The Seating Chart Was Always the Point

There is a particular kind of confidence that has never been tested. You see it sometimes in a man who's only ever played cards with people who let him win. He's got all the gestures right. The deliberate pause before laying down his hand. The measured nod. The practiced humility of a fella who already knows the other players folded before the deal.

I've been thinking about that man a lot since I read about Tad Devine's new book.

Pastor Holmgren, who has run the Lutheran church kitchen committee for going on thirty years, once explained to me that the secret to a successful potluck isn't the food. The food is secondary. The secret is the seating chart. You put the right people next to each other, and the casserole could be stone cold and nobody cares. You put the wrong people together, and the finest green bean casserole in three counties won't save you. The seating gets decided in advance. The potluck is a formality. I've never been sure he meant this as a warning or a confession.

Anyway. Tad Devine was Bernie Sanders' chief strategist in 2016, and he has written a book called "How the Democrats Screwed Bernie," which is one of those titles that tells you the whole story before you crack the cover. Big Earl at the grain elevator operates the same way. When he says the soybeans are damp, the soybeans are damp. I respect that kind of labeling.

Devine's argument, stripped down to what it is, goes like this: the Democratic National Committee, supposed to be the neutral referee of the party's nominating contest, was instead run from inside Hillary Clinton's campaign from the beginning. Debates were scheduled to minimize audiences. Anonymous money was deployed. Superdelegates, party insiders who could vote for whoever they wanted regardless of what regular people did at the polls, lined up early and publicly, making the whole thing feel finished before most folks had voted. It was a process, Devine says, engineered to produce one outcome, then papered over to look like a contest.

Bernie wasn't even technically a Democrat. He'd caucused with the party in Congress for decades but ran as an Independent from Vermont. You could argue the party owed him nothing. Devine's answer is that Bernie showed up, ran under their banner, played by their rules, and they still couldn't manage a fair process. That's like inviting a fella to your farm for supper and then being surprised he expected to eat at the table.

The book isn't purely backward-looking, though it earns its backward look. Devine says the DNC put out a post-mortem on the 2024 election earlier this year, and he calls it a document designed to protect certain people and certain arrangements rather than ask hard questions. He says party registration is dropping because people can't find a reason to pick a side. They're going independent, he says, in big numbers.

The deeper problem, in Devine's view, is campaign money. Dark money. Anonymous billions. Citizens United. He thinks Democrats need to swear it off entirely and make campaign finance reform as central as jobs and housing. That's a tall order. It's a little like asking the Lindqvist twins to reconcile. You might be right that they should. But the disagreement has gone on so long that nobody remembers the original cause, and the only way they communicate now is through passive-aggressive casseroles left on each other's porches. The town has theories. The town always has theories.

Where Devine gets interesting is when he looks ahead. He sees polling that suggests Democrats might actually be competitive in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Montana in 2026. He thinks a strong midterm could give Congress enough footing to put a check on whatever the current administration is up to that week. And he credits Bernie's 2016 run, whatever you thought of it, for the younger generation of candidates who talk about wages and housing and healthcare like those things are the point rather than the footnote.

He floats some names for 2028. AOC. Jon Ossoff. Andy Beshear. He says Beshear impressed him most, not by winning Kentucky twice, which is impressive enough, but by talking plainly about trans issues and still winning. That's a fella who said something true in a room where people expected him to go quiet, and he didn't. There's a kind of confidence in that too. Different from the card player. The kind you earn instead of assume.

I keep coming back to Pastor Holmgren's seating chart. Not the arrangement itself but the feeling it creates. The food was never the point. The point was whether the process of gathering felt honest to the people who showed up with a dish. You can have the finest kitchen in the county, but if folks sense the table was set before they walked in, they stop coming. And after a while you're sitting with a lot of cold casserole and nobody there to share it.

The thing about 2016 that didn't end in 2016 is the trust. It wasn't just that the process tilted toward one candidate. It's that people could see it, and seeing it changed something. They didn't stop believing in that one primary. They stopped believing in the general arrangement. And when that goes, people don't wait around to be argued back. They just look elsewhere.

Devine's book is an argument that the party can fix this, if it's willing to be honest about what needs fixing. That's a reasonable hope. It's also possible that a party, like a church kitchen committee, will choose the comfort of a settled seating chart over the harder work of setting the table fresh every time.

The potluck only works if everyone believes they've got a real seat.