Democrats Should Swap Out “Bidenomics” for an Abundance Agenda

“Finish the Job” ain’t gonna cut it.

My Liberal Patriot partner-in-crime, John Halpin, scrutinized the Biden campaign website in search of his second-term agenda, should he manage to vanquish Trump again. He found:

The official website of the Biden for President campaign is a complete mystery. It’s basically a half-hearted request for money with a promise to “Finish the Job.”

Finish the job?? Does this make much sense when voters think the job you’ve been doing is so bad? Both the RCP and 538 running averages have Biden’s job approval below 40 percent. In the most recent New York Times/Siena national poll, a thumping 79 percent of voters rate the nation’s economy as only fair or poor vs. just 21 percent who say they are good or excellent. Moreover, voters in the poll give Biden an abysmal 35 percent approval rating on handling the economy, compared to the impressive 64 percent approval rating voters give Trump’s handling of the economy when he was president. Just 25 percent are willing to characterize the years when Biden has been in office as mostly good ones. Note that these views are all substantially more negative (and more positive relative to Trump) among working-class (noncollege) voters.

In a just-released CBS News poll, only 23 percent say their overall financial situation has gotten better in the last few years. Asked how the policies of the presidential candidates might affect them financially, a mere 16 percent think Biden’s policies would make them better off in a second term, compared to 48 percent who expect those policies to make them worse off. In contrast, 42 percent expect that Trump’s policies in a second term would make them financially better off, compared to 31 percent who think they’d be worse off.

Finish the job indeed. Of course, “Bidenomics,” which famously crashed and burned as a campaign theme, was no better and probably worse. But what is “finish the job” but Bidenomics without the name or mentioning Biden at all? Seems unlikely to work. Perhaps voters are looking for something different as an approach to the economy and direction for the country.

I have previously written about an “abundance agenda” as precisely that different approach that is needed. As I noted:

Abundance means just what you think it means: more stuff, more growth, more opportunity, being able to easily afford life’s necessities with a lot left over. In short, nicer, genuinely comfortable lives for all.

But you can’t get there from here; our system, as currently structured, simply doesn’t permit it. Voters sense this and are correspondingly frustrated. In the most recent New York Times/Siena battleground poll, almost 70 percent think our system needs major changes or to be torn down entirely. But over 70 percent believe Biden would make only minor changes or change nothing at all if he is re-elected. “Finish the job” would not appear to speak to this.

Instead, what is needed is an actual attempt to change the way our system works that could plausibly put us on the path to abundance. As explained in an excellent new essay from the Niskanen Center by Steven Teles and Rob Saldin (part of a package of essays discussing the abundance approach on Niskanen’s new Substack):

Abundance has [a] quite sweeping package of reform that envisions a wholesale program of state-building—building housing, clean energy, and infrastructure by reforming our creaky, captured systems of governance at all levels, and building a simpler, more effective and democratically legitimate welfare and regulatory state. Like the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century, the supporters of abundance seek to simultaneously dismantle an exhausted, maladapted, and frequently corrupt state structure with one built for the problems of today….

Connecting all of these areas of public policy is a conviction that we need to focus more on supply rather than adopting an exclusive emphasis on distribution. Rather than reflexively calling for “deregulation” in a way that invites backlash, it calls for unleashing both the private sector and government, to targeted ends. These are the combined agendas of “abundance” and “state capacity,” which converge on the conclusion that the scale and speed of building that is needed to address our challenges requires dramatic changes in our systems of governance that reduce veto points, increase the authority and competence of government, and make it possible to produce public value at much lower unit costs and with greater speed. This agenda also cuts across traditional ideological lines because it combines a desire to expand the scope of public action with a skeptical view of existing interest groups and producer interests in government…

Students of public opinion such as Ruy Teixeira and Patrick Ruffini have observed that a broad, multiracial group of working-class voters have grown increasingly misaligned with the legacy interests of both parties. They are skeptical of progressive social positions, especially on social order questions like crime and immigration. But they also are uncomfortable with economic globalization, supportive of social insurance, and longing for economic opportunity to be available beyond superstar coastal cities. They are skeptical of professionals and public sector unions, but they also need police, schools, universities, and infrastructure that work—they lack the resources that the wealthier can use to get around public sector dysfunction. The Romney-to-Biden voter—suburban, middle-class, and professional—may have durably realigned to the Democrats. But the multiracial working class—Obama-to-Trump voters—may not realign at all. They may simply remain as the floating voters in a more dynamic electoral politics....

A focus on addressing the cost of living by driving down the underlying cost of goods like housing, transportation, and energy is attractive to [these] voters who are economically pinched but skeptical of redistribution. Such voters will also be attracted by the idea that the work of government is important but that actually getting it done requires a willingness to pick fights with public sector producer interests like unions and social service professionals (which they assume, with reason, control the Democratic Party).

One could sum all this up by saying: “It’s too damn hard to build stuff” in this country. Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear Biden say this instead of, well, finish the job. It would be a broader version of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s spectacularly successful “fix the damn roads” slogan from her first election campaign in 2018.

Of course, I’m not holding my breath on this. It’s hard to envision Biden, creature of the Democratic establishment that he is, intent on intra-party unity at all costs, saying anything that would imply the need to confront the shibboleths of his own party. But it would be nice if he did.

Over the longer-term, I do think Democrats will have to overcome their resistance to such a course to be successful. And as they do this, Democrats will have to remember this: working-class voters do not share Democratic elites’ zeal for restructuring the economy around “green” industries and a clean energy transition based around wind, solar and electric vehicles which has underpinned much of Bidenomics and presumably much of what is now meant by “finish the job.” Working-class voters, precisely the voters who have been slipping away from the party, are much more pragmatic and will judge any strategy not by its greenness but by its concrete effects on their lives.

That is the way—the only way—Democrats can truly become the party of abundance American voters are looking for. Here is a vivid illustration of just how far away they are from being that. For 74 years Gallup has been asking a question about which party can do a better job “keeping the country prosperous” in the next several years. In the first part of this period, from 1951 to the election of Ronald Reagan, Democrats had a large and robust advantage on this measure, averaging a 17-point lead over the Republicans. But from the Reagan election on, that advantage has vanished. While there have been many ups and downs, Republicans have averaged a slight advantage (two points) on which party can keep the country prosperous. The last two readings, in fall of 2022 and fall of 2023, had Republicans preferred over the Democrats by 10 and 14 points points, respectively. And among working-class voters, the gap was vast in the last reading: 60 percent of these voters preferred the Republicans and just 33 percent the Democrats.

Democrats have a lot of work to do if they want to become America’s party of abundance. And they should wish to do so. That’s the job American voters want done and they don’t particularly care if some Democratic oxen get gored in the process.

It’s just too damn hard to build stuff! And that’s all there is to it.