A Top Democratic Strategist Says His Party Should Be ‘Open to Things Like Spanking’

Somewhere in Washington, a think tank ran a fancy survey and discovered what most parents in America could have told it for free. A lot of regular people think a swat on the backside is not the end of the world, and they notice when a politician acts like it is.

That think tank is the Searchlight Institute, and its founder, longtime Democratic operative Adam Jentleson, just told his own party to take the hint.

Jentleson went on The Ezra Klein Show from The New York Times on Monday to talk about how Democrats can compete in places like Kansas, Texas, Alaska and Oklahoma. His résumé is about as inside-the-party as it gets. He was deputy chief of staff to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, served as chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman and has written two books on Senate power, the newest called Supermajority.

His advice turned heads. Democrats, he said, need to show voters they don’t think in a “rigidly ideological way.” And the way to do that is not another speech about the economy. It’s a handful of small, gut-level issues.

Three issues the party forgot

According to the episode transcript, Jentleson said Searchlight’s research turned up “issues that would never pop in sort of your average poll of top voter concerns that nonetheless are extremely powerful signals to people that you have a heterodox point of view.”

His first example was social promotion, the practice of pushing kids to the next grade even when they fail. “Being against that, is something that people don’t expect to hear from Democrats these days,” he said. “They think of Democrats as sort of everybody gets a trophy, squishes.”

Then came the other two. Democrats could stand against homeless encampments, he said, and be “open to things like spanking.” He called those issues “incredibly culturally loaded,” but argued they “connect with voters on a values basis,” as Mediaite and others quoted him.

Read that list again. Hold kids back if they fail. Clear the tents off the sidewalk. Let parents parent. That’s not a bold new centrist platform. That’s a Tuesday night at most kitchen tables in America.

The numbers back him up

Jentleson isn’t wrong about where the country is. Pew Research Center surveys from spring 2025 found 75% of U.S. adults express no moral objection to spanking children. The gap between the parties is wide. Pew found 35% of Democrats call spanking morally wrong, compared with just 12% of Republicans.

A YouGov poll taken Aug. 26 to 28 of this year landed in the same place. Asked whether it is ever acceptable for parents to spank their children, 33% said definitely and 26% said probably, a combined 59%. Only 27% picked the statement that spanking harms children and parents should never do it, according to YouGov’s results.

Support has slipped over the decades. Survey data cited by The Conversation show 83% of adults agreed in 1986 that it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with “a good, hard spanking.” By recent years that had dropped to 56%, according to an analysis in The Conversation. But it is still a majority, and it is a majority that a big slice of the Democratic base doesn’t share.

That is Jentleson’s whole point, even if he didn’t say it this bluntly. The loudest voices in his party have drifted away from ordinary parents, and ordinary parents can tell.

The left pushed back fast

The reaction proved his case almost immediately. Mediaite ran a sarcastic column under the headline “Ezra Klein’s Very Serious Conversation About Spanking Kids.” On X, progressive activist Melissa Byrne wrote, “I think two men being be open to hitting children is not good,” and added, “I bet neither Adam nor Ezra have spent time with abuse victims.”

So a strategist suggests Democrats stop sneering at three out of four Americans, and the response from his own side is to sneer at three out of four Americans.

When reporter Jeff Stein asked him about it, Jentleson said, “There are a lot of issues that carry very strong signal with voters that aren’t the ones we are constantly debating,” according to Stein’s post on X.

Jentleson didn’t back down. On X he reposted writer Pat Dennis, who wrote that while he personally thinks spanking is wrong, “75% of Americans don’t, so he was talking about ways to show you’re not a 25% weirdo like me and the other people who listen to ezra klein,” in a post Jentleson shared. He also reposted Matt Yglesias joking that he had “unleashed a spanking revolution in the Democratic Party.”

Klein himself framed the conversation as a look at the centrist, pragmatist wing of the party and promised a second episode later this week with a guest from the left. That one should be interesting.

Talk is cheap

Here is the problem for Democrats. Saying you’re open to spanking on a podcast is easy. Voting against the teachers unions on social promotion, or telling a progressive city council to clear the encampments, is hard. Voters have heard Democrats talk tough before an election and then govern from the left once they get to Washington.

Republicans don’t need a focus group to know where parents stand on discipline, failing grades or tents on the sidewalk. They’ve been saying it for years and getting called extreme for it. If Democrats now want to borrow those positions to look normal, good. Voters should make them prove it with votes, not slogans.

Jentleson’s advice is probably smart politics for his side. It’s also an admission. The party spent years treating common sense as a fringe view, and it took a think tank to tell them that most Americans never agreed.