Are moderate Democrats washed?
Are moderate Democrats washed?
A year ago, the hottest idea in Democratic circles was “abundance” — a growth-friendly agenda with centrist appeal that would help the party prove it was capable of shoving aside special interests and governing again.
Fast-forward a year. Today, in primary after primary, the far left is on the march. Last week’s victories for socialist candidates against the establishment in New York’s Democratic primaries sent centrists into alarm and despair.
What happened? In a vacuum, leftist primary wins in deep-blue urban districts might not mean much — and traditional establishment figures keep winning many primaries elsewhere. But New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other high-profile socialists have been enormously successful at winning attention and steering the public discourse — and there are still more opportunities, including Tuesday’s primaries in Colorado, for the left to build on their momentum.
More importantly, the results seemed to confirm a shift that has happened gradually over the past year — that energy, excitement, and attention have moved away from centrist ideas about how to reform the Democratic Party, and gone instead to the left. Around the country, insurgent candidates have found a repeatable formula of issues, endorsers, and small-donor networks that moderates have yet to consistently match.
“I would say Matt Yglesias’s Substack is the only place where 10,000 centrist Democrats are paying dues every month,” Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist group WelcomePAC, told me, referring to the blogger who has urged the party to moderate. By contrast, Kerr pointed to what he saw as the left’s superior organization, which has enabled it to contact, persuade, and turn out voters in major races.
This isn’t how it all looked just a year ago, when many center and center-left Democrats had united around abundance as an optimistic, attention-grabbing vision for the party’s future.
The idea — inspired by the bestselling book by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — was that by cutting through red tape, being less beholden to interest groups, and helping unleash the private sector, Democrats could actually make voters’ lives better, delivering abundant housing, clean energy, and new infrastructure. (Both Klein and Yglesias are Vox co-founders, and departed this publication in 2020.)
“Abundance” moved beyond the book to become a factional rallying cry for many Democratic commentators, advocates, and operatives who were dissatisfied with their party’s establishment, but skeptical of far-left solutions. They faced criticism from the left’s economic populists, who argued they were not focused enough on taking on wealth and corporate power.
A spirited public debate ensued, and by June of last year, a three-way battle for the Democratic future was underway: the left versus the establishment versus those on the center-left who had flocked to Abundance.
Now, that has collapsed to a two-sided contest: the left versus the establishment. Ideas from Abundance have been adopted by figures on both of those sides — including Mamdani and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. But public attention and debate has shifted to other issues — such as Israel-Gaza — and the centrists have been left unmoored, without a clear cause to mobilize around.
So how did it happen?
How a burgeoning Democratic debate over cultural issues became one about Abundance instead
In the immediate aftermath of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2024, Democrats engaged in vigorous hand-wringing and finger-pointing about what went wrong.
One critique that quickly gained steam was that Harris, and the party generally, had gone too far left — that on issues like immigration and trans rights, Democrats had become too beholden to the progressive advocate nonprofits known colloquially as “the groups,” had lost touch with the median voter, and needed to change course. Yet no wrenching fight about whether the party should moderate ended up happening, as a largely unstated consensus soon emerged that Democrats should quietly back away from some “peak woke” positions while shifting attention to other issues.
The factional fight that did break out turned out to be over Abundance, released in March 2025. The book was a sunny manifesto about how Democrats needed to learn to get big, positive things done again — and a critique of the Biden administration and blue-state Democrats for failing to do that.
Because part of Klein and Thompson’s critique involved “the groups,” who they said often impeded action; and because Abundance viewed economic growth as a goal and did not see business as the enemy; various funders, nonprofits, and advocates coalesced around it. It became essentially the moderates’ cause célèbre, discussed at conferences and in many podcasts.
Economic populists on the left criticized Abundance harshly, calling it a stalking horse for a billionaire agenda. But many leading Democrats embraced the ideas — former President Barack Obama praised “the quote-unquote abundance agenda,” and Newsom signed some related housing reforms into law last summer.
Even Mamdani — fresh off his rise from obscurity to real contention for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City — said he liked it.
“One of the most compelling things that I think abundance has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about,” Mamdani told Thompson last June. (“Mamdani was deft,” the socialist commentator Nathan J. Robinson wrote afterward. “He co-opted the centrist phrase ‘abundance’ and used it to refer to his affordability agenda.”)
Why centrist Democrats have struggled in the past year
The book Abundance was a sales success and drove elite Democratic discourse (both for it and against it) for months. But the centrists who coalesced around Abundance haven’t yet been able to take the next step and make a real contest for the future of the party.
Klein and Thompson are journalists, not factional political leaders. They never claimed to be offering a message that could best win elections or mobilize the public around them — instead, they were offering a manifesto for governing, and trying to persuade Democratic elites to follow their advice.
Because their prescriptions were largely practical policy ideas, they could also be taken up by leaders from any ideological camp, which made it harder for allied centrists to use “abundance” as shorthand to differentiate between groups of candidates. Left-aligned members of Congress like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) were enthusiastic early backers as well as centrists like Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA). Similarly, grassroots state and local “YIMBY” groups that favored Abundance-oriented ideas found themselves considering DSA and centrist candidates alike.
The upshot was that as the calendar moved into primary season, there was no wave of centrist primary challengers who could shake up the establishment, delivering “wins” for the movement and minting new charismatic stars akin to Mamdani. (Not that they necessarily could have pulled that off — the closest likeness to an “Abundance-coded” candidate in a major race was San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who ran for governor of California and finished with 3.5 percent in the primary.)
“Our organization has been focused 100 percent on districts that Trump won. We’ve been entirely about expanding the map,” Kerr of WelcomePAC said. “I think it’s fair to go back and say, is that the way to build a stronger and more enduring Democratic Party?”
Part of the problem was that, on Democratic primary voters’ main topic of interest — how to stop what they saw as Trump’s outrageous and authoritarian actions — cautious centrists seemed to have less to offer.
In an environment where the Democratic base was increasingly horrified about Trump’s aggressive deployments of ICE in US cities, which led to the killings of two US citizens in Minneapolis, debates over what Democrats had been doing wrong felt less relevant and less morally urgent.
Opposition to Israel also proved to be an intensely motivating primary issue — but here, awkwardly for the centrists, it’s the left who seem more in touch with the party’s increasingly anti-Israel voters. And compared to “abundance” issues, voters and activists were able to use Israel debates to sort themselves into clearer establishment and anti-establishment factions: Candidates who were especially early and strident critics of Israel tended to be further left and far removed from party leadership; opponents backed by pro-Israel super PACs tended to be more moderate.
The result is that there’s a real contest going on to shape the party’s future, between the left and the establishment — but reformist centrists have, for now, dropped from contention.
As for Abundance: as a policy agenda, its ideas continue to be quite relevant. Housing remains a major issue, both in Congress and especially in state and local politics. The need for abundant energy has only grown more intense, with AI sucking up gigawatts. The next Democratic president could well refer to the abundance playbook.
But as an organizing project for centrist attempts to remake the party politically from within — it hasn’t done the trick.
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