dems have of defeating an increasingly authoritarian Republican party in 2028. Five Takeaways •       The FDR Lessons Nobody Tells. Picking up where yesterday’s Hitchcock episode left off: FDR built the New Deal supermajority not by bowling opponents over with progressive rhetoric but through a deeply heterodox coalition — including factions today’s Democrats would expel — and sold it in conservative wrappers: Social Security pitched as fiscally responsible and earned, not given (he railed against the dole in cabinet meetings). The uncomfortable ledger: FDR actively worked against every civil rights bill of his era to keep self-declared white supremacists in the tent — which means, Jentleson argues, that today’s trade-offs (a Kansas candidate with questions about trans sports, a border-security Democrat) “pale in comparison” to the compromises that built the twentieth century’s Democratic dominance. The Kansas case in point: megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, running in a state Trump won by twenty points, holds the line on healthcare, the safety net, and progressive taxes — and the alternative to his heterodoxy is a MAGA senator.•       Too Rigid, Not Too Woke. Asked the New Yorker’s question — is the party still too woke? — Jentleson answers with his own euphemistic diagnosis: “we are still too rigid.” The evidence is the class flip: JFK won about two-thirds of working-class voters; Harris lost about two-thirds, while the college-educated — once the party of Romney, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower — became the Democratic base. And the sociology cuts deep: education correlates with ideological rigidity, while working-class voters hold heterodox mixes — the focus-group regular who wants the 2008 CEOs jailed and undocumented immigrants deported in the same breath. Hence the echo-chamber problem (Andrew’s San Francisco testimony included): the decline of unions, parties, and Elks halls narrowed the aperture to funders and interest groups, and the Harris circle heard only itself. The fix costs nothing: choose diverse advisers, model good-faith disagreement — a preview of next week’s Susan Neiman conversation — and collect what Jentleson calls the electoral windfall waiting for whichever party does it first.•       It’s Working Right Now. To Andrew’s two-state-solution objection — lovely in theory, impossible in practice — Jentleson answers from the November polls: Mary Peltola leading in Alaska (Trump +double digits) as a pro-drilling Democrat; James Talarico leading in Texas as a fossil-fuels-as-bridge Democrat; and Rob Sand in Iowa, whose flat “no” on a right-wing radio show — the host admitted he’d prepared follow-ups for the expected wriggle — took the wedge off the table and freed his anti-corruption message. As recently as 2009, he reminds us, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, both Dakotas, Louisiana, and Montana. The forgotten exemplar: Bernie Sanders 2016 — economically populist but a 2007 immigration-bill no vote, “open borders is a Koch brothers proposal,” Lou Dobbs appearances, and gun rights to Hillary’s right — the heterodox mix that produced his crossover appeal, against Clinton’s across-the-board orthodoxy. Jentleson’s 2028 read: the primary won’t resolve for the left, and Ossoff, Cooper, and Peltola are the model — though he tips his hat to the DSA’s weeknight commitment to Robert’s Rules.•       The Fetterman Cautionary Tale. The hour’s most personal stretch: Jentleson was John Fetterman’s chief of staff, and his verdict on his old boss — who cameoed at Trump’s convention this week — is that Fetterman shows what happens when the heterodox strategy is “taken too far”: the fighting “has become the entire point of his career,” unmoored from the principles that make divergence meaningful. On the Wall Street Journal’s reporting — the children’s hospital he refused to meet, the York police funerals he skipped — Jentleson wasn’t a source (“if you’re going to say something, you should say it on the record and put your name on it”) but confirms it “resonated with my experience.” His primary emotion: “sadness and regret… he’s letting a tremendous number of people down, including the people of Pennsylvania, who are basically down a senator.” The lesson for the book’s own thesis: heterodoxy is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it needs to stay rooted in why you entered politics at all — or it leads “to some dark places.”•       The Vision Thing. Why supermajority and not Madisonian faction? Because, Jentleson argues, this era has something genuinely new: “the first time in American history where we have one political party that is entirely aligned with a sympathy towards authoritarianism” — not flashes like McCarthy or Father Coughlin (yesterday’s villain, returning), but a party whose convention this week featured Trump leading “a pledge to cheat in elections,” with no internal pushback. (FDR’s court-packing, by contrast, was the exception proving the rule: the system brushed him back in 1938.) Hence the pull quote — and yet democracy-talk alone doesn’t win: “Biden tried to run on soul of the nation… and it didn’t work.” The closing agreement, via Andrew’s wrapper argument: the New Deal and the Great Society were named visions; Clinton and Obama never articulated one. Jentleson’s candidate: finish FDR’s cradle-to-grave social insurance — wage insurance against AI’s disruptions, everything earned rather than handed out, aimed at bank accounts and the pump rather than the soul of the nation. And his 2028 intrigue, on the record: Jon Ossoff — the anti-Fetterman — who writes his own speeches, wins Georgia repeatedly, and conditioned aid to Israel early enou...