Economic Populism, Not Neoliberal Abundance, Is the Best Path to Defeating Trumpism

If you follow intra-Democratic discourse on social media, then you probably saw the frenzy that erupted this week following Axios’ coverage of a poll by Demand Progress that found populist messaging far outperforms the messaging being pushed by proponents of the “abundance” movement.

When asked about a candidate who wanted to “get money out of politics, break up corporate monopolies, and fight corruption,” 48.5% of respondents said they’d be much more likely to vote for that candidate and 33.1% said they’d be somewhat more likely, for a total of 81.6%. When asked about a candidate who wanted to “make the government and economy do a better job of serving working and middle-class Americans” by reducing “regulations that hold back the government and private sector from taking action,” 18.8% said they’d be much more likely to vote for that candidate and 28.9% said they’d be somewhat more likely, for a total of 47.7%. (The massive gap between the two options is actually slightly larger among independent voters, with 84.8% more likely to support the populist candidate versus 44.9% for abundance.)

At a moment when Democrats’ efficacy in defeating Trumpism carries such existential stakes, these survey results demonstrate why many of us on the left have found the campaign to make abundance the new face of the Democratic Party so deeply concerning. In the fight against authoritarianism, we simply cannot afford to repeat the mistake Kamala Harris made in 2024, when her shift away from an initially populist message to an abundance-adjacent strategy coincided with a significant drop-off in popular support – a disastrous approach that abundance advocates are working to recreate (or, perhaps more appropriately, maintain) within the Democratic Party, with the aid of millions of dollars from their crypto, AI, Big Tech, and fossil fuel backers.

In the fight against authoritarianism, we simply cannot afford to repeat the mistake Kamala Harris made in 2024...

Perhaps more revealing than the actual poll, however, have been the responses to it from the abundance camp. Abundance proponents immediately lashed out to try to dismiss the survey, cast doubt on its methodology, and explain away the obvious conclusions that Democrats should draw from its results. But each of their arguments is so profoundly weak, if not outright disingenuous, that reviewing them one by one calls into question nearly every aspect of the abundance program.

Abundance proponents’ first strategy was to attack the poll’s wording. For example, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait immediately sprung into action after the results were published to claim that the poll “is literally worthless, because the language is crafted to yield the desired outcome.”

Here’s how the poll described the abundance argument:

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 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. This increases costs and makes it harder for us to provide for everybody’s needs. We need to push back against these groups so the government and economy can work better for working and middle-class Americans.

I don’t know how anyone could read this language and not think it’s an accurate articulation of the abundance agenda. Maybe abundance advocates could come up with a more generous framing of their argument, but if so, they haven’t provided it.

The one specific criticism I have seen came from Adam Jentleson, self-appointed warrior against “the groups,” who wrote, “This is a good example of how groups cook polls. Candidates typically say ‘cut red tape,’ which probably performs better than just ‘bottlenecks.’ But the group massages the question wording [to] get the outcome they want.” But that’s just not how abundance proponents frame their program. In Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s agenda-defining book, "Abundance," the word “bottleneck” is used over a dozen times. The phrase “red tape” does not appear once. Bottleneck also frequently appears throughout the authors’ other writings on this subject, and in the materials of the institutions backing the abundance campaign. If this isn’t a compelling message, that’s not an issue of unfair wording – it’s a problem with the abundance message, as pushed by abundance’s top messengers.

The reason I’m advocating for Democrats to campaign as economic populists – and then govern as such – is because all evidence indicates that this strategy gives us our best chance of beating fascism, before it’s too late.

The next move from the abundance camp was to attack the very idea of comparing populist and abundance messaging, given that it’s possible for Democrats to embrace both programs. As Jentleson put it, “This binary is silly and it’s a structural problem to have foundations pumping millions into calcifying it. The top Dem electoral performers talk about breaking up concentrated corporate power AND cutting gov’t red tape.” There are two big problems with this argument. First, the poll actually tested this point directly. One of the survey’s questions combined populist and abundance messaging to see how a both/and approach performed. Lo and behold, while the combined message did much better than the plain-abundance option, it did significantly worse than the plain-populist one.

But even more importantly, this “we can do both” line completely sidesteps the reality that most of abundance’s top backers have spent the last six months actively fighting to stop Democrats from embracing populism. Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank that has been a major booster of the Abundance agenda, recently complained that “demanding economic populism is its own form of purity test” and argued that Democrats should stop using a “fighting the oligarchs” message. Jonathan Chait just published a piece about abundance titled “The Coming Democratic Civil War” which stated with admirable honesty that “progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement.” At one Abundance promotion event, Derek Thompson said, “What is ‘oligarchy’ doing for you? The tool they have used to explain the world fails to do so.” In another interview he said, “On the Democratic side, there is a fight, and it’s happening right now, and our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party.”

For the abundance camp to contend that they never claimed their program could help Democrats win elections is gaslighting, pure and simple.

In reality, there are pieces of the abundance program that could fit in with a populist agenda. For example, it’s often been progressives who have led the fight against exclusionary zoning. But the abundance movement – its top proponents, the institutions behind them, and the interest groups that are, to use Jentleson’s words, “pumping millions into” standing them up – have generally presented abundance as either in conflict with economic populism or, as Thompson put it, as an alternative that must displace progressivism in “defining the future” of the Democratic Party. Given the battle lines they have drawn, information about which framework voters respond best to seems extremely important. And let the record be clear: The idea of merging populism with abundance is a concession they are making only now that it’s clear that abundance alone could spell disaster for Democrats at the polls.

But it is the final argument from the abundance camp that is both the most disingenuous and the most telling. Many abundance proponents responded to the poll’s evidence that abundance offers Democrats a weak message to run on by arguing that their framework was never meant to be an electoral program. As Vox’s Eric Levitz argued, “[T]he point of abundance reforms is to govern well, not win elections.”

The idea of merging populism with abundance is a concession they are making only now that it’s clear that abundance alone could spell disaster for Democrats at the polls.

Of course, this claim is patently false. Abundance proponents have, beyond any shred of a doubt, been pitching their program as the electoral strategy that will give Democrats their best shot at defeating Trumpism. In his keynote description of abundance in The Atlantic this March, Thompson could not have been more explicit on this point, writing, “If Trump’s opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to construct a new political movement, one that aims for abundance instead of scarcity.” For the abundance camp to contend that they never claimed their program could help Democrats win elections is gaslighting, pure and simple.

And yet, accepting this claim entails accepting an even more devastating indictment of the abundance movement. Because in the midst of Trump’s ongoing authoritarian takeover of our country, winning elections is the number one existential goal we must achieve. Yes, I am a progressive, so I want to see economically populist governance because I believe it will improve Americans’ lives and strengthen the prospects of our shared future. But I believe the same about maximalist policies on a number of social issues that I’m not advocating for Democrats to campaign on. The reason I’m advocating for Democrats to campaign as economic populists – and then govern as such – is because all evidence indicates that this strategy gives us our best chance of beating fascism, before it’s too late.

This debate matters greatly, because the stakes are so high. If abundance isn’t going to help Democrats defeat MAGA, then abundance advocates – or at least the ones who care about ending Trumpism – should stop trying to “define the future of the Democratic Party.” Let’s leave that work to the Democrats who are trying to orient our party around a vision that voters actually do find compelling.