Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power by Adam Jentleson. W.W. Norton & Company, 280 pages. 2026.

In his blueprint for reviving the Democratic Party’s political fortunes, political consultant Adam Jentleson gets one big thing right: The party is in thrall to a sclerotic ideology that’s kept it in a clueless defensive crouch, unable to identify new majoritarian strategies and capitalize on pivotal opportunities. The only problem is that this ideological dead zone is the one that Jentleson and his Beltway colleagues occupy—not, as he would have it, the habitat of a cadre of scowling progressive “activists” who have “assumed many of the functions that used to be the purview of the party itself.”

In Jentleson’s telling, these ascendant corps of busybodies have wielded their fundraising prowess, candidate questionnaires, and ideological purity tests to bully the Democratic political machine into craven and unimaginative submission, minting out a long string of “box-checking” candidates pandering…