Only a big tent can maximize the OBBBA opportunity

Republicans think Democrats are too toxic on culture to beat them

Like many of you, we’re devastated by the news coming out of Kerr County, Texas. Kate’s parents live in Ingram very near the Guadalupe River, and it’s a place where we’ve made many happy memories and enjoyed many delicious breakfast tacos. Our family, fortunately, is safe and their home is intact, but many people have not been so lucky. If you’re interested in helping, we’d like to recommend our friends at GiveDirectly.

As longtime Slow Boring readers know, GiveDirectly provides direct cash transfers to people in need. We raise money for their overseas efforts every November, but with this disaster top of mind for so many, we wanted to share a bit about their domestic work.

You can read about their disaster relief efforts here, but in short, GiveDirectly is able to provide cash support in situations where the government response is too slow to meet urgent needs, especially for low-income households and those who may lack documentation or otherwise fall outside of the government’s eligibility requirements. They can often deliver funds in less than 24 hours to people who need things like medicine or baby formula.

So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to support those impacted by the Texas flood, please consider GiveDirectly.

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Now that Republicans’ awful budget bill has passed, Democrats’ thoughts turn naturally to revenge. The upside of losing on the substance of a fight like this is that the “winner” normally reaps political backlash, and the opposition party gets a leg up in the midterms.

In the House, the strategy for making Hakeem Jeffries Speaker is pretty straightforward: Democrats need to raise a ton of money to help support the 13 incumbents holding down seats that Trump won, and they need to recruit politicians with a little charisma and some good biographies to run in R+1 and R+2 seats. The problem, as has long been clear, is the Senate. Time has shown that beating Susan Collins is a lot tougher than just recruiting a pretty good candidate and hoping for generic backlash. Besides which, Collins had the prudence to vote against the bill and Democrats are having a really hard time finding a pretty good candidate.

The best chance is North Carolina, but that’s a state Trump won three times in a row, albeit narrowly.

After that, it gets really tough. I’m hearing from a lot of Democrats who are lowering expectations for the midterms on the basis of the “bad map.” The problem is that the map doesn’t get any better in 2028.

Why I'm obsessed with winning the Senate

The map isn’t bad because of some fluky confluence of circumstances. The map is bad because there are 25 states that Trump carried three times in a row, and only 20 states that he lost three times in a row. After North Carolina, Democrats’ best shots are in Ohio and Alaska. But Trump came closer to winning New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia, and New Mexico than he did to losing any of those states. The Democratic Party coalition is just not fit to purpose if the purpose is to win Senate majorities. And yet if Dems can’t win Senate majorities, they can’t prevent the MAGAfication of the federal judiciary or pass laws or confirm their own appointees if they win the White House. Giving up on ideological commitments that make it borderline impossible to win the Senate isn’t really giving up on anything, because without the Senate, you have nothing. But the party, it seems to me, doesn’t want to talk about this — instead, everyone is fascinated by Zohran Mamdani versus Andrew Cuomo, a race that features two guys who are both way too left-wing on key issues to win in Ohio.

It’s not exactly that winning the Senate in 2026 is crucial; just coming close could be good enough to win a majority in 2028. My point is that the nature of electoral cycles is such that the national political environment is likely to be more favorable in the midterms than in the general, and the fundamentals of the map don’t get better in the future. You can’t use the objective difficulty of the task as an excuse. The objective difficulty of the task should motivate you to make the needed changes.

But I want to flag an encouraging conversation I had on Twitter with Senator Brian Schatz, one of the leading contenders to succeed Chuck Schumer, on the night the bill passed. Schatz started by appropriately setting “win the Senate” as the appropriate goal for Senate Democrats, and then correctly acknowledged that a Senate majority will have to include members like Joe Manchin, who say and do things that annoy progressives.

This is the whole ballgame. I especially liked the specificity of the Manchin callout (which Schatz clarified is earnest, not sarcastic), precisely because Manchin was so villainized in 2021-2022.

