HOW TO GET AN OP-ED PUBLISHED: CHASTISE DEMOCRATS FOR NOT DOING THINGS THEY'RE ACTUALLY DOING

Adam Jentleson, a former top staffer to Senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, has some theories about the 2024 presidential election, which he's published in a New York Times op-ed:

When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet 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.”

Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.

Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.

Kamala Harris tried to win this race by doing a great deal of outreach to moderate Republican voters, in an effort to expand her coalition. Harris also held a huge rally in Texas, a state everyone knew she was unlikely to win. So why was Trump's strategy so special?

But go on, Adam.

Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. 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. 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.

Okay -- Jentleson has used the word "supermajority" three times in the first four paragraphs of this op-ed. He's clearly angling for a deal to publish a book with the word Supermajority in the title (or maybe Supermajority will be the entire title). As you'll see when I discuss the rest of the op-ed, the subtitle of Jentleson's book will be something like How Democrats Can Build a New Winning Coalition by Embracing the Middle -- and Abandoning the Left.)

And now let's talk about how well Trump's "supermajority" strategy worked, because, well, he didn't win a supermajority. It's not clear that he even won a majority. According to AP and the Times, Trump has 50.1% of the national vote, with nearly 2% of the vote still to be counted, much of it in California, a state Harris won by more than 20 points. The Cook Political Report says he's at 49.96%. His popular-vote victory over Harris was less than 2%. Biden won the popular vote by more than twice that in 2020. Both of Barack Obama's popular-vote wins were by greater margins. Even Hillary Clinon's popular-vote win in 2016 was by a greater margin. So if this was a supermajority strategy, it didn't work.

Continue, Adam.

That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.

Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a 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 on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, 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.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.

Democrats didn't make a clean break with interest groups? Really? Harris embraced fracking. She and President Biden expressed support for a right-wing immigration bill. She portrayed herself as tough on crime, and announced that she owns a gun and would use it to defend herself if necessary. She rebuffed opponents of Israeli brutality in Gaza. That's just a partial list of ways she broke with progressive interest groups.

And it's clear that Jentleson has fallen for the myth that Trump is a fearless maverick who follows his inner dictates and doesn't give a damn about party dogma. Really? Does he think the famously libertine Trump gave speech after speech to Christian Right groups out of a deep and abiding personal faith in the Almighty? Does he think Trump announced that he'd vote to uphold Florida's six-week abortion ban a day after criticizing it because he has a profound inner belief that abortion is wrong? Trump got Roe overturned for one reason: coalition management. He signed on with anti-vaxx obsessive Robert Kennedy Jr. for the same reason -- remember when Trump said positive things about COVID vaccines and was booed by his own supporters?

Jentleson goes on to say that Democrats should

stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun. This is where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.

But Donald Trump once said he wanted "some form of punishment" for women who had abortions, and he said it on video. Why was he able to get out from under this past statement and a hundred others, while Harris was held accountable for her past statements?

Or should we just say that if it was a 50%-48% race, as appears to be the case, then both candidates lost votes because they'd previously said and done things the voters didn't like, and it's unreasonable to expect a candidate not to have a record to defend?

Jentleson's point is that previous progressive policy positions (decriminalizing border crossings, offering gender surgery to prisoners) buried Harris. But she wasn't buried. It was a close race. And she tacked to the right on many, many issues, but Trump was more successful at shedding his baggage. I believe that was because people without the means to pay off their credit bills in full every month are still understandably angry about a burst of inflation that wasn't actually Harris's fault, or President Biden's, but they took it out on her. She did a great deal of what Jentleson accuses her of not doing. But in a dissatisfied country, that wasn't enough.