Beto O’Rourke, the latest candidate to enter the 2020 race, toured the small eateries of Iowa earlier this month, climbing onto coffee counters and bars to deliver his message of uplift. Last Friday, he towered over an audience at a restaurant in Mount Vernon, Iowa. “I’m encouraged, I’m energized,” he said, with a few swings of his left arm. “Because I know that all of us, regardless of our geography, regardless of our race, regardless of any other difference that might otherwise define us and divide us, are going to come together at this moment of truth.”

On “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Fallon played him as if “your friend’s hot dad had the energy of a golden retriever,” but BuzzFeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy posted a dispatch that suggests O’Rourke was well received by Iowa voters. “I want reconciliation, and he brings that to my heart,” a woman named Anne Phillips told her. “I sense in him that he can bring us back together.” O’Rourke—a moderate who raised his national profile on a live-streamed road trip with a Republican colleague—has staked much of his career on creating that feeling. His unwillingness to outline much of a policy agenda has vexed progressives and journalists alike. Hensley-Clancy wrote, “It took several different reporters, and several different campaign stops to pin down something approximating O’Rourke’s stance on health care.” (He eventually responded that he supports a Medicare buy-in.)

O’Rourke joins a field of candidates who have spent the past two years loudly taking stands on the proposals that will define the primary and the election beyond. Most of the major candidates have moved left, converging on ideas like Medicare for All. Some, like O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden, should he enter the race, want to stay planted near the Party’s center. The policy debates and jostling between the Democratic Party’s competing factions—a recent FiveThirtyEight piece identified six distinct wings—are sure to continue. But whatever the policy differences between the contenders, there is a firm consensus, within the Democratic Party, on the politics of consensus. As Cory Booker, the candidate of “radical love,” has put it, “The larger call is not just how we beat Republicans but how you unite all Americans in the cause of our country.” Or as Klobuchar, who is running on her popularity in moderate Minnesota, has said, “I am someone who’s always looked for that common ground, and I believe we need to cross this river of our divide over the sturdy bridge that is our democracy.”

Beyond uniting America, the more immediate challenge for the next Democratic President will be overcoming some difficult math. Democrats currently hold forty-five seats in the Senate. It would take a gain of fifteen seats—in an election year dominated by red-state contests—to reach the sixty votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster. The last election to deliver a change of more than ten Senate seats occurred nearly forty years ago, when Republicans took twelve seats upon Ronald Reagan’s election, in 1980. Outdoing it in 2020 would require Democrats to run the table in places like Tennessee and Nebraska.

Democrats will almost certainly fall short, and when they do, the chances of Republicans lending a hand to pass policies like Medicare for All or a Green New Deal are, of course, even slimmer. And the experiences of the Obama Administration should disabuse Democrats of the notion that more moderate proposals would fare any better. “Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health-care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H. W. Bush’s foreign policy,” the former Clinton economist Brad DeLong told Vox earlier this month. “And did George H. W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The next Democratic President with a Democratic Congress will thus have exactly one option available for the passage of most of the major proposals being advanced by the 2020 candidates: urging the Democratic Senate Majority Leader to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass legislation by simple majority vote.

Exactly two candidates—Washington governor Jay Inslee and South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg—have explicitly endorsed this idea. Both are long shots. Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all said straightforwardly that they would like to keep the filibuster. When asked about the filibuster on the podcast “Pod Save America,” in January, Gillibrand argued that reaching sixty votes in the Senate would be indicative of broad public support for the policy in question. ”[I]f you don’t have sixty votes yet,” she said, “it just means you haven’t done enough advocacy and you need to work a lot harder.”

In fact, there is already broad support for the most ambitious ideas being offered by Democrats this election. Fifty-six per cent of Americans support Medicare for All while seventy-four per cent support a Medicare buy-in. More than eighty per cent of Americans support the provisions of the Green New Deal. None of these proposals is likely to receive sixty Senate votes in the next Congress. The problem isn’t a lack of public support but a set of structural obstacles, including the design of the Senate, that have contributed to what the Columbia law professor Tim Wu calls the “oppression of the supermajority.” The American political divide rests not between the two halves of a deeply divided public but, rather, between a significant majority of the American population and a conservative minority that is both disproportionately empowered by our political institutions and incorrigibly opposed to Democratic policies.

This is an existential challenge for the Democratic Party and American democracy. No sunny homily delivered from atop a dining table is going to make it go away. But the candidates bear only part of the blame for our inability to face the problem squarely. They are, after all, just telling Democratic voters what they want to hear. Polls have long shown that Democrats value political comity and compromise more than Republicans. A Pew survey last year found, too, that seventy-nine per cent of Democrats believe, like seventy-eight per cent of voters over all, that it is very important for the country that Democrats and Republicans “work together on issues.” If the rise of Donald Trump has failed to dislodge that aspiration, it’s unclear what would. For years, a certain class of pundits has got its jollies scolding voters for both supporting a variety of expensive policies and opposing the broad tax increases that might be advanced to finance them. Fewer take aim at another, equally stark contradiction: the public’s support for both highly partisan policy ideas and the norm of bipartisan compromise in Washington.

Perhaps the clearest illustration in recent memory of how lowly we’ve prostrated ourselves in the hopes of national reconciliation came last week, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Post that she does not support impeaching President Trump. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” she said. It would seem that bipartisanship and conciliation have at last supplanted an older, fustier norm: the rule of law.