go a long way toward

Idioms and Phrases

Have considerable effect or influence on. For example, This argument goes a long way toward proving the scientists are wrong , or, as Eudora Welty put it in The Ponder Heart (1954): “It went a long way toward making him touchy about what Uncle Daniel had gone and done.” This idiom, then put as go a great way toward , was first recorded in 1697.