He was by no means the perfect politician or beyond criticism. But the uncomfortable reality is that Manchin is much closer to being the solution to Senate Democrats’ problems than the source of them. Acknowledging that will be contentious with the donors, with the groups, with many staffers on the Hill, and with much of the base. It’s also true that Manchin would not have voted for this bill, and that we will get much more progressive outcomes by remaking the party as a big tent that comfortably includes Manchin-like figures.

Opposing this bill can play on a broad map

Running against this legislation is great politics for Democrats, first and foremost because most people share progressives’ basic moral premises about health care.

Significantly larger than the group who would self-describe as progressive or socialist is the swath of voters who do not want to live in a world where people forego useful medical treatments due to inability to pay. This doesn’t mean that enacting progressives’ preferred affirmative agenda on health care is easy. In the real world, you face tradeoffs and raising taxes is hard. But conservatives believe, truly and deeply, that whether a person can see the doctor should hinge on their ability to pay.

The baseline unpopularity of the Republican view on health care is only exacerbated by the extent to which the Trump administration has also taken a hammer to basic medical research. The sophisticated alternative to the naive progressive view of health care is that in the long run, developing new cures is more important than maximizing access to the treatments that already exist. Trump, though, is also against this and has subordinated the broad public interest in science to his vendettas against various universities.

So depending on where they’re running and who they’re talking to, candidates have more than one promising angle for talking about Trump and health care.

The legislative package itself, meanwhile, is especially toxic because it’s not as if unpopular cuts to Medicaid and ACA enrollment are being done in a spirit of shared sacrifice that will reduce the budget deficit and bring down interest rates. Republicans are taking an unsustainable fiscal situation and making it much worse, even accelerating the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare.

The bill manages to be cruel and irresponsible simultaneously because it blows so many trillions of dollars in an orgy of regressive tax cuts.

This is something you can hold your head high opposing basically anywhere. Former Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards served two terms as a pro-life, pro-gun, Democrat who was favorable to the oil and gas industry based on Medicaid expansion as his key cause. Could he win a Senate race on that platform? Obviously, Louisiana would be an uphill battle for Democrats under any circumstances. But with Republicans violating their own promises to protect Medicaid, his key issue is clearly relevant, which gives him a puncher’s chance. But Democrats have to want to be a big-tent party.

Recruiting is necessary but insufficient

In an era of nationalized politics, any member of any party trying to win a tough race faces an inherent credibility issue. Lots of moderate Republicans in the House promised in 2024 not to vote for exactly the kind of bill that they just voted for. Larry Hogan dramatically overperformed the baseline partisan fundamentals in his Senate race, but he ran much weaker as a Senate candidate than he did as a gubernatorial candidate because lots of moderate Maryland Democrats who’d voted for him twice as a check on the state legislature didn’t want a senator who would empower Mitch McConnell.

That’s why it’s important to not only recruit a big tent of candidates, but for party leaders to stand by them.

That’s not to say that if Edwards were to run, safe-seat Democrats should suddenly abandon all their views and endorse the draconian abortion ban that he signed in Louisiana. But they do need to say that they would welcome him as a colleague on the basis of their agreement on things like health care and their recognition that the voters of Louisiana are very conservative on abortion. They need to tell abortion rights groups squarely that a Democratic Senate is good for their issue, and they’re not going to twist the arm of a pro-life Democrat from the Deep South if they can get one.

In most states, abortion rights is a good cause for Democrats. But the maximalist position that Democrats have outlined as party orthodoxy is not the most popular position on abortion. Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas are not Louisiana, but it’s crazy to run in states where the electorate is baseline skeptical of Democrats while making zero concessions to mass opinion on late-term abortions. And party leaders need to say to the groups, “Look I agree with you personally, but my focus is on winning a majority, and I will be mad if you spend your time hassling my frontliners about this.”

This is a long way from how the Senate Democratic caucus currently operates.

