The Jeffersonian Political Future
Republicans should develop a broad embracing platform which will be supported by 75 percent to 80 percent of the American people.
I have spent 68 years studying and working on self-government, politics, and the patterns of history. At the moment, we seem deeply, bitterly, and narrowly divided.
However, I think we are on the edge of a breakout which will lead to the kind of dominance Thomas Jefferson’s movement developed between 1796 and 1812.
There is a huge difference between the shallow waves of daily events and the deep underlying currents which move institutions and people decisively. Seth Keshel’s work on voter registration is a great example of the power of looking at underlying patterns rather than the transient daily waves.
Ninety-five percent of the horse race polls fit into this temporary news category. They are captured by William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” when he says:
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Yet, as Keshel often notes in his newsletters, there are underlying rivers of change which are captured by, among other things, the trend of voter registration. Studying this allowed him to ignore all the horse race polls and correctly predict every swing state in 2024.
While we are fixated on the daily trivia and ups and downs, change is building. In fact, our current position reminds me of another Shakespeare lesson, from “Julius Caesar:”
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
For Republicans, the tide comes in the form of a gigantic tsunami of support by the American people for a wide range of issues. Far from being narrowly divided, the American people come together in massive majorities across a wide range of issues.
Washington is divided. The news media and academia are hostile to a Jeffersonian majority, because it is almost entirely built on issues that bore or infuriate the elites.
We have been tracking the beliefs of the American people since 2018 when the late Bernie Marcus asked us to study the possibility of building a consensus so large that we could go back to governing and not be trapped into a narrow divisive minority.
We have gathered an enormous amount of data over eight years of polls and focus groups. You can see all this data at America’s New Majority Project.
We continue to add examples as we discover them, but presently you can find 53 issues around which the American people have formed a huge majority — in the Jefferson model rather than a narrowly divided country in the current news media model.
The scale of agreement in many cases is at the 70 percent to 90 percent levels. It is sufficient evidence that political and news media malpractice and incompetence has led to the current sense of deep division, rather than the beliefs of the American people.
Consider just a few issues (most but not all from America’s New majority Project national surveys):
· 87 percent favor Middle Class Tax Cuts
84 percent believe consumers and not government should choose about cars, appliances etc.
84 percent want health providers to give clear upfront prices for all services
80 percent support reforms to the federal supervised release program which are held in the Safer Supervision Act, according to a Fabrizio Ward poll
90 percent support Medicare coverage of Alzheimer’s blood tests, according to a Fabrizio Ward & Impact Research / AIM poll
87 percent want to reduce prescription drug prices by reducing the influence of middle men in the supply change
78 percent want insurance companies to pass negotiated savings on to the patients at the pharmacy counter
83 percent want local law enforcement to hold illegal immigrants when arrested and turn them over to the federal government for deportation
79 percent want to require proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote
77 percent would require a government issued photo identification to vote and consider it “common sense”
74 percent believe women’s sports should be limited to people who were born female
79 percent believe parents should have the final say in their children’s education
86 percent favor banning all congressional stock trading, according to the Program for Public Consultation / University of Maryland
86 percent are proud to be American, according to Cato Institute’s America 250 Survey
80 percent believe freedom of religion is important to America’s identity, according to an AP-NORC survey
83 percent believe being American is a core part of their personal identity (second only to family as an identity), also according to Cato Institute
82 percent believe equal opportunity is essential
The list could go on.
The key point is there are more than enough positive values and ideas to build a 70 percent to 80 percent majority — if one of the two parties decided to build a “Platform for the American People.”
Whichever party builds a unifying campaign around these kinds of issues has a real opportunity to seize Shakespeare’s tide of victory while leaving the other party trapped in a series of minority positions.
With the rise of the Big Government Socialist, weird values Democrats, it becomes almost impossible for them to seize this opportunity. Their activist wing and left-wing allies would wreak havoc if they tried to move toward some of these 80 percent positions.
Republicans, on the other hand, are well positioned to take Shakespeare’s tide and ride it to a long-term majority that could last several generations (in the style of the Franklin D. Roosevelt majority that started in 1932).
Roosevelt (and Jefferson) understood that you could unify 75 percent to 80 percent issues with the American people and govern for a long time inside the framework they would support.
President Donald J. Trump now has an opportunity during the fall campaign to build on MAGA and add the next 30 percent of the American people whose values are close to the President’s.
The Zohran Mamdani left versus the MAGA Republicans is one fight.
The Mamdani left versus 80 percent of the American people is a much different contest.
Republicans should develop a broad embracing platform which will be supported by 75 percent to 80 percent of the American people. This could be the equivalent of the Contract with America 32 years ago and will create a framework for an astonishing victory this November.
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Basically, the Democrats have had a majority behind the scenes, for many decades, and it's mostly been things Americans don't want. So you're saying the Republicans could begin a similar majority, based on transparency and things Americans actually do want, and maintain it for just as long.