What kind of cassette tape creates a contract?
On politics as a team sport
The most consequential political act of the 1980s wasn’t a speech, a campaign, or a vote. It was a cassette tape mailed to strangers by a backbencher his own party’s leadership wished would go away.
Those tapes ended forty years of losing.
Right now, with the Republican Party splintering over Epstein, a war in Iran spreading like wildfire with no exit strategy, and an economy punishing the people who were promised prosperity, his story contains the seeds of a solution for Democrats.
In 1954, Republicans lost the House of Representatives. They didn’t get it back until 1994.
In that forty years between one Republican Speaker and the next, America desegregated its schools, fought Vietnam, put men on the moon, watched Nixon insist he was not a crook, watched the Berlin Wall go up and come back down, and invented the personal computer. An entire generation of House Republicans served their whole careers in the minority. They chaired no committees. They set no agendas. They couldn’t bring a bill to the floor. The Democrats who ran the House didn’t need Republican input, didn’t seek it, and didn’t pretend to.
The Republican leadership made its peace with this. They got along with the Democrats. They cut small deals. They had nice offices.
A backbencher from Georgia named Newt Gingrich did not have a nice office.
Gingrich had been elected in 1978, and from his first term he was a problem for his own leadership. He didn’t want to be a comfortable minority. He wanted the majority, and he had a theory about why his party couldn’t get it: three hundred Republicans were running three hundred separate races, each on its own terms, and nothing added up because there was nothing to add up to. They weren’t a team. They were three hundred people who happened to have the same letter after their names.
In 1986, Gingrich started to fix it.
He took over a political action committee called GOPAC and turned it into something American politics had never previously seen: a farm system.
GOPAC didn’t just raise money. It recruited candidates, trained them, and taught them how to talk. The operation mailed cassette tapes (this was the 1980s, young friends, that was the highest tech option) and printed guides to aspiring Republicans across the country: not just people running for Congress, but city council members, state legislators, school board candidates, anyone who might run for anything someday. The tapes taught them how to frame issues, draw contrasts, and sound like part of something larger than their own district.
By one count, nearly half the Republican freshmen elected between 1990 and 1994 had come through GOPAC. John Boehner, who went on to become Speaker of the House, later said that without those tapes, he probably wouldn’t have run for Congress at all.
Nobody noticed, because it didn’t look like politics. It looked like a guy mailing cassette tapes.
In 1990, GOPAC put out a memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Gingrich had developed it with a young pollster named Frank Luntz, who tested words and phrases to find the ones that moved people. The memo was blunt. Two lists. Here are the words you use to describe us: freedom, truth, moral, courage, prosperity, liberty. Here are the words you use to describe them: decay, traitors, corrupt, radical, sick, pathetic.
This memo did enormous damage to American political culture, the beginning of the toxic discourse we’re drowning in now. But the strategic effect was immediate. For the first time, Republican candidates in Oregon and Georgia and Ohio and Florida sounded like they were on the same side. Hundreds of isolated local races started to feel like one national movement.
And they didn’t just sound like a team. GOPAC had connected them to each other with the same tapes, the same guides, many of them meeting at GOPAC events. When Gingrich called, they picked up, because they knew him and they trusted the system that had helped them get where they were.
Then, in 1994, he did the thing that made him famous, though it was really the last step, not the first.
Six weeks before the midterms, he gathered more than three hundred Republican candidates and sitting members on the steps of the Capitol. The visual was extraordinary, hundreds of people standing together, a show of unity that congressional campaigns had never produced. They signed a single document: the Contract with America. Ten specific things they’d bring to a vote in the first hundred days if voters gave them the majority. A balanced budget amendment. Welfare reform. Tax cuts. Term limits. And a line no politician had said before: “If we break this Contract, throw us out.”
The items were a mix of popular and cynical. That almost didn’t matter. What mattered was what the Contract did: it turned three hundred separate races into one race. You weren’t voting for your local Republican. You were voting for a written agenda that connected your district to every district in the country. The midterms stopped being three hundred local elections and became a national referendum.
Democrats responded by mocking it. They called it the “Contract on America.” Then they went back to running three hundred separate campaigns.
Individuals against a team.
Republicans gained fifty-four seats, taking the House for the first time since 1954. They brought nine of ten Contract items to a vote in the first hundred days and passed every one — 299 out of 302 votes in favor.
Forty years in the wilderness. Eight years building a team. Six weeks showing voters what that team stood for.
Right now, the Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. But they are fracturing over the Epstein files, the war with Iran spreading through the Middle East with no plan for how it ends, an economy hammering their own voters and their own districts. The coalition that looked monolithic six months ago is coming apart, because a party built around a personality instead of a platform has nothing to hold it together once the personality starts costing people more than it’s paying them.
What do we need to do in order to win back the House, win the Senate, and win over the country?
We need to play politics as a team sport, not an individual one.
On the plus side, we’re not starting from zero.
Amanda Litman’s Run for Something has recruited and trained young progressives for down-ballot races since 2017, for school board, city council, and state legislature, and connected them to each other in peer networks organized by state. Sixteen hundred of them have won. Since November, sixty-five thousand new people have signed up to run. That’s a farm system.
Swing Left is pouring twelve million dollars into 2026, their largest midterm investment ever, and sending volunteers into swing districts now, not in October, to have real conversations with voters about what they actually need. Indivisible has two thousand local groups in every state, people who show up on the streets to show the power of the grassroots.
We’re most of the way there. What’s missing is the thing that made the Contract work: a shared platform. Run for Something recruits candidates. Swing Left contacts voters. Indivisible organizes locally. But there’s no simple document that connects them — no ten items, no “if we break this, throw us out.” Every candidate still writes their own message. Three hundred separate races, same as 1994.
We need a story that connects every local race to every other local race in the country, so voters know what they’re voting for.
November is eight months away. It’s not yet too late.
The next time you talk to a candidate or an elected official or a Democratic Party officer, ask them: what’s our contract for America?
Easy to start:
A living minimum wage
protect collective bargaining
progressive taxes
Trust busting resumed
Civil rights for all
Universal Medical care (Medicare for all)
Reduce military spending
A permanent national infrastructure bank
Reverse Citizens United (get money out of politics)
Restrict Presidential military power
Anyone else want to add to the list?
The Dem contract should be similar to Bernie's but also antiwar: (1) Get money out of politics, (2) Pass the John Lewis Voting Right Act, and stop gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression, (3) End the forever wars for real, close most overseas military bases, lower the Pentagon budget, and expose and dismantle most of the CIA, (4) Raise taxes on the rich and claw back some of the tens of trillions of dollars transferred to the 1%, (5) Reform health care by implementing Medicare for All, and (6) Re-enact the environmental, health, and financial regulations dismantled by the GOP. Thing is... the mainstream Democrats are beholden to many of the same corporations and rich people that fund the GOP.
Did I forget anything?