Transcript: Why Affordability Replaced Abundance as the Dems Buzzword

Groundwork Collaborative’s Lindsay Owens says that while the idea of “abundance” received a lot of attention last year, voters prefer hiking taxes on the rich and reining in corporate power.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: So I want to start by talking about—taking us back to about a year ago. I think last March, the book Abundance was released by Derek Thompson, then of The Atlantic, [and] Ezra Klein of The New York Times. This book really caught a lot of attention because they’re left or center people, very thoughtful in terms of economic policy. And the book basically argued that the problem for the left was that things are not being built fast enough, and it really detailed how we need to reduce regulations on housing and things like that to have more abundance—was the phrasing.

And at first that book really took off. You heard a lot of Democratic senators and governors talking about it. But I think over the last year, I’d say another word—affordability—has taken the lead. So I wanted to talk to you about that, because you followed these economic policy debates. And I think one factor is obviously the Zohran campaign—we should get into that a little bit. But talk about maybe how, if there’s a zero-sum compass—and I’m being a little silly about this—how affordability got ahead of abundance.

Lindsay Owens: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. You’re right—Abundance just had such an incredible moment as a book, as a policy project, a set of policy ideas. And there was a large—and still is a large—kind of policy movement around the book. Some of it predated the book, some of it was buoyed by the book. These are YIMBY organizations all across the country, new think tanks and policy shops at the federal level as well as at the state level—the Inclusive Abundance Institute, right—this whole sort of cottage industry of new players. So it had a really big moment.

And importantly, it was also the first big new idea on the left after our big loss in the general election. And the party is reeling after losses in the general election, Trump’s reelection. We have been hemorrhaging the working class, right—there are a lot of people asking questions about how this happened, who’s to blame, and what the path forward should be.

And one thing we knew is Democrats were wildly unpopular, right—we have got to do something different, we have got to shake up the status quo, we can’t support the same old stuff, we have got to be change agents. Abundance is really the first offer of how we can change things. My organization was really interested in understanding not just Abundance as a policy project—although I think we have a lot of interest in it as a policy project, there are pieces of it that we find very agreeable, we’re also interested in boosting the supply of affordable housing in the United States, for example—but we were more interested in whether or not Abundance could hang as a political project.

And so we teamed up with some really smart political people to help us answer that question. So we hired Geoff Garin of Hart Research, who’s a top pollster for the Senate Dems and has been doing polling on the economy for a long time—he was Harris’s pollster, for example. And then we also hired Brian Fallon, who advised on our project and has worked for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and others, and is just a really smart political thinker and communicator. And we teamed up with some other folks—brought Rama Murty on the project, and some great folks at Groundwork. And we just said: let’s put Abundance to the test. Can Abundance get working-class voters engaged with the Democratic Party again? Is the Abundance agenda resonant as a political project? Does it address voters’ top concerns, top priorities? And can Abundance compete with some other leading ideas—economic populism, fighting oligarchy, other candidate ideas that Democrats might put forward in a future election?

And look, the data was very clear. The first thing that came through in the data—and this is just anodyne to say at this point—but the first thing that came through in the data is everyone is focused on affordability, cost of living, prices. That’s your top concern, right? And so any economic agenda you put forward has to be responsive to that concern and you can’t even get in the arena if your policy agenda can’t meet Americans where they are. And where they are is: stuff is fucking expensive. And I need my Democratic lawmakers and my candidates to offer me a way forward. So that was the test—like, how does Abundance do on its own merits, then stack it up in a horse race against populism?

Then I think because we were really devoted to, frankly, quite a serious empirical exercise here—like, it was the first horse out of the gate and the first big idea, can we use this one?—we even gave it various advantages and then saw if it could hang.

Bacon: In polls or in focus groups, or both?

Owens: We actually did focus groups—yes, we did quite a few focus groups on it. And then our qual boards, it’s like an online version of a focus group. And then we did the polling. And in the polling we not only tested Abundance against a straightforward populist approach, but we also tested a hybrid. Because the truth is you don’t have to—it isn’t zero-sum. Candidates can run on a whole variety of ideas, and they can take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B, and they can take the best ideas from every set of intellectual theorists, or advocacy groups.

Bacon: Explain what a test might sound like. So Abundance, sentence or two—you described Abundance as X and economic populism as Y. Give a short sentence of how those things might sound.

Owens: Yeah, I brought a few examples so that I could read them. Okay. So for example, in asking voters whether or not they thought Abundance-style policy solutions were responsive to the affordability problem, we would say things like: which would address the high cost of living more—cutting red tape and regulation, like a very abundance-style approach, or cracking down on price gouging? And that’s a 60–30, right—60 for price gouging, 30 for cutting red tape and regulation.

Bacon: Is that all voters, swing voters, working-class voters? What is the sample?

Owens: That one was everybody. That one was all voters—that 60–30? Yeah.

Bacon: Who’s the 30—just curiously, do you know, like who’s in—what’s in—who’s in the third?

Owens: Great question. So I’ll give you another one, which will answer that one more definitively. So when we say: look, which approach do you think is better for rebuilding the middle class—this more populist solution, or this more abundance-style solution? Fifty-nine percent want the more populist solution, 41 percent want the more abundance-style solution. All subgroups, except for Republicans, prefer the populist solution. So Democrats prefer it by 42 points, independents prefer it by 20 points, working-class voters prefer it by 26 points.

Yeah, so we really took a kind of forensic look at this policy agenda. And look, it has some appeal—it is absolutely the case that there are elements of the Abundance agenda that majorities of voters like, building more affordable housing. It’s just that when stacked up against alternatives, it’s really an inferior choice. And more importantly, when put through the test of: can it be resonant with voters’ top concern, which is affordability—can it appeal to the coalitions that we’re trying to pull back into the party, the working class?—it does particularly poorly.

And to answer your question of where did it go, I think it faded from the political conversation because ultimately it couldn’t compete as a political project on the merits. That isn’t to say that it’s not a viable and important policy project—Abundance adherents right now are interested in the housing bills that are moving through the Senate, Senator Warren wrote the housing bill, and there’s plenty of room for the policy project. But I think as a political one, it just can’t—it’s a horse that can’t really run. And I just think it is interesting that people do tend to try to run on winning and popular messages.

Bacon: So the one thing I remember, when they were talking about the book—Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein—one thing they said was essentially the idea you framed. The question is: does the agenda help with affordability? I thought part of their framing was that people perceive Democrats as not governing effectively—yeah, just affordability was second. And if we have—and if housing can be developed as fast in California as in Texas, that’ll show that Democrats govern well, and that’ll help the party nationwide.

How do you view that argument—it’s a little common, but how do you view that argument, which is a little bit separate from affordability?

Owens: Yeah, it’s a really important one. It is absolutely central to their thesis. And if you remember, their book came out at a really interesting time in........

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