Democrats should debate messaging less (and policy more)

In the months since Kamala Harris’s defeat, Democrats have debated the party’s political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don’t provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism. Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers’ power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and “populist” ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed. A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter. The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that ‬America’s “big problem is ‘bottlenecks’ that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy‬ production, or build new roads and bridges.” The candidate goes on to note, “Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of‬‭ well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but‬‭ these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow‬ things down.” It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that “The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our‬ government.” By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat. This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress’s mission is to “fight corporate power” and “break up monopolies.” It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey’s wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its “abundance” message (signaling that the candidate would give people less “voice” and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey’s hypothetical populist promised to fight “well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,” their message might have fared less well. This said, I think it’s almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically resonant than technocratic arguments about supply-side “bottlenecks.” According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Harris’s best testing ad in 2024 included a pledge to “crack down” on “price gougers” and “landlords who are charging too much.” But that doesn’t have much bearing on whether Democrats should embrace abundance reforms for two reasons. First, the political case for those reforms rests on their material benefits, not their rhetorical appeal. And second, Democrats don’t actually need to choose between pursuing abundance liberalism and populism — if by “populism,” one means a politics focused on redistributing wealth and power from the few to the many. The political case for “abundance” policies is rooted in their real world effects, not their rhetorical appeal The Demand Progress poll aims to refute an argument that Abundance does not make. Klein and Thompson do not claim that politicians who promise to combat regulatory “bottlenecks” will outperform those who vow to fight “corporations.” And I have not seen any other advocate of zoning liberalization or permitting reform say anything like that. Rather, the political case for those policies primarily concerns their real-world consequences, rather than their oratorical verve. The starting point for that case is a diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s governance failures. Klein and Thompson spotlight several: * Big blue states suffer from perennial housing shortages and exceptionally high homelessness rates. In 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness — California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington — were all governed by Democrats. * Democrat-run states and cities also struggle to build public infrastructure on time and budget. Seventeen years ago, California allocated $33 billion to a high-speed rail system. It still has not opened a single line. San Francisco has struggled to build a single public toilet for less than $1.7 million. New York City’s transit construction costs are the highest in the world. * At the federal level, similar difficulties have plagued Democrats’ infrastructural ambitions. For example, the Biden administration invested $7.5 billion into electric vehicle charging stations in 2021. Analysts expected that funding to yield 5,000 stations. Four years later, it had built only 58. Klein and Thompson attribute these results partly to zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. The former prohibit the construction of apartments on roughly 70 percent of America’s residential land, while the latter empower well-heeled interests to obstruct infrastructure projects through lawsuits. Abundance argues that this is a political problem for Democrats in at least three ways: First, the party’s conspicuous failure to contain the cost-of-living in New York and California undermines its reputation for economic governance nationally. Second, the public sector’s inability to build anything efficiently abets conservative narratives about the follies of big government. Third, and most concretely, Americans are responding to high housing costs in blue states by moving to red ones — a migration pattern that’s about to make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. After the 2030 census, electoral votes will be reapportioned based on population shifts. If current trends persist, California, Illinois, and New York will lose Electoral College votes while Florida and Texas gain them. As a result, a Democrat could win every blue state in 2032 — along with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and still lose the presidency. Klein and Thompson therefore reason that enacting their proposed reforms will aid Democrats politically by improving the party’s reputation for economic management, boosting confidence in the public sector’s efficacy, and increasing blue states’ populations (and thus, their representation in Congress and the Electoral College). Therefore, you can’t refute the political argument for “abundance” policies with a messaging poll. Rather, to do so, you need to show 1) that “abundance” reforms will not actually make housing, energy, and infrastructure more plentiful, or 2) that making those goods more plentiful won’t actually increase support for the Democratic Party, or 3) that people will keep moving away from blue states and toward red ones, even if the former start building more housing. For the record, I think the substantive case for the abundance agenda is stronger than the political one. I’m confident that legalizing the construction of apartment buildings in inner-ring suburbs will increase the supply of housing. I’m less sure that doing so will win the Democratic Party votes. A lot of Americans are homeowners who don’t want tall buildings (and/or, lots of nonaffluent people) in their municipalities. But that isn’t the argument that Demand Progress is making. There is no actual trade-off between soaking the rich and making it easier to build stuff The Demand Progress survey is premised on the notion that Democrats must choose between an “abundance” agenda and a “populist” one. But this is mostly false. There is no inherent tension between vigorously enforcing antitrust laws and relaxing restrictions on multifamily housing construction. To the contrary, there’s arguably a philosophical link between those two endeavors: Both entail promoting greater competition, so as to erode the pricing power of property holders. (When zoning laws preempt the construction of apartment buildings, renters have fewer options to choose from. That reduces competition between landlords, and enables them to charge higher prices.) More broadly, abundance is compatible with increasing working people’s living standards and economic power. The more housing that a city builds, the more property taxes that it can collect — and thus, the more social welfare benefits it can provide to ordinary people. And this basic principle applies more generally: If you increase economic growth through regulatory reforms, then you’ll have more wealth to redistribute, whether through union contracts or the welfare state. This isn’t to say that there are no tradeoffs between “abundance” reforms and economic progressivism, as some understand that ideology. For example, individual labor unions sometimes support restricting the supply of socially useful goods — such as housing or hotels — for self-interested reasons. Some populists might counsel reflexive deference to the demands of such unions. Abundance liberals generally would not. But policies that make a tiny segment of workers better off — at the expense of a much larger group of working people — are not pro-labor in the best sense of that term. More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. The first aims to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many environmental organizations have the opposite priority. Yet fighting to limit America’s supply of oil and gas — even if this means making infrastructure more expensive and scarce — is not an especially populist cause, even if one deems it a worthy one. The “abundance” debate is primarily about policy, not politics Ultimately, abundance liberalism is less about how Democrats should message than about how they should govern. It’s useful to know whether a particular analysis of the party’s governance failures is politically appealing. But it’s more important to know whether that analysis is accurate. Democrats can rail against corporate malfeasance on the campaign trail, no matter what positions they take on zoning or permitting. If they operate from a false understanding of why blue states struggle to build adequate housing and infrastructure, however, they will fail working people. Critics of abundance liberalism should therefore focus on its substance. To their credit, many progressive skeptics have done this. I think their arguments are unconvincing (and plan to address them in the future). But they at least clarify the terms of the intra-left debate over abundance. Demand Progress’s poll, by contrast, only obscures them.