Is the Democratic Party Still Too Woke?
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It would be wildly premature to declare a winner in the Democratic Party’s Civil War of 2026, but, with the midterms fast approaching, the insurgent left appears, at the very least, to have establishment forces on the run. In House primaries in Colorado and New York, first-time far-left candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America scored upset victories over powerful incumbents. Graham Platner, a populist oyster farmer, trounced a sitting governor in Maine’s Senate primary; then, after Platner was forced to drop out of the race over allegations of sexual assault (which he denied), the state’s Democrats replaced him on the ballot with Troy Jackson, a former state senator who’s enjoyed the support of Maine’s D.S.A. chapter. And, most significantly, Abdul El-Sayed—a former public-health official who is campaigning on a platform of Medicare for All, the abolition of ICE, and an end to U.S military aid to Israel—overcame a spending advantage that’s been estimated as high as twelve-to-one in favor of his centrist opponent to claim the Democrats’ Senate nomination in the crucial swing state of Michigan. Whatever happens in November, it’s hardly a lefty fever dream to envision a scene two years from now in which Chuck Schumer meets Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Capitol to negotiate the terms of surrender of his Senate seat—that is, if A.O.C. isn’t the Democratic Party’s next Presidential nominee.
Not so long ago, Adam Jentleson, a veteran Democratic operative, would have celebrated these developments. In the years after Donald Trump’s first election, Jentleson was a self-described “woke warrior.” He bashed Democrats who failed to embrace causes like Black Lives Matter and D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood as sellouts and squishes; when a Democrat whom he found sufficiently liberal proved unable to win at the ballot box, such as his preferred 2020 Presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, he chalked up the defeat to sexism rather than ideology. Behind the scenes, he served as an adviser to progressive groups such as the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats. Although Jentleson says that he counselled those groups to be “aggressive yet realistic,” members of the groups recall him egging them on to hold Democratic leaders’ feet to the fire. He believed that “the way for Democrats to win was to get your base really riled up.”
But a series of recent events, culminating in Trump’s second election, has changed Jentleson’s thinking. In a Times Opinion piece two weeks after Kamala Harris’s defeat, he urged Democratic candidates to “break with progressive orthodoxy” and declare “independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.” Ten months later, he launched the Searchlight Institute, a center-left Democratic think tank whose animating purpose is to create a more pragmatic party. “I was part of the left, but I got burned both by the left itself and by my experience with the American electorate not turning out to be what that faction says it is,” Jentleson told me when we met at Searchlight’s Capitol Hill office this summer. “They sell this idea that if you just fight harder or yell louder you can unlock this secret socialism in the American electorate that’s just latent and waiting to be tapped into, and I think that’s basically a misleading case to make to people. I think telling our voters—Democratic voters—that that’s the case is doing them a disservice, because it’s not true.”
Now, in a new book, “Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power,” which comes out on September 15th, Jentleson argues that the problem for the left (and a Democratic Party beholden to it) is that its policies will never appeal to enough voters to overtake the forces of Trumpism. In order for a Democratic President to “enact major change” rather than “merely be a seat-warmer at the Resolute Desk until turning power back over to Republicans,” Jentleson writes, he or she will have to win not a bare majority of two hundred and seventy electoral votes but a super-majority of three hundred and seventy—an outcome that would require victories in states such as Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Jentleson believes that this will “usher in majorities in both houses of Congress” big enough to survive the midterms, and hold power long enough so that Democrats cannot only enact their agenda but also flip the balance of the Supreme Court. “Settling for smaller but ideologically purer majorities is a path to purgatory at best,” he concludes, “and losing to fascism at worst.”
Jentleson, who is in his mid-forties, with an impressive head of hair and an equally impressive beard, is a consummate Washington operator. He is an oft-pinged contact in political reporters’ phones (he was a major source for last year’s blockbuster New York magazine story about the mental-health struggles of his former boss, John Fetterman), and he continues to serve as an informal adviser to Democratic politicians. Occasionally, some of them return the favor. When Jentleson recently had to dispose of a dead fawn in the back yard of his home in suburban Maryland, he texted Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor in Iowa and an avid outdoorsman, who counselled, “Ankles are the easiest body part to haul them by.”
The first half of “Supermajority” is a compelling memoir of Jentleson’s nearly two-decade-long career in Democratic politics—working for Harry Reid and Fetterman, among others—which afforded him a front-row seat to the Democratic Party’s enfeeblement. After Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Jentleson, who was then working at the Center for American Progress, hosted a daily conference call for twenty labor, environmental, and other lefty groups to coördinate messaging and to insure everyone was in synch with the White House. “The idea of criticizing Democrats was as anathema to us as if we had worked for the party itself,” Jentleson writes of the calls’ participants. But as Obama ran into the realities of governing, and the groups experienced the disappointment of his Administration’s compromises on issues such as health care and climate change, their reticence waned. “[W]hat had been a centrifugal force became centripetal—no longer drawing groups toward a central focus, instead pushing each of them toward their individual issues and causes, an ever-expanding galaxy of policy demanders,” he writes.
Jentleson recounts how Democrats “shifted dramatically to the left” after Trump’s election in 2016, and that their policy demands “crescendoed” at the outset of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, when liberal interest groups threatened to withhold endorsements unless candidates embraced “their rigidly left-wing positions.” As it turned out, the Democratic candidate who largely stiffed these groups during the primaries, Joe Biden, won the nomination and then the White House. But the purity tests proved to be a ticking time bomb: when Vice-President Kamala Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign resurrected an A.C.L.U. candidate questionnaire that Harris had filled out in which she’d answered “yes” to a question about whether she supported taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners and migrants. The Trump campaign turned the questionnaire into a TV ad that ended with the message “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Had Harris done more during the campaign to “draw some bright lines of independence” from her party, Jentleson argues, she might have had sufficient “armor to beat back” the attack.
