Understanding Every Principle | #6: Seek Unity through Broad Support
Why Policies Built on Narrow Majorities Tend Not to Last
This is the sixth article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. The previous article examined Principle 5: Debate with Facts and Dignity. Today, the series turns to its companion principle, which addresses not just how we argue but what we are trying to build when the argument is over.
Principle 6: Build policies that earn broad, lasting support. Where consensus is out of reach, respect that communities will find their own path.1
In June 1989, a bipartisan group of senators, environmental advocates, and coal-state Republicans sat down to work out the details of what would become the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The political obstacles were formidable. Democrats wanted command-and-control regulations. Republicans balked at the costs. The Reagan years had left environmental legislation stalled for a decade. Yet, over the course of the following year, the two sides found a mechanism they could both accept: a market-based system of tradable pollution credits. It was not anyone’s ideal policy. It was a genuine compromise. When the final bill came to a vote, it passed the Senate 89 to 10 and the House 401 to 25. Those margins told a story about what happens when legislation is built to last.2 That story is exactly what Principle 6 is about.
Why This Principle Comes Sixth
This is the sixth article in a nine-part series on the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. Principle 6 states: build policies that earn broad, lasting support, and where consensus is out of reach, respect that communities will find their own path.1 It is the second and final principle in the Collaborative Governance cluster, and it completes the thought that Principle 5 began. Principle 5 established how a democracy should argue. Principle 6 establishes what a democracy should be trying to accomplish through that argument: not a narrow victory, but a durable agreement.
The two pillars that Principle 6 serves are Pillar 8, a civic culture of tolerance and compromise, and Pillar 5, responsible political parties.3 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in their foundational 1963 study of political culture across five democracies, identified what they called the “civic culture” as the essential social substrate of stable democratic governance: a population that participates actively but also accepts that political outcomes require negotiation rather than maximalism. A party system serves democracy, in the analysis of Linz and Stepan, when it channels competition into constructive policy-making rather than zero-sum conflict. The pillar framework that grounds this series is direct on the point: when political parties treat every vote as a weapon and every majority as an unlimited mandate, the civic culture of compromise that sustains democratic governance begins to dissolve.3
The Anatomy of a Policy That Does Not Last
American political history is full of lessons about what happens when one party pushes major legislation through on the narrowest possible majority, with no buy-in from the other side. The lesson is almost always the same: the policy survives until the other party regains power, and then the work of unraveling it begins.
The Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010 without a single Republican vote.4 From the day it passed, it was a target. Republicans attempted to repeal it more than 70 times over the following years. In 2017, they came within one vote. The skinny repeal bill failed 51 to 49 only because three Republicans defected. A policy affecting one-sixth of the American economy, touching the health coverage of tens of millions of people, has spent fifteen years as a political hostage because it was passed by one party and opposed by the other from the moment of its birth.5
The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House in May 2025 by a margin of 215 to 214, is already tracing a similar arc.6 Within days of passage, Republican members of the House were telling reporters they had regrets. Several said they had been pressured into voting yes and were uncomfortable with the Medicaid cuts the bill contained. The Senate signaled it would make substantial changes. A bill so narrowly passed, in a chamber so tightly divided, is not a policy accomplishment. It is an opening move in a fight that will continue for years.7
Compare those episodes to the 1983 Social Security reforms. In 1982, the Social Security system was months from insolvency. President Reagan appointed a bipartisan commission, chaired by economist Alan Greenspan, that included representatives from both parties. After months of negotiation, the commission produced a package of payroll tax increases and benefit adjustments that neither side loved but both sides could accept. The legislation passed the Senate 58 to 14 and the House 243 to 102 with large majorities from both parties.8 More than four decades later, the 1983 reforms still stand. No serious attempt has been made to repeal them. The policy endured not because it was perfect but because it belonged to both parties. Neither side had the incentive to tear down what both sides had built.
The pattern extends beyond any single policy to the structure of congressional behavior itself. Congressional Quarterly has tracked party unity votes, defined as roll calls in which a majority of each party is on opposite sides, since 1953. In 1990, the party unity rate was 54 percent in the Senate and 49 percent in the House. By 2025, the rate had reached 85.3 percent, the highest level ever recorded. Congress in 2025 was the most partisan since CQ began keeping score.2 What that number means in practice is that the space for bipartisan policy-making has shrunk to almost nothing. The exceptions, when they happen, have become news.
Both parties share responsibility for this condition. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act through reconciliation specifically to avoid needing Republican votes. Republicans passed the 2017 tax cuts the same way. Obama governed by executive action on immigration when he could not get legislative agreement. Trump has signed more executive orders in his second term than in his entire first term.2 The pattern is bipartisan: when one party cannot persuade the other, it goes around them. The policies that result are always the first target when the other side returns to power.
What Independent Voters Are Telling Us
The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents understand this problem viscerally, even if they do not always have the vocabulary for it.9
A 2025 survey by the nonpartisan research organization Center Forward found that 72 percent of Americans believe elected officials should prioritize finding common ground over pushing through their party’s priorities. Among independents, that number was 81 percent. The same survey found that 68 percent of Americans believe that major policy changes should require support from both parties to be considered legitimate.10
A September 2025 poll found that 76 percent of Americans favor compromise from politicians to get things done, including 65 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.11 What independents are describing is not a demand for weak or wishy-washy governance. They are describing a demand for governance that can actually last. They have watched too many cycles of one party passing something transformative, the other party spending years trying to repeal it, and nothing getting better in the meantime. They are not asking for less ambition. They are asking for policies that can survive a change in administration.
