The 2024 presidential election threw the Democratic Party into disarray with no clear consensus on an alternative to Donald Trump’s blitz of executive actions to secure the border, shrink the government and reshore American manufacturing.
But some party elites are now coalescing behind a pro-growth message familiar to the Beehive State.
To counter a scarcity mindset on both sides of the aisle, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson have proposed an abundance agenda with a new book targeting the obstacle of overregulation in Democratic strongholds.
Take for example California’s high-speed rail. The project is a decade overdue, $100 billion over budget and still undergoing regulatory review because of burdensome bureaucratic requirements.
Or consider the Biden administration’s $42.5 billion rural broadband initiative. Not a single house has been connected to the internet because of a 14-step approval process demanding climate plans, union favoritism and separate low-cost options.
“That’s a classic example of progressive processes and procedures getting in the way of progressive outcomes,” Thompson said in an interview with the Deseret News.
A focus on picky government processes has created an affordability crisis of epic proportions in recent decades, Thompson said. But the solution laid out in “Abundance” isn’t to expand demand with government subsidies, following an old Democratic playbook — or to decrease demand with closed borders, cut programs and canceled trade agreements, as some Republicans might advocate — it’s to increase supply by streamlining government processes and promoting a “YIMBY” culture of “yes in my backyard.”
As liberals scramble to articulate a substitute to Trump’s populist regime change, “Abundance” proposes a simple thesis: The answer to voter frustration isn’t pointing fingers, it’s producing more of the material outcomes that make America great.
“‘Abundance’ is inherently a positive-sum vision,” Thompson said. “We totally reject (a) scarcity-for-scarcity vision.”
At its heart, “Abundance” calls for a shift in attitude away from simple redistribution and toward seismic innovation. And, according to Thompson, the book’s call to action could take a page or two from Utah’s example of pioneer positivity.
Does Utah have an abundance mindset?
A 2023 Harvard study, often cited by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, found that the state is a clear outlier in terms of having the least amount of “zero-sum thinking,” or the belief that one group’s gains must come at another’s expense.
Of the 20,400 survey respondents, Utah residents were the least likely to agree with statements asking whether the success of a certain ethnicity, immigrant community, international trade partner or income class necessarily hurts another group.
Zero-sum thinking was shared evenly among members of both major political parties. Democrats tended to be more zero-sum about economic inequality. Republicans tended to be more zero-sum about immigration. Young people also tended to be more zero-sum than older generations. This trend was bucked by Utah, the youngest state in the nation.
Over the past few years, Utah has been ranked as the best state in the country, the best place to start a business, the best place for upward social mobility and the state with the strongest middle class, all while taking the title of the fastest growing state in the nation from 2010 to 2020.
In November, Cox told community leaders at the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce Growth and Prosperity Summit that the secret to Utah’s success is a “non-zero-sum mindset” that avoids false choices between growth and quality of life.
“Cox does a really lovely job of marrying the material arguments for abundance with a deep understanding of what life is about in the first place,” Thompson said.
Just as there is a “scarcity faction” on the left and the right, with the former favoring “de-growth” environmental activism and the latter lobbying for protectionist policies, there is also a bipartisan “abundance faction,” Thompson said, that can become a source of unity for lawmakers across the country who are more interested in improving outcomes than scoring political points.
While “abundance Republicans” and “abundance Democrats” hold different end goals, they tout a similar trust in the power of good process to unleash human ingenuity, Thompson said. With his book representing the rallying cry for pro-growth liberals, Thompson said that Utah’s governor could very well characterize the conservative counterpart.
“There are Republicans, like Cox, who see very clearly that the path toward prosperity, not just material prosperity, but human well-being, requires an obsession with the basic building blocks of material wealth, and that starts with housing,” Thompson said.
Cox has framed his second term around the motto of “Built Here,” based on his promise to spur the construction of 35,000 new starter homes by the time he leaves office in 2029 and his objective to double power production over the next decade as the state goes big on artificial intelligence, nuclear reactors and transportation technology ahead of the 2034 Winter Olympics.
During his state of the state address in January, Cox highlighted these goals but emphasized that they could fall out of reach unless Utahns keep exercising faith in the belief that they can make the desert blossom despite limited resources.
“We are at a fork in the road,” Cox said. “We can either press forward with our pioneer spirit, our grit, our industry and our faith, and build the next great chapter of Utah’s story — or we can be washed away in the negative, nationwide malaise of dysfunction.“
Utah’s housing scarcity crisis
Utah is at risk of losing its abundance future if the state’s rapid growth runs into too much resistance toward change, according to Steve Waldrip, Cox’s senior adviser on housing affordability.
Despite being political opposites, California — which hasn’t elected a statewide Republican since 2006 — and Utah — which hasn’t elected a statewide Democrat since 1996 — have seen their housing costs become the second and eighth least affordable in the country.
In Utah, the homeownership rate has historically been around 70%, Waldrip said. But now only around 7%-8% of non-homeowners can afford to buy a median-priced home. In over 60% of the state, median home prices are more than five times greater than the median income. And a recent poll found that a third of Utahns have considered moving out of state because of expensive housing.
The problem is on track to worsen, even with the unprecedented steps being taken by the state Legislature to encourage affordable home development. Population growth is currently outpacing construction by around 6,000 units a year in Utah. If this trend continues, last year’s shortage of 37,000 homes could grow to 45,000 homes over the course of 2025.
Only so much can be done at the state level, according to Waldrip, because it is ultimately up to cities and counties to decide whether to allow new developments on smaller plots of land. So what’s getting in the way?
“Honestly, it’s fear,” Waldrip said. “The biggest impediment we have really is this fear narrative that creeps into our local politics and drives a lot of the decisions that are made at that local level because the perception that there’s a risk of loss if any change happens.”
This fear comes from the “false choice” that cities can either grow larger or keep current residents happy, Waldrip said. But this stands in stark contrast to the Utah “ethos” beginning at the time Brigham Young led pioneers into the valley in 1847, according to Waldrip.
That generation thought it was their duty to sacrifice to make the state more habitable for their children and grandchildren — and even Utahns in 2025, Waldrip said. This kind of “long view” is needed now more than ever, Waldrip said, because at the end of the day an abundance agenda is really a pro-family agenda as unaffordable housing pushes younger families to move away.
Can Utah be the blueprint for ‘Abundance’?
Devin Zander, age 25, and his wife are currently renting in Sugar House and hope to buy a home near Salt Lake City. But there are almost no new homes available on the market, and the ones that are for sale are extremely expensive.
“The barrier of entry is so high,” Zander said.
A report from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Institute found that the median home price in Salt Lake County is $530,000. This means that to buy a home a household needs an income of at least $153,000.
Zander has started his own real estate development firm in the hopes of increasing the number of high-density townhomes in his area but he continually hits barriers at the city level, he said.
While Utah has shown it is very capable of fast-tracking large scale infrastructure projects, like the FrontRunner and new highways, Zander said municipalities often push back against state pressures to permit high density developments, forcing families like his to leave town, and leading to the closure of empty elementary schools.
Zander referenced Texas as a model — also highlighted in “Abundance” — as a place with little local zoning limitations