Is the abundance agenda dead?

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. 

To start with a brief programming note, this will be the last “happy Tuesday” that I’ll be wishing readers. Rent Free is not going away. But starting next week, it’ll start going out to readers on Mondays.

Back to the content, this past week, the country went through a midterm election that delivered Democrats historic wins across the country. 

As a housing policy writer, I don’t have too much to add to all the pollsters’ and pundits’ post–horse race analysis. 

But the scale and scope of Democrats’ victory does clearly have implications for the kinds of issues we cover regularly at Rent Free.

In what might run against the consensus opinion, I think Tuesday’s results are bad news for those hoping the Democratic Party will rejuvenate itself by embracing the “abundance agenda.”   

When Derek Thompson’s original “abundance agenda” essay ran in The Atlantic in 2022, inflation was near a 40-year high, pandemic-era shortages were a recent memory, and Americans seemed angrier and more polarized than ever. 

Thompson’s “simple plan to solve all of America’s problems” involved a shredding of all the red tape that was holding back both the government and private sector’s ability to supply the things that Americans really wanted, from housing to healthcare. Kickstarting another supply-side revolution would bring prices down, unite the dynamists across all of America’s political factions, and generally make Americans happier with their individual prospects. 

By the time the book version of this essay was published in March 2025, Thompson and co-author Ezra Klein’s “abundance agenda” had taken on an added partisan political dimension. 

Just a few months prior, President Donald Trump had won reelection by capitalizing on voter anger over inflation, immigration chaos, and excessive cultural wokery.  

Defeated Democrats just didn’t seem to have anything to offer voters. 

The trillions the Biden administration had spent on new subsidies hadn’t bought the loyalty of the electorate. No one expected the last administration’s green energy and infrastructure projects to be delivered on time and on budget. 

Blue states and cities had become synonymous with high costs and incompetent government. Population shifts to red states were whittling away Democrats’ lock on congressional seats and Electoral College votes. 

Klein and Thompson’s book popped in the discourse, in part, because it seemed to offer Democrats a way out of this funk. 

By embracing the “abundance agenda,” liberal politicians could turn blue states back into growth magnets and convince voters that they were the real party of affordability and efficient administration. 

On policy grounds, there was much to recommend about the abundance agenda (even if its best ideas were things free marketers had been arguing for for decades). American living standards really are held back by a morass of regulations that serve mostly to restrict supply and raise prices. 

Looser zoning rules and fewer environmental review regulations would do a lot to bring down the costs of energy, housing, and other necessities of modern life.

But the political case for the abundance agenda was a harder sell. 

Supply-constraining regulations persist because there’s a political constituency behind them.

Even voters who care primarily about zoning reform or lowering energy costs will still base their vote on broader partisan interests. And not that many voters care primarily about zoning reform, even if rising prices are what motivates them to get out and vote. 

Deregulation that brings down housing and energy costs in the long run won’t do a lot to win the next midterm or presidential race. NEPA reform could electrify a lot of things, but the electorate isn’t one of them. 

Tuesday’s “blue tsunami” would seem to confirm all the political weaknesses of the abundance agenda. 

In an election year when the cost of living was a primary motivation of the electorate (second only to government corruption), voters rejected cost-cutting “abundance-coded” ballot initiatives while handing a Democratic Party that is still far from “abundance-pilled” a historic victory. 

In Massachusetts, voters very narrowly rejected a “starter home” referendum that would have capped minimum lot sizes for single-family homes at 5,000 square feet statewide. 

California’s Proposition 45, which would have created an expedited environmental review process for a long list of  “essential projects” (energy infrastructure, water infrastructure, housing, transportation, etc.), lost by a sizable ten-point margin. 

Both initiatives were archetypal abundance agenda proposals in that they proposed removing regulations on building needful things in two of the highest-cost states in the country. 

The “yes” campaigns on both initiatives focused their pitch squarely on affordability. Voters who were mad as hell about high prices still said no to both. 

