The abundance agenda sounds like a political winner, but it isn’t

Democratic intellectuals, scrambling ahead of the 2026 midterms to curate an economic message that can stabilize the party’s weakening hold on middle-class voters and energize its drifting racial minority base, are increasingly hitching their wagon to what is known as “the abundance agenda.”

This centrist ideology calls for steep deregulation to increase the supply of societal goods and spur economic development, and serves as a stark rebuke to the scarcity agenda characteristic of populism on both the left and the right. But, for all practical purposes, abundance and scarcity are just two sides of the same coin — particularly when it comes to my area of research: economic inequality.  

The wealth gaps between rich and low-income people and between white and Black individuals in places like the Bay Area, where I live, are both deep and persistent. Abundance theory argues that these gaps are eminently fixable, although it’s fairly agnostic to income and racial disparities on the whole, aware that they exist but largely unbothered about their genesis, nature or why they persist.

Regulation is the very thing that reduces, or at least stabilizes, inequality. And while regulations can no doubt be onerous — see California’s star-crossed effort to develop high-speed rail in the state — people largely understand that they aren’t put in place to stymie progress. Rather, they are used to protect civic interests, big and small.

People further understand that deregulation, though often a net benefit for society, is frequently most beneficial to developers and their corporate interests. In addition, a common consequence of deregulation is a deeper concentration of social and environmental hazards in low-income and racial minority communities. 

Abundance theory indeed carries much of the small-government, “trickle down” logic that defined Reaganomics. It also accelerated deindustrialization throughout the U.S. and steepened white flight and commercial disinvestment in minority communities. Unsurprisingly, polling shows deep racial fissures around the idea of regulation: 70 percent of Asians, 69 percent of Black people and 62 percent of Hispanics believe government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest, compared to just 53 percent of whites.

Given the vast disparities in economic development that exist between white and non-white communities, it would seem that the communities most poised to benefit from the abundance agenda’s development bonanza would be people in racial minority communities. But looks can be deceiving. Deregulation is what allowed Silicon Valley to quickly morph from an agricultural pass-through in the 1970s to a modern tech mecca — an evolution that, in turn, has contributed heavily to statewide gentrification and exorbitant housing and energy costs, sparking an ongoing exodus of residents, many of them Black, from the state.  

The abundance agenda has also flopped in other Democratic strongholds. Consider Detroit, the majority Black city where I researched health disparities in the early 2010s. During this time, Detroit was experiencing a transformative development boom, due in no small part to the Herculean efforts of Mayor Mike Duggan (D), the Motor City’s first white leader since the 1970s.  

Under Duggan, wielding deregulation as a primary tool, thousands of homes were built in Detroit, public transit options were substantially expanded, and hundreds of commercial properties were developed from scratch or renovated — all in little over a decade. Still, population growth in Detroit has been virtually nonexistent. Poverty remains essentially endemic, and homelessness rates are consistently high.  

Thrice-elected, Duggan is currently running for governor of Michigan as an independent, describing the two-party system as “toxic.” His political pivot appears to be at least some indication that abundance politics aren’t altogether marketable to those they are presumably poised to buoy. In a May 2025 poll from Demand Progress, 55.6 percent of Democratic voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate making a populist argument (about corporate greed, corruption, etc.), whereas only 43.5 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who made an abundance argument. 

At a time when Democrats are desperate to claw back and unite their multiracial coalitions, something newly elected NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory shows a tentative blueprint for, the abundance movement is regrettably tone deaf and monolithic. Its primary evangelists are New York Times’ commentator Ezra Klein, writer Derek Thompson, and a handful of liberal white politicians, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy. 

Unironically, the abundance agenda adopts a Trumpian ethos that separates thorny discussions about class from thorny discussions about development. This is politically expedient but not aligned with how our economy works. People aren’t just angry about the exorbitant cost of living and unchecked corporate hegemony, but about the social values (or lack thereof) that cause these things.  

In short, the abundance mindset is a luxury that people actively in the throes of scarcity cannot, literally or figuratively, afford. 

Jerel Ezell, Ph.D., MPH, is executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cultural Humility, and assistant professor at the University of Chicago in infectious diseases and global health.