Sept. 29 · Elections
The Untold Story of How The Democrats Won Their Last Supermajority: The 50 State Strategy
How Howard Dean staffed all 50 states, and how that map produced the last filibuster-proof Senate
Author’s note: I have tremendous respect for Dr. Howard Dean and for the political impact of the 50-state strategy. Cable news treated one enthusiastic shout as the whole story of his 2004 campaign. I appreciate his legacy and hope he is out there living his best life.
The last time Democrats held a filibuster-proof Senate, it was not because they perfected the art of talking to one another in blue trifectas. It was because, for a few years, they showed up everywhere, including places the party had treated as lost causes, and made it possible for restless Republicans and independents to walk over.
After Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts lost the 2004 presidential race, former Vermont Gov. Dr. Howard Dean became chairman of the Democratic National Committee and said the following about the race: “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” Instead of pouring every dollar into Ohio and Florida television, he paid for three or four organizers, press aides, and fundraisers in all fifty state parties. He rebuilt the voter file. He copied the Republican National Committee’s long game of local infrastructure. The cost was modest, about $8 million a year. The contempt directed at Dr. Dean was not so modest. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, then chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign committee, wanted the money for targeted swing districts. Paul Begala, a former Clinton White House strategist, sneered that Dean was hiring staff “to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”
Dean trusted the process and implicitly demonstrated respect for the people of this nation, this entire nation. In 2006 the wave arrived (Iraq, Katrina, scandal) and Democrats had boats in the water. They netted 31 House seats and six Senate seats and took both chambers. In Kansas, Democrat Nancy Boyda beat Republican Rep. Jim Ryun. Democrats flipped three House seats in Indiana. Jim Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former Navy secretary, won a Virginia Senate race by a few thousand votes. Jon Tester, a Montana farmer, took that state’s Senate seat by fewer still. Elaine Kamarck, a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, found that districts with DNC organizers gained 9.8 points in the Democratic vote from 2002 to 2006, against 4.7 points in all contested districts. The party contested 425 of 435 House races, up from 399 two years earlier.
Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, did not invent that map in 2008. His campaign scaled it. Four years earlier, in Boston, he had already rejected the red-blue partition: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America.” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, put staff in every state. Obama won Virginia and Indiana, neither Democratic at the presidential level since 1964, and North Carolina, last taken in 1976. Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Ohio flipped too. Down-ballot, Democrats added another 21 House seats and eight Senate seats.
Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist who had managed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, later said Dean’s project “fertilized the landscape” for that campaign. Those elections produced 57 Democrats and two independents. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania’s longtime Republican senator, switched parties in April 2009. Al Franken, Minnesota’s Democratic challenger, was seated in July after a recount. The caucus hit 60. The window was short. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in August. Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, won the special election to replace him in January 2010. It was still long enough to pass the Affordable Care Act on a 60-39 Senate vote. That’s the only way we are going to get progress now. In 2026, progress federally requires a supermajority, while destruction follows anywhere Republicans control as the courts shrink or aggrandize the office in question with narrow rulings that say a Republican can take Congress’s constitutional power of the purse but a Democratic president can’t forgive federal student loans, gerrymandering is worse than ever, and oligarchs fund and facilitate mass disinformation networks and GOP campaigns. The game’s rigged; yes, we still must be voters. The America of 2026 is not the America of 2008. Our democracy and economy took a hit during the Bush administration, took a real swing at recovery with Obama, and has been on life support since.
For the record, I think the George W. Bush administration and the Roberts Court are what gave us this possibly deadly disease, transmitted through greed and resisted honorably by so many folks.
But why did I write this article about the last Democratic Supermajority in congress?
Because it gives me hope. I am optimistic because we can do this. You, me, everyone reading this. Let’s look at the labor rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the abolition of slavery. Not one of them came from a national political party adopting that policy. The change came from We The People, in a largely decentralized manner, but hand in hand with many types of organizations, all advocating everywhere we can for progress. Not because we think it will happen in time for the midterms, but because so long as any of us suffer injustice, we all suffer injustice. No matter how long it takes, we can choose to be activists. We can choose to be the first responders to abuses by the haves imposed upon the have-nots. And what a legacy to leave. Maybe it won’t even happen in our lifetime. People were born into slavery, freed, and lived into old age fighting for abolition to their last day.
Housing, healthcare, fair wages, and no longer killing innocent people on the other side of the planet so billionaires can build more data centers.
We fight on every front. Frequently people comment on my posts and say “but what can I do, I’m in a red state?” Their job is the same as everyone else’s.
The Existentialist Republic has a program developed from studying successful social movements.
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Two of my north stars are Albert Camus and Thomas Paine. Camus edited Combat, a French Resistance newspaper. Writing for it could get him killed. He kept going because he knew how much the written word mattered.
Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, a book that could persuade a lawyer and a farmer alike. One in five people in the colonies read that book, more than that had it read to others on street corners. If that is what it takes, that is what we will build.
Now let’s get after it. - Chris
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