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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
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 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. 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 fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. 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. 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.
Vox
6 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Democrats should debate messaging less (and policy more)
is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. 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.' The Rebuild The lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 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. 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 fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. 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.
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Miami Herald
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Do Americans prefer a populist agenda? Here's what a new poll found
Populist policies resonate strongly with many Americans, more so than a newly articulated alternative, according to new polling. In the latest Demand Progress survey, respondents were asked to choose between two options for how to help ordinary Americans: a 'populist' agenda and an 'abundance' agenda. It comes after the publication of 'Abundance,' a book by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which argues that the U.S. has failed to build what society needs — including affordable housing and clean energy — in part because of excessive regulation. Klein, a New York Times columnist, has argued that, if Democrats want to win elections going forward, they should take up the 'politics of abundance.' Breaking down the poll The poll — which surveyed 1,200 voters May 8-13 — described the abundance view by saying: 'The big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges … Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations …' In contrast, it described the populist view by saying: 'The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government. … We need to hold these corporations accountable and reduce their power …' For most respondents, the latter view was seen as more persuasive. Fifty-six percent said they would be more likely to vote for someone — whether for Congress or the White House — who articulated the populist view, while 44% said they'd probably vote for a candidate who held the abundance view. When the results were broken down by partisan affiliation, some significant differences emerged, according to the poll, which has a margin of error of 3.09 percentage points. The vast majority of Democrats, 73%, favored a candidate making the populist argument — as did 55% of independents. In contrast, 59% of Republicans said they were more likely to vote for someone making an abundance argument. Additionally, respondents were asked which view they agreed with more — even if neither lines up perfectly with their beliefs. A plurality, 43%, said they agreed more with the populist view, while 29% selected the abundance view. Again, Democrats and independents preferred the populist argument, while Republicans favored the other option. 'What these voters want is clear: a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption,' Emily Peterson-Cassin, the corporate power director at Demand Progress, a progressive organization, said in a release. 'The stakes are too high for Democrats to fixate on a message that only appeals to a minority of independent and Democratic voters.' However, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat — who has called for embracing economic populism — expressed some skepticism with the poll's findings. 'It's a weird juxtaposition,' he wrote in a post on X. 'Why not craft a message where we aggressively reduce concentrated corporate power AND we fix bottlenecks and build more stuff?'
Axios
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Poll: Democratic voters prefer "populism" over "abundance"
Democratic voters prefer a populist message over one that focuses on an "abundance agenda," according to a new poll by Demand Progress. Why it matters: Democrats are asking themselves some hard questions as they ponder how they lost the 2024 election — and consider how they might win in 2028. On the economic front, some elected officials, like Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), want to embrace a version of the "abundance" agenda that liberal writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lay out in a new book titled (ahem) "Abundance." Klein gave voice to the abundance argument at a policy retreat for Senate Democrats this month. Other party leaders want to focus their energy on challenging President Trump on the populist front. Think of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, trying to dare Republicans to vote against tax cuts for billionaires. Driving the news: The survey of 1,200 registered voters by Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy organization, was designed to supply some hard data for the debate. It defined the abundance argument by starting off with this sentence: "The big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges." The populist argument was described as "The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government." By the numbers: 55.6% of all voters preferred the populist argument, compared to 43.5% who said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who offered the abundance argument. Those preferences were even stronger among Democratic and independent voters. 72.5% of Democrats reacted positively to the populist argument compared to 39.6% for Republicans. It was 55.4% for independents. Given a direct choice, 59% of Democrats preferred the populist argument, compared to just 16.8% liking the abundance one. The bottom line: "What these voters want is clear: a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption," said Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress. Methodology: The survey of 1,200 registered voters was conducted on the YouGov platform from May 8 to May 13, 2025. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3.09 percentage points.
The Hill
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Ed Martin, outgoing US attorney, discloses he is subject of ethics probe
Outgoing interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin disclosed he is under investigation by a D.C. ethics panel in a goodbye email to staff as he prepares to take on a new role at the Justice Department. Martin stepped down this week after his nomination for the post hit a roadblock with some GOP senators. He has since been tapped by President Trump to lead the new Weaponization Working Group at DOJ. Now slated by Trump for a more far-reaching role at Justice, Martin alerted staff that he is under investigation by D.C.'s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) which reviews complaints filed against attorneys in the city. Martin appeared to attach a complaint before the board and referenced the office's leader, Hamilton 'Phil' Fox. 'I am taking Mr. Fox head on. His conduct is personally insulting and professionally unacceptable,' Martin wrote in an email reviewed by The Hill. He also blasted the office as well as judges, writing, 'It is an outrage how they treat us and I will continue the fight against the weaponization of our law licenses against us.' Martin was facing at least two requests for ethics investigations made to ODC. A letter from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and fellow Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee laid out a series of actions from Martin, noting that he remained the attorney of record for one of the Jan. 6 defendants he represented in private practice while dismissing his case as the interim U.S. Attorney. 'By not recusing himself from this matter, Mr. Martin created an impermissible conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety by using his new government office to favor his client, whom he was defending from the very charges he sought to dismiss,' Durbin wrote. The letter also noted Martin's tweets to Elon Musk, pledging to take action against those who 'even acted simply unethically' in dealings with the Department of Government Efficiency efforts. A request from the group Demand Progress made similar arguments. It's not clear which of the requests Martin was referencing. Durbin's office did not respond to request for comment. While Demand Progress received a response from Fox's office asking for more information, the group indicated their request has not yet been formally docketed – a contrast to the docketed case number referenced by Martin.
