In the months since Kamala Harris’s defeat, Democrats have debated the party’s political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don’t provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws.

In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism.

Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers’ power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and “populist” ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed.

A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter.

The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that ‬America’s “big problem is ‘bottlenecks’ that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy‬ production, or build new roads and bridges.” The candidate goes on to note, “Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of‬‭ well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but‬‭ these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow‬ things down.”

It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that “The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our‬ government.”

By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat.

This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress’s mission is to “fight corporate power” and “break up monopolies.” It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey’s wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its “abundance” message (signaling that the candidate would give people less “voice” and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey’s hypothetical populist promised to fight “well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,” their message might have fared less well.

This said, I think it’s almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically........

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