One recent example: California received a waiver from the Biden EPA allowing it to impose stricter tailpipe emissions standards than the ones in place nationally. They were going to use this waiver to essentially ban the sale of new internal combustion engine cars by 2035, and several other blue states were planning to piggyback on that. Earlier this year, Republicans brought up a Congressional Review Act vote to strike the waiver and make California follow the national rules and continue allowing gasoline cars indefinitely. Banning gasoline cars is unpopular, and Elon Musk wasn’t pressuring Republicans on this, even though the California rules were good for Tesla, so the GOP easily had the votes to enact their preferred agenda.

In the House, 35 Democrats — including basically everyone with a track-record of over-performance and everyone in a frontline seat — defected and joined the GOP. After all, why should you cast an unpopular vote on something where your vote doesn’t even make a substantive difference? Environmental groups went buck-wild, attributing opposition to banning gasoline cars to oil industry lobbying rather than the obvious fact that most people prefer to be allowed to buy what they want. Climate donors mobilized (and, in at least one case, were mobilized by a key donor advisor) to coerce frontline Senate Democrats into casting an ineffectual and unpopular “no” vote on this.

Donors wrote to frontline senators asking them to hold the line on this — a question with, again, zero substantive policy stakes — and they wrote to Schumer asking him to ask to his frontliners to hold the line. In the end, only Elissa Slotkin broke with the party.

And for what?

When you’re in the majority, it’s always tough to know when to push your members to take political risks for the sake of accomplishing something important. People lost their seats in 2010 because of their votes for the Affordable Care Act, but they can tell their grandkids that they brought health insurance to millions of people. But when you’re in the opposition, why push people to take tough votes? It makes no difference to the outcome. I don’t care how fanatical you are about climate change, to accomplish anything, you need to win first.

I don’t want to paint Schumer as some huge villain here. He has his own politics to manage, and donors were furious at him for having done the right thing over the government shutdown earlier this year. But at the end of the day, the Minority Leader just has a tough job. And that job includes protecting frontline members from the depredations of the progressive NGO borg and having tough conversations with donors when their actions make it harder to win the majority.

The flywheel of change

On many levels, I feel like Democrats are in an impossibly deep hole.

But these things are cumulative, and if you accept Schatz’s premise that Democrats need to recruit a big tent of candidates, two things follow. One is that to make the recruiting pitch work, potential candidates need to believe that the party will protect them if they win. Another is that if Democrats are committed to not only recruiting the big tent, but protecting the big tent, there are lots of progressive agenda items that just aren’t going to get to the 50 or 60 votes that they need. And if an item can’t get to 50, then it doesn’t need to be part of the caucus’s official agenda.

There’s not going to be a national majority to ban gasoline cars or fracking or new pipelines or assault weapons. There could be federal legislation to secure abortion rights in the states where it’s now banned, but we’re not going to achieve the Freedom of Choice Act’s goal of setting a standard that goes well beyond the pre-Dobbs status quo. Individual members of the caucus don’t need to disavow these ideas, but party leadership needs to make it clear that the legislative agenda will consist of policies that frontline members who need to run tough races are enthusiastic about running on.

If Democratic leadership does that, two things happen. One is that safe seat members will pop up with occasional heterodox views because the stakes are lower. The other is that the overall national image of the party will shift. Right now, no matter what position Colin Allred takes on fossil fuels or assault weapons, voters in Texas will be suspicious that he’s part of a secret agenda to help Democrats ban that stuff. If party leaders say, actually, our agenda is health care and tax fairness, that makes it a lot easier.

But this means getting out of the habit of dog-whistle moderation and the perverse obsession with policing the most far-left members of the caucus.

This is a two-party system, so both parties have extreme members — that’s life. Democrats’ problem isn’t that AOC and Zohran Mamdani are too left-wing on guns, climate change, immigration, and trans issues, it’s that Democrats everywhere are expected to share these positions.

Trump has invested a lot of time and energy in convincing people he’s a “populist” who’ll protect critical programs like Medicaid. On cultural issues, though, he’s a loud and proud conservative, because he knows that Democrats’ stances are losers in key states. Everyone agrees that the way to beat him is to expose his hollow lies for what they are. But to do that, Democrats have to defuse the culture war issues that he’s weaponized so effectively.