Pew Research found in October 2025 that 73 percent of Americans want their party leaders to compromise with the other side to get things done, compared to only 24 percent who want their leaders to hold firm.12 That preference held across both parties and was strongest among political independents. The voters have been saying the same thing for years. The parties have not been listening.
The Centercratic Position
The Centercratic Party’s sixth principle states its requirements with deliberate precision: build policies that earn broad, lasting support, and where consensus is out of reach, respect that communities will find their own path.1 Both halves of that statement matter equally.
The first half is a standard for governance. It asks legislators and executives to measure the success of a policy not just by whether it passes but by whether it can survive the next election cycle and the one after that. A policy that passes with 51 percent of the vote in a divided legislature and is immediately targeted for repeal has not solved a problem. It has created a new one. The standard for “broad, lasting support” is not unanimity. It is the kind of majority that reflects genuine persuasion rather than pure party discipline.
The second half is a standard for federalism. The Centercratic Party recognizes that on some questions, national consensus is genuinely out of reach. On those questions, the appropriate response is not to force a national solution but to allow communities, states, and regions to find their own paths. That principle is not a concession to division. It is an acknowledgment that a country of 340 million people, spanning enormous geographic, cultural, and economic diversity, will not always arrive at the same answers on every question, and that a governing system which forces identical solutions on communities with different circumstances will generate endless conflict and diminishing legitimacy.
In practical terms, this means that the Centercratic Party commits to three specific behaviors. First, it will seek genuine consultation with the opposing party before advancing major legislation, not as a procedural formality but as a genuine effort to incorporate concerns that might otherwise make a policy vulnerable to repeal. Second, it will use reconciliation and other procedural shortcuts only for genuinely budgetary matters, not as a workaround to avoid the hard work of persuasion. Third, on questions where national consensus cannot be achieved, it will support giving communities the authority to govern themselves, rather than imposing a federal solution that half the country will spend the next decade trying to reverse.
What Happens When This Fails
The political science of polarization offers a precise description of what happens to a democracy that abandons the principle of broad support. Gordon Heltzel and Kristin Laurin, reviewing decades of research, identified a self-reinforcing cycle: as parties pursue narrow victories rather than broad coalitions, citizens perceive the gap between the parties as even wider than it is, which leads them to disengage from anyone on the other side, which increases actual polarization, which makes broad coalition-building even harder.13 The researchers concluded that the only way to interrupt the cycle is for political and media institutions to actively combat the misperception that compromise is impossible.
The 1990 congressional session, now viewed as one of the most productive in modern American history, produced the Clean Air Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Immigration Act, and a bipartisan budget deal, all under a divided government.2 The lesson its veterans draw is not complicated. Former senator Bob Dole, who championed the ADA and watched a successor treaty to his signature achievement fail in 2012 along party lines, said it plainly before his death in 2021: “If somebody is at a two and you are at four, there ought to be some way to get to three. And you settle on three.”2
The 2026 midterms will test whether the current moment produces any pressure toward that kind of governing. The party unity data suggests it will not happen on its own. It will require leaders, in both parties, who are willing to trade a narrow victory today for a durable agreement tomorrow. The Centercratic Party exists, in part, to make that trade worth making.
Tomorrow, this series turns to Principle 7: Govern with a Balanced Approach, and the question of what effective governance actually requires.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
2 Rosenwald, Michael S. “How a Historically Bipartisan Congress Gave Way to Partisan Rancor.” The Washington Post, April 2026. [Space file: How-a-historically-bipartisan-Congress-…-partisan-rancor-The-Washington-Post.pdf]
3 Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture. Princeton University Press, 1963; Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
4 Brookings Institution. “Republicans Learn the Limits of Reconciliation with Failed ACA Repeal.” July 27, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/limits-of-reconciliation-and-failed-aca-repeal/
5 CHEAC. “Senate Rejects Repeal of the Affordable Care Act.” July 2017. https://cheac.org/senate-rejects-repeal-of-the-affordable-care-act/
6 Progressive Policy Institute. “House Republicans Pass ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Despite Several Big Red Flags.” May 21, 2025. https://www.progressivepolicy.org/house-republicans-pass-one-big-beautiful-bill-despite-several-big-red-flags/
7 New York Times. “After Muscling Their Bill Through the House, Some Republicans Have Regrets.” June 3, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/us/politics/house-republicans-policy-bill-regrets.html
8 Social Security Administration. “The 1983 Greenspan Commission on Social Security Reform.” https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/gspan7.html
9 Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean
10 Center Forward. “The American Voter Mindset, 2025 Center Forward Voter Research Journal.” November 5, 2025. https://center-forward.org/voter-research-journal/
11 LiveNow from Fox. “Americans Favor Compromise from Politicians to Get Things Done in Government: Poll.” September 28, 2025. https://www.livenowfox.com/news/americans-compromise-politicians-government-poll
12 Pew Research Center. “What Americans Want and Expect from Party Leaders.” October 29, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/10/30/what-americans-want-and-expect-from-party-leaders/
13 Heltzel, Gordon, and Kristin Laurin. “Polarization in America: Two Possible Futures.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020): 179-184. [Space file: Polarization-in-America-two-possible-futures.pdf]