Meanwhile, the scale and scope of the blue wave saw a diverse array of Democrats elected. 

Some did indeed talk like they’d read Abundance. Others were more interested in ending arms sales to Israel or relitigating the injustice of the Mexican-American War. 

Abundance-pilled or not, they all won. 

And they won despite Democrats not creating that shining example of functional, affordable blue-state governance. Presiding over steady, even prosperity, it turns out, wasn’t necessary for a revival of the party. Disgust at Republicans was enough.  

Nor was the growth and affordability that red states had delivered sufficient to prevent the GOP’s electoral wipeout. 

Abundance liberals have often looked at Texas’ booming cities and rapid deployment of renewable energy with envy. The state’s ruling Republicans could plausibly claim that their decades of one-party rule were responsible for this growth.

That wasn’t enough to keep the blue wave at bay this year. Arguably, Texas voters’ growing dissatisfaction with the Lone Star State’s particular blend of pro-growth policies helped Democrats sweep the elections there. 

If growth is neither a necessary nor sufficient guarantor of electoral success, Democratic politicians might well ask themselves why they should fight the hard political fights to deliver that growth.

It’s no secret, even to the politicians, that California’s zoning laws drive up housing costs, and its environmental regulations make the cost of building everything else more expensive. 

Fixing either problem requires taking on powerful interest groups within the Democratic coalition, be they unions, environmental groups, or community activists. 

If Democrats can avoid those fights and still win national elections, why have them at all? 

That would seem to be the view of the likely next Democratic House speaker. 

Two days after the midterm elections, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) said he wanted to renegotiate a Senate-crafted permitting reform bill. In its current form, that bill would pare back many requirements of federal environmental law to speed up a wide range of federally permitted projects. 

Its potential for speeding the deployment of renewable energy makes it a perfect example of an “abundance agenda” policy. But Jeffries says the bill does too much to remove environmental protections and wants to see it amended. 

Not every incoming Democrat likely feels that same way. In a post-election interview on Fox, James Talarico specifically mentioned permitting reform and cutting red tape on housing as something he’d want to prioritize in the new Congress. 

In a post-midterm column, Thompson himself highlighted examples of Democrats using the word “abundance” in their stump speeches and running ads that promise faster delivery of infrastructure and more housing. 

That’s all good evidence that the abundance branding isn’t politically toxic for Democrats and that some incoming lawmakers might be genuinely abundance-pilled. 

On the other hand, talk is cheap. It’s one thing to say “abundance” in the abstract is good. It’s another thing to commit to policies that will actually deliver it. 

For instance, Thompson’s column cites a paid advertisement put out by Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs that focuses on her delivery of new housing units. OK. This is also the governor who has blocked starter home reform in Arizona for years. 

None of this is to argue that policy debates about permitting reform, zoning liberalization, and other items on the abundance agenda are going to stop in the new Congress or in states with new Democratic governments. But the abundance agenda didn’t get a huge boost from Tuesday’s elections either.

As a way for market-curious liberal wonks to organize their thoughts and direct their activism, the idea of abundance can do a lot of work. But Tuesday’s elections are evidence against the notion that the abundance agenda is the code needed to crack America’s politics and fix all its problems. 

• As mentioned above, Massachusetts voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have allowed single-family homes on smaller lots by a very thin margin. “No” on Question 7 won with 50.6 percent of the vote.
• Last week, I also covered the loss of California’s Proposition 45 (also mentioned above), which would have scaled back the state’s laborious environmental review requirements.
• In happier news, voters in Johnston, Rhode Island, rejected a ballot initiative that would have enabled the town to seize a plot of land to stop affordable housing development. I’ve written about the truly scandalous details of this eminent domain controversy here, here, and here.
• Some Texas Democrats propose building on the zoning reforms passed in the 2025 Legislature.
• Hostility to data centers was a major issue in this year’s midterms.