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Whatever happened to “abundance,” the pro-growth movement that many Democrats were going to hitch a ride on this election cycle?
They did embrace its ideas. They just don’t use the “a-word” that much.
In ads and across swing districts, Democrats are running on having “built more affordable housing,” supported “all-of-the-above energy,” and sliced through “bureaucracy and red tape” without mentioning “abundance” at all. Back home, some are talking about the permitting reform bill they’re trying to push through Congress, and the housing bill they already did.
“Resource development is about our survival,” former Rep. Mary Peltola says in one of her ads, highlighting how she defied climate activists to support Alaska’s Willow oil-drilling project.This year, after progressive activists accused the loose “abundance” movement, which favors targeted deregulation to spur growth, of trying to steer Democrats away from populism, groups working with local electeds forged ahead armed with polling showing how their ideas fit into the “affordability” framework that most candidate were running on.
“That early criticism of ‘abundance’ being a flash in the pan was a bad faith argument from people worried about what a powerful argument it was,” said Derek Kaufman, the founder and CEO of Inclusive Abundance. “I look at New York, where I live, where you have Gov. [Kathy] Hochul Mayor [Zohran] Mamdani changing environmental reviews for urban infill; you have Mamdani doing his version of DOGE, which he called COGE.”
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Kaufman continued, “the more progressive-coded candidate is all about building housing to bring down costs.”
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The criticism of the “abundance” concept got a wide airing in 2025. Last spring, after Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” hit the New York Times bestseller list, progressives attacked it as a dangerous off-ramp from populism — which could actually win elections.Skeptics commissioned their own polls to argue that “abundance” was a dead end. Last spring, Demand Progress tested a version of an anti-bureaucracy “abundance” message against a “populist” message that saw the latter winning out.
Four months later, Groundwork Action released data that found “excessive bureaucracy,” while a concern for some voters, “ranks far behind other concerns and tackling it does not strike voters as a direct response to the problem of affordability.”
To critics, the absence of the word “abundance” on the campaign trail is a sign of victory. Those sympathetic to the movement argue that’s not the case — and that there was never a binary choice at hand between progressive ideology and the ideas abundance advocates stand for.
“I don’t use the word ‘abundance’ when I’m campaigning,” said Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Mich., “but I say all the time that when people think that the system is rigged against them, they’re right. It is. And a lot of the reason is what we’ve layered into government, where really well-intended ideas have the opposite effect.”
David’s view
Democrats are feeling very good about next month’s elections, and the jockeying is already underway about which faction made it happen. Progressives hope to power a Democratic victory in the House that sees them pick up more seats — and influence — in the next Congress.
When “abundance” critics went after the movement, they were trying to win the argument then as well as the argument of the future. They saw a coalition of techies and liberals who were trying to prevent what they wanted: A move to the left and away from deep-pocketed donors. They view “abundists” taking credit for Mamdani’s victory as opportunists trying to deny democratic socialists a major governing success.
But the non-socialists have made a modicum of impact, even if “abundance” has faded from Democrats’ lexicon. Thompson got Mamdani to agree with some of the “abundance” principles, and both agreed that the left can’t credibly compete with the new right if people believe progressive governments are tied down by interest groups and can’t build.
The argument continues.
Room for Disagreement
David Segal, whose group Demand Progress commissioned the first abundance-skeptical poll, argued that the abundance movement is all but dead.
“Having a primary message that is populist and then having a couple of lines about zoning or permitting reform is ‘offering a sop to abundists,’” he said. “It’s not ‘running on abundance.’ And it’s totally fine to do that, but it’s just not what Abundance (™) was arguing for when they rolled out their project.”
Notable
- In Politico, Riley Rogerson broke news of another “abundance”-pilled caucus in the House looking for a way to fund more big projects.