The way Democrats have handled the issue of transgender rights is especially resonant for Jentleson. In 2021, his spouse, the writer Benny Peterson, came out as nonbinary. Jentleson and Peterson tried to make it work, but last year, after Peterson decided to transition, the couple split up. The pair co-parent two children and still vacation together as a family, but they now live in separate houses on the same street. Amid these personal developments, Jentleson has publicly urged Democrats to recalibrate their position on trans rights, particularly as they relate to sports and to gender-transition care for children. “Part of the reason this has become such a big issue is that Democrats decided to collectively plant our flag on the fringiest examples of where this stuff comes into play,” he told me. “There’s actually broad support for the policies that affect most people in terms of protection from discrimination and access to medical care.” Peterson declined to talk with me about Jentleson or their political views on the record, but Jentleson acknowledged that his new project has become a sensitive subject. “It’s a hard conversation to have, but I feel like I’m doing the right thing by them,” Jentleson told me. “Their job isn’t politics. That’s my job, and it is tricky, but I do think that this is going to make them safer and make all trans people better off if we can just beat these fucking fascists.”
For the past few years, center-left writers and practitioners have been offering political programs designed to halt the Party’s leftward march. Popularists, such as the data scientist David Shor and the writer Matt Yglesias, have advocated using rigorous polling and analytics to develop a Democratic agenda that appeals to the median voter. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the co-authors of the 2025 book “Abundance,” have argued for cutting back on well-intentioned but nettlesome rules and procedures—environmental reviews and strict zoning requirements—that have prevented the government from delivering public goods such as high-speed rail and affordable housing. Jentleson borrows from both camps in “Supermajority,” but his argument is even more reductionist. “The tried-and-true policy levers on our side are raising taxes on rich people and then using that revenue to pay for benefits for working people,” Jentleson told me. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”
The Searchlight Institute—whose name is inspired by the rural Nevada mining town where Harry Reid grew up—has released polling memos advising Democrats to push for reforms to ICE but not for the agency’s abolition and to abandon calls for Medicare for All in favor of a health-care-reform plan that negotiates drug prices, breaks up medical monopolies, and allows people to keep their private plans. Looking ahead to the 2028 Democratic Presidential primary, the group is desperately hoping to avoid a repeat of the race to the left of 2020. In every primary, “minute differences in policies become these massive debates between the candidates,” Jentleson said. “The key is to set the parameters so that you are having those narcissism of small differences conversations within basic parameters that aren’t politically suicidal.”
Jentleson’s super-majority vision has struck a chord with some Democrats. In the months after the 2024 election, he pitched his plans for Searchlight to top Democratic officials and contributors, including those assembled at an exclusive retreat at an upstate New York resort. When Searchlight officially launched last September, it boasted a roster of billionaire donors and a ten-million-dollar annual budget. But some of Jentleson’s erstwhile allies on the left are less sanguine about his project. Amira Hassan, the former political director of the Justice Democrats, worked with Jentleson after Biden’s election. “I think he’s a grifter who doesn’t really believe in anything except his own continuation,” she told me. Morris Katz, a young Democratic strategist who helped mastermind the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani (and Graham Platner), met Jentleson during Fetterman’s 2022 Senate campaign. He was similarly blunt in his assessment: “Adam Jentleson is a broken weathervane, who is trying to go in the direction that money and public sentiment is blowing, but has political instincts that are too shitty to even do it successfully.”
Jentleson believes that his detractors have lost sight of the bigger picture. The second half of “Supermajority” is a potted history of the most successful Democratic politicians over the past ninety years—a list that includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Obama—whose success Jentleson attributes to their embrace of heterodoxy. Jentleson concedes that the New Deal was “fundamentally radical,” but he argues that Roosevelt “emphasized themes such as stability, prudence, and personal responsibility, habitually wrapping ambitious liberal goals in traditional moral narratives and weaving conservative elements into his policies.” Johnson paved the way for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by enacting budget cuts and signing into law “the largest income-tax reduction in US history at that point.”
That heterodoxy wasn’t without its downsides. Jentleson notes that, in order to win the support of Southern Democrats, Roosevelt agreed to exclude domestic and agriculture professions from his Social Security bill (sixty-five per cent of Black Americans worked in the domestic or agriculture sectors at the time); after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson spent the 1964 Presidential campaign running away from it and refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s racially integrated delegation at the Democratic convention in favor of the state party’s all-white one. But Jentleson contends that the trade-offs, as painful as they may have been, were ultimately worth it—that Roosevelt and Johnson “wove together conservative themes to secure monumental liberal goals.”
At the same time, Jentleson has begun striking a more conciliatory tone toward the left. A lot of his time on X and Substack of late has been spent admonishing Democrats who say that they won’t vote for El-Sayed in the midterms; he is a fierce advocate for what he calls “big tent absolutism, an approach to politics where the only litmus test is that there are no litmus tests.” On the day that I visited Searchlight this summer, the group was holding its weekly all-hands meeting. Jentleson, seated at the head of a conference table, brought up a snarky comment he’d made the previous evening on X about a photo from a D.S.A. gathering in Denver. “That’s a lot of facemasks for July 2026,” he’d written. He was now rethinking his post. “That is a room full of people engaging in the civic process,” he reminded his colleagues. The D.S.A. might be “wildly out of step with the public on a lot of issues,” he went on, but just as majorities aren’t built on ideological purity, neither are super-majorities. “We should also respect that they care about issues, passionately, just like we do,” Jentleson said. “The national Democratic Party would kill to have that level of engagement from people.” ♦