A durable majority

My goal in politics is to help Democrats build a “durable majority”. That is to say I want to help elect enough Democrats over a long enough period of time so meaningful policy to be enacted. The most prominent example that comes to mind is the amazing run of social and economic victories by the Democrats running from the New Deal through the Great Society arguably up until the 1990s when we lost the House for the first time in 40 years.

During this period we saw the civil rights movement, the first Catholic president, second wave feminism, social security and so much more. Even Republicans who won in this period were impacted by progressive agenda setting, such as Nixon’s EPA, Eisenhower’s highways or George Bush’s Americans with Disabilities Act. It’s hard to imagine anything like these bills being a priority to today’s GOP leaders.

Many people in the movement that I talk to seem to write off the possibility of a durable majority. Both parties have seized single party control in more and more states leaving fewer and fewer states that are even worth competing in. This makes it hard to imagine a victory on the scale that would be required to win in a truly transformative fashion. Too much of the country has written us off. I think that this pessimism contributes to Democrats ceding ground and to pessimism among the electorate.

In reality even in these difficult to win places we don’t lose as badly as people think. In 2024 we lost by 20 points in “ruby red” Nebraska which admittedly sounds bad and contributes to people thinking that there aren’t meaningful amounts of Democrats in states like it. However, the flip side is we won 40%, which is still a huge portion. If 2 in 5 people in a community were left handed you’d notice. There are places where we are in the minority and we should recognize that strategically, but we can’t give up on half the country because it precludes us from winning the type of victory that would allow us to achieve our goals.

Recreating a durable majority will be incredibly hard but I believe there is no other way to pass the bills we need to in order to address climate change and fight the ever increasing inequality in America. For that reason I’m going to start putting my ideas on a few of the building blocks for a winning out there. I’m going to start next week with expanding the electorate and talking to as many folks as possible.