In January 2007, Chuck Schumer published a book titled “Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time.” In it, he proposed the following policy agenda, which he dubbed the “50 Percent Solution”:
Increase reading and math scores by 50 percent.
Reduce property taxes by 50 percent.
Increase the number of college graduates by 50 percent.
Reduce illegal immigration by at least 50 percent and increase legal immigration by up to 50 percent.
Reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 50 percent.
Reduce cancer mortality by 50 percent.
Reduce childhood obesity by 50 percent.
Reduce abortions by 50 percent.
Cut children’s access to pornography by 50 percent.
Reduce tax evasion and avoidance by 50 percent.
Increase our ability to fight terrorism by 50 percent.
This was not an agenda designed to guard his left flank against a primary challenge in New York. It was also not an agenda designed to mobilize progressive donors by promising to make all their dreams come true.
It was, if anything, the opposite: an agenda you could imagine a Democrat defending from a debate stage in any of the 50 states.
South Dakotans are quite conservative, but I don’t think there’s anything on that list that would cause a South Dakota voter to balk. The whole thing is a bit of a cringe gimmick, and of course many conservative-minded voters in conservative states would not find it credible for a Democrat to promise all of those things. But in 2008, Democrats held Senate seats in West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, and Montana, and gained seats in Alaska and North Carolina, as well as in other, more liberal states.
I’m not going to tell you that Schumer’s 50 Percent Solution is the reason Democrats did so well in those races. That’s absurd. But one of the reasons that Democrats did so well in those races is that they really were making a good-faith effort to contest those Senate seats.
The 50 Percent Solution was fully aligned with that kind of good faith effort. It included specific measures to broaden the tent by appealing to cultural conservatives with promises to reduce abortions, restrict access to pornography, and curb illegal immigration. The plan to reduce dependence on foreign oil is used as a lever to advance a bunch of environmental goals, but it’s not just a skinsuit on a crash decarbonization agenda — he specifically says we should open more terrain to drilling. And the progressive promises on offer, like more progressive taxation and more investment in education, were the most inoffensive forms of progressive economics. Looking back, it’s striking how expansive that agenda was.
Somehow here we are, 18 years later, and everyone in Democratic Party politics is extremely alarmed about the damage that Donald Trump is doing to the country.
Yet Senate Democrats are playing on a far smaller, far less ambitious field, and their leader — a person whose political achievements I genuinely respect, who I interned for, and who has surely forgotten more about politics than I ever knew — is not really doing anything about it.
I think I understand why.
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