An Electoral Abundance Agenda

There’s demand for centrist leadership. Our problem is on the supply side.

The “abundance agenda” is all the rage among policy wonks these days.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson (currently co-authoring a book on it with Ezra Klein) calls it “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems.” The concept is that progress against our biggest problems is best achieved by building, innovating, and growing the pie.

Prophets of abundance like Thompson and Klein view scarcity as the crux of our contemporary social and economic problems. Americans have been plagued in recent years by inadequate supply of basic necessities from Covid tests to housing to healthcare. Rather than tinkering with demand or entertaining redistribution to “address” these shortages, abundance advocates want to dramatically increase supply to meet the needs of all.

It’s the opposite of zero-sum thinking and, as Thompson argues, has the potential to lift Americans out of what has felt like an entrenched period of social stasis:

America has too much venting and not enough inventing. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change—but in practice, many Americans are basically dead set against the clean-energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar-power projects. We say that housing is a human right—but our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or megaprojects. Politicians say that they want better health care—but they tolerate a catastrophically slow-footed FDA‪ that withholds promising tools, and a federal policy that deliberately limits the supply of physicians.

Thompson also notes the cross-ideological appeal of abundance:

Derek Thompson @DKThomp

This is an attempt to sketch out a political philosophy that combines a) the left's care for human welfare, esp for the most vulnerable b) libertarians' focus on barriers to progress c) the right's fixation on national greatness There is a synthesis view. It's abundance.

The clear mainstream appeal of this mindset has led many on the pragmatic center-left to embrace an abundance agenda as part of a next-generation political platform designed to win over the middle. Klein has called for “supply-side progressivism,” as has Matt Yglesias. Ruy Teixeira has argued that center-left candidates should embrace an abundance agenda as part of his “Three Point Plan To Fix the Democrats and Their Coalition”:

Voters, especially working class voters, are interested in abundance: more stuff, more growth, more opportunity, cheaper prices, nicer, more comfortable lives. Thus to reach and hold these voters, the Democrats need an abundance agenda. Right now, they don’t have one.

An abundance agenda may serve as the core of a mainstream economic or social policy plan. But what about a similar approach to addressing supply-side problems in electoral politics?

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Moderates Have a Supply-Side Problem

Election after election, voters demonstrate that they have a demand for mainstream, moderate candidates (and an aversion to the fringes on both sides of the aisle). When given the chance, they tend to elevate normal, middle-of-the-road candidates over those they perceive to be extremists.

We have seen it in the most popular politicians in America, nearly all of whom are blue state Republican governors perceived as moderate. We saw this at the federal level last cycle, in conservative Alaska where ranked choice voting allowed a bipartisan majority of voters to express their preference for moderate Democrat Mary Peltola. We saw it in Colorado, where former independent-turned-Democrat Adam Frisch came within 546 votes of knocking off MAGA maniac Lauren Boebert by building a “tri-partisan coalition” and welcoming voters into what his mother affectionately calls “the pro-normal party”. We also saw it in Kansas and Maine and Ohio, and Washington, and, and, and …

The demand for moderate candidates is clear, but we have a supply-side problem that manifests in two ways.

First, there’s the issue of supply in the candidate marketplace: there’s a genuine shortage of moderate, everyday citizens running for office. 

This is the core argument in political scientist Andrew B. Hall’s 2019 book Who Wants to Run?, which describes how a relative scarcity of normal, mainstream people deciding to seek elected office has created more room for ideological extremists and their small-yet-vocal cohorts of polarized supporters to step into the void in their place. Hall argues that this dynamic on the ground has created a vicious cycle: as fewer moderates seek office, more extremists get elected, the environment becomes even more hostile to moderates, and then even fewer seek office.

Second, there’s the challenge of supply in the attentional marketplace: as much as there remains a shortage of moderates running for office, there are still plenty of dynamic mainstream elected officials on the center-left (such as the 109 House Democrats who, led by the New Democrat Coalition, held the moderate line and voted to denounce socialism in last week). The only problem is that too few voters are exposed to these candidates in our sensational, hyper-polarized media environment.

The right and the far-left fringes have a symbiotic relationship, and their made-for-social-media antics hijack our attention and divert it away from more mainstream candidates in the middle. (AOC trading jabs with MTG turns out to be a boon of attention and money for both of them.)

The result is that our existing shortage of moderates appears far worse to voters than it actually is while, on the flip side, it looks like there’s an overwhelming abundance of extremists when in reality they only make up a third of the country.

This, too, manifests as a vicious cycle, with disproportionate media attention going to the most polarizing figures on the political stage, only to foment further demand for “polarization porn” from political hobbyists, only to further reward the polarizers.

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We Need an Electoral Abundance Agenda to Win the Middle

There’s tons of demand for moderation among voters, but a relative scarcity of supply in the political arena. Such scarcity must be addressed in both the candidate and attentional marketplaces.

On the candidate side, far more must be invested in supporting brand-differentiated moderates in the kinds of electoral environments where the track record shows they can thrive. These are candidates like Adam Frisch, Sharice Davids, and Jared Golden, whose moderation has enabled them to harness volatility and win right-of-center voters in Colorado, Kansas, and Maine. While there are some great organizations and individuals committed to recruiting and supporting such candidates, this is more work to be done in this area.

On the attentional/media side, more moderate leaders must step into the fray to engage in productive conflict with their counterparts at the ideological fringes. It is through those individual leaders (and their contrast with both the right and the far-left) that voters can be more aggressively and authentically exposed to the middle.

These individual leaders also require a community of like-minded pragmatists who can provide support — and not just campaign contributions, but the sense of the camaraderie that has carried extremists to outsized power in recent decades.

The intersection of abundance policy and leadership can be found at NewDEAL Leaders events, where pro-growth state and local leaders have built the type of esprit de corps among doers that drives a network of centrist superstars including Pete Buttigieg. WelcomePAC’s co-founders joined NewDEAL’s Executive Director Debbie Cox Bultan in a recent podcast interview to discuss why “the best way to protect our democracy is to practice democracy.”

The Most Valuable Players in democracy are centrist Democrats who can win the middle. The real or perceived shortage of such leadership has led to uncontested House races in more than a dozen potentially competitive districts.

We can have an abundance of centrists — both voters and leaders. We just need to put it at the top of America’s agenda.

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