A few days ago, Matt made a point I've seen elsewhere, and long meant to comment on. Call it the 50%+1 theory:
Democratic performance in the past few elections has been good enough that one could envision a lot of difference paths to victory. Indeed, there's always a temptation to oversell defeats. After the Pistons last two losses to Miami, I've read a lot of articles about how Detroit needs to figure out how to contain Dwayne Wade. Certainly that would be a nice thing to do, but the reality is that they would have won with Wade uncontained if they'd just hit more free throws. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with their game -- they're just messing up some little things.
That strikes me as exactly the wrong way to look at recent defeats. For one thing, our electoral coalition, which is already proving inadequate, is marching in the wrong demographic direction. The states that are growing vote Republican, in a few years, the same votes that brought us within a stone's throw of a win will amount to crushing defeats.
But demographic defeatism is only half the story. To continue on with sports metaphors, teams don't practice to gain incremental strengths, they train to become crushing juggernauts. As a football player, you may spend a day or two learning how to contain a star player or run a particular play for a specific game, but you spend the vast majority of your time trying to get so good that incrementalism is rendered unnecessary, you can just beat the other team outright. Calming ourselves with the mantra that our fading coalition could have won if only we'd had a slightly quicker reaction to the Swift Vets or a stronger answer on Iraq isn't particularly useful: the demographics aren't in our favor and, in any case, we don't want to be locked in a death battle for another percentile point, we want to figure out how to capture an easy majority.
Now, certainly that's easier said than done, but it should be the goal nevertheless. And one thing it demands, specifics aside, is to think big. Small programs and targeted appeals to specific constituencies may help bring in another percentage point, but they don't change the electoral landscape. We need big ideas and the conviction to sell them, and that means we have to stop thinking like a majority-party-in-exile and instead focus on becoming a majority party in power. Many in the party are doing that already, but such projects can always be hijacked by those promising that we're really good enough already and just need some better language for our proposals. We don't need better language or a new play, we need a new gameplan.
