Opinion | When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?

When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State.Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”Mr.

Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.Unlike Democrats, Mr.Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment.

We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments.Last week, Mr.

Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like.Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power.

Whereas Mr.Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your bro...