Are moderate Democrats washed?

They hoped “Abundance” could be the party’s new vision. It hasn’t worked out.

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.

Why urban Democrats love socialists now

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........

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