Two strains of thought are emerging on how to win them back. Neither side quite has its message together yet, but both groups are striving to at least define what it is in their party’s status quo that they’re fighting against.
At its core, abundance is a pro-growth argument—especially when it comes to areas where Americans feel shortages most, like in housing and mass transportation. But the mechanisms for building more and building faster that the book focuses on are snoozy issues like zoning and bureaucratic reform. Polling shows that “cutting red tape” is not a popular political message. Ahead of the conference, Abundance 2025, Blue Rose Research, the outfit led by Democratic polling guru David Shor, surveyed voters and found that messages “focused heavily on process changes” were not very effective at appealing broadly to voters.
But an electoral argument was waiting in the wings among centrists and quickly tied itself to the abundance agenda. There have long been pundits on the center-left, lately including Ruy Teixeira and Matt Yglesias, who argue that Democrats should moderate on cultural issues. A new think tank launched Wednesday takes that as a founding ethos. The Searchlight Foundation is headed by Adam Jentleson, who has worked with the late Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the presidential campaign for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman. Jentleson has argued that Democrats have been pushed into unpopular cultural positions by interest groups, especially on issues around transgender rights and immigration.
In fact, some prominent backers of Abundance conferences and organizations, including John Arnold of Arnold Ventures, a former hedge funder, have long fought public-sector unions. Other groups with the movement, like the Breakthrough Institute and ClearPath, distance themselves from other environmentalists. At the centrist WelcomeFest, hosted by WelcomePAC earlier this year, many speakers championed abundance and the writer Josh Barro blamed unions for lack of progress in blue cities.
The argument centers on the idea that working-class voters have been alienated by a Democratic Party that’s become too swayed by its new college-educated base on cultural issues, and it needs to moderate to win these voters back. Searchlight argues that Democrats either ignore polling showing them their positions are unpopular or engage in wishful-thinking polling to try to show that they are.
A polling memo published earlier this month from Hart Research and Groundwork Action, the advocacy affiliate of the liberal group Groundwork Collaborative, also showed that a message that blamed corporations and billionaires for the problems of working people and cracking down on price gouging, raising taxes on the wealthy, and reducing corporate lobbying power was more appealing than one focusing on cutting red tape, reducing labor and environmental standards, and “unleashing the private sector.”
That may prove a liability for the abundance movement; some very rich people are closely associated with it, including Silicon Valley power brokers such as Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, and Arnold. Proponents in the tech billionaire world were championing the abundance idea even before the book came out, Burke said. McCall thinks American voters keep electing a party that cuts taxes for the rich and increases inequality despite what they believe for many reasons, but one is that they haven’t yet had reason to trust the Democratic Party to do anything about it over the long term.
Naturally, in three and a half years, everyone on the Democratic side of the fight might have a villain to take aim at that is more salient than generic “billionaires” or “The Groups,” in President Donald Trump and his expanded universe of cronies and villains—a purported billionaire surrounded by other extremely wealthy people, who now looks to be on path to wreck the economy, despite winning voters’ trust on that very issue. If that happens, the reasons Democrats lost in 2024 might be less important than they seem now because we’ll all have lost so much by the time the next election rolls around.
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