Democrats Need Supermajority Mentality—Former Fetterman Chief of Staff

A former Democratic Senate staffer urged his party to change its approach to politics and adopt “supermajority thinking” to make a comeback against Republicans in upcoming elections.

President-elect Donald Trump will start his second administration with the added support of Republican control in the House and Senate, even as the House majority remains at a thin majority.

Adam Jentleson, who served as Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman’s chief of staff and Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s deputy chief of staff argued in a New York Times op-ed that the Democrats need to change their thinking if they hope to take the right lessons from the 2024 election.

For Jentleson, Trump achieved “an electoral realignment” that resulted from his overperformance with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters relative to what polling and past performances had indicated would happen.

Newsweek reached out to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by email on Saturday evening for comment.

“Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment,” Jentleson wrote. “We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments.”

“Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like,” he continued. “Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.”

Jentleson chided critics for scoffing at Trump’s campaigning throughout New York, including rallies in the Bronx and Long Island as well as the now-famous Madison Square Garden rally.

“As a strategic matter, asking the question ‘What would it take for a Republican to win New York?’ leads to the answer, ‘It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters’,” even as it remained clear that Trump would not win New York State.

Jentleson suggested the Democrats look at a similarly ambitious goal, such as winning back the 365 electoral votes President Barack Obama won in 2008, and figuring out what it would take actually achieve it.

Part of that, according to him, would mean abandoning the “fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power.”

“Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line … Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party,” he wrote.

Jentleson also took a shot at the “liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win,” arguing that it leads to the intellectualization of politics gives rise to the sense of a college-educated elite and places “a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal … fatally wounding them in the places they need to win.”

This would mean ignoring a Left-Wing “purity test,” which has remained a significant topic of discussion between centrist and more far-left Democrats. The “purity test” requires a candidate to comply with almost all of a voter’s desired positions or get no support.

Republicans similarly argued about the “purity test” for their candidates, even toying with the idea of imposing an actual purity test on potential candidates after Obama’s landslide victory: “Comply with eight of the party’s 10 “Reaganite” principles, the thinking went, and you’re worthy of funding. Fall short, and you might as well be Leon Trotsky,” Newsweek wrote in 2016.

The same thinking applied to Democrats led to many voting for Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein or refusing to vote at all if it meant voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, potentially handing Trump victory in several areas that led to his win.

Democrats need to start prioritizing winning over appeasing, according to Jentleson, which he understands “will make the groups mad, and that’s OK – in fact, it will be good for them.”

“The 2026 midterms will offer an opportunity for Democrats to make major gains in the House and the Senate,” Jentlson argued. “Mr. Trump is likely to be an unpopular president, and congressional Republicans consistently undermine their own advantages in pursuit of tax cuts for the wealthy.”

“One way to do this is for Democrats to stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun,” he wrote later in his piece. “This is where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.”

“Democrats should seek out issues that demonstrate their willingness to fight for their constituents and break with progressive orthodoxy,” he said. “The emerging concept known as supply-side progressivism offers a good guide, embracing limited deregulation that advances liberal policy goals.”

“Those who would rather lose elections so that they can feel better about themselves leave the real suffering to the people they claim to fight for,” he concluded. “No one wins when we lose. It is time to start winning again.”