The Limits of “Abundance” Politics for the Democratic Party
Taking on NIMBYism is a worthwhile cause, but it's not the party's challenge in the heartland.
During last year’s election, I had no doubt that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris was going to lose my home state of Georgia.
People were too upset about the immigration situation, inflation had cut far too deep into Georgians’ pocketbooks, and swapping Joe Biden for Kamala Harris was a trade that maybe gave the party a chance to spare itself from a landslide but wasn’t going to persuade a lot of swing voters who couldn’t name a single substantive difference between the two (to be fair, the candidate herself couldn’t, either).
The elections I was more interested in were the pair of transit referendums in Metro Atlanta. Would voters approve hundreds of millions of dollars to help build out the bus system and make life easier for commuters?
Maybe the massive influx of newcomers who’ve moved to Georgia over the past decade would want some form of transportation besides sitting in your SUV in gridlock on I-75 every day.
Well, it turns out the car is still king in Georgia. Voters in both Cobb County and Gwinnett County, both of which are now blue counties, turned down the referendum by margins so large it suggests that not only did the overwhelming majority of Republicans oppose more transit, but many Democrats also didn’t want to change the status quo.
This was a frustrating defeat for me. Although I was born in raised in Georgia, I spent about a decade of my life in the Washington, D.C. area. If you live outside the nation’s capital, as I did, you really don’t need to own a car at all. I’d take buses and trains everywhere, or I’d just walk to get groceries or other basics. It was good for my health, and it was good for my pocketbook.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy zipping around in my EV, it’s just that I want to have the option of using good public transportation instead. With the defeat of the pair of transit referendums, urbanism is not any closer to becoming the new philosophy of even a bluer Metro Atlanta.
Which brings me to Abundance, a new book by a pair of Democratic Party-aligned pundits (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson) who argue that what the party really needs to do is make it easier to build — build housing, build transit, build everything.
(If you don’t want to read the whole book, I recommend this interview with Klein where he lays out the argument.)
I’m largely sympathetic to what Klein and Thompson are arguing. Yes, there is a lot of annoying Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) activism that prevents development in Democratic strongholds like New York City and San Francisco. There are a lot of regulations and bureaucracy that make it difficult for say, California to build high-speed rail.
Klein and Thompson have a legitimate beef with parts of the Democratic Party who tend to be concentrated in affluent cities on the coasts who slow down or prevent abundance.
But the relevance of the book drops off once you start talking about regions of the country like mine.
Take the transit referendum. As part of a larger project I’m doing with the New America Foundation, I interviewed people who were opposed to the 1% sales tax and transit funding that it would’ve produced in Cobb County. The overwhelming message you get from folks is: Cobb is suburban. We don’t want to be urban. We don’t want to be New York City.
That sentiment largely comes from Republicans, many of whom have lived in the region for decades. Some of them, no doubt, were motivated by distrust of diversity — more transit means more minorities or lower-class people riding transit into Cobb County. As anyone who followed the construction of Truist Park can attest, fears of crime animate a lot of older Republicans.
But an increasing number of Democrats also have found themselves comfortable with the suburban lifestyle and voted just like the Republicans did on the referendum. Who needs buses or trains or walkability? Pile everyone in the Palisade, we’re going for a drive.
None of this can be boiled down to this idea that Democrats have ensnared development with a web of zoning restrictions. Democrats don’t have enough power in the state of Georgia to do that even if they wanted to.
And if you look around our state, abundance really isn’t our major problem. Every time I drive anywhere I see people with massive pickup trucks with $50,000 price tags (that’s probably a conservative estimate) going to palatial homes. Republicans and Democrats alike in Atlanta’s suburbs already have plenty of abundance. In general, it’s pretty easy to build here, and it’s pretty easy to start a business. The problems of New York City or the Bay Area of California really aren’t the problems of the Sunbelt.
Our problems revolve around the fact that 18 hospitals have closed over the past decade, most of them in rural areas as our Governor declines to participate in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which could at least help a little bit with this problem. Or that preschool teachers are being paid $13 an hour, and we wonder why there’s such high burnout and plentiful job openings in this field. A lot of those people who are financing those aforementioned trucks can barely afford them because jobs don’t pay like they should and people want to Keep Up With the Joneses regardless.
The Sunbelt is famously the country’s harshest region to start a union or assert your rights on the job; poverty is endemic in parts of our states, especially in rural sections that sit miles away from commercial capitals.
Does the Abundance Agenda have much to offer people in the swing states that unanimously rejected Harris’s campaign? On the margins, maybe. Regulations that prevent us from bringing in more foreign doctors, for instance, could be making our health care crisis worse.
The one thing the Abundance folks have to realize is that the world is much larger than the NIMBY battles in Brooklyn or Pacific Heights. Taking on some of the more moribund areas of Democratic governance on the coasts is a worthwhile task. But there’s very little in this agenda that is suited for America’s heartland. In fact, arguing for urbanism across Metro Atlanta could very well sink an ambitious Democrat who would be better off making their campaign about the minimum wage, child care, Medicaid, and education.
Democrats in states like Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will have to look elsewhere for an agenda that addresses the needs of the people of their states.
I can’t begrudge Klein and Thompson for encouraging California and New York to get their affairs in order, but I do begrudge the larger Democratic Party for concentrating its intellectual prowess so narrowly while putting so little thought into the social, cultural, and political problems in the rest of the country.
Really good piece.
Hmm, while winning over swing voters might be what you were hoping their book was about, I don't think that's what it is actually about.
Nonetheless, one has to wonder why would swing voters trust Democrats to govern their nation given how poorly they are governing states that they perennially control like California and New York. Further the same tendencies that have hobbled CA and NY unsurprisingly reared their ugly heads during Biden's administration, preventing solar farms and electric vehicle charging infrastructure from being built in Democratic states. Indeed it was red states that are far less "anti-abundance" that benefited disproportionately from Biden's policies.
As for the swing voter issues that are called out here, they would definitely be quite relevant in a book about winning over swing voters in 2028. Still you have to wonder just how convincing these issues would be. Democratic candidates could absolutely point to states like California and New York as proof of higher minimum wages, expanded Medicaid, and subsidized child care programs. Democrats would just have to hope that those swing voters didn't notice that many of those Californians who received said benefits were living in RVs because they can't afford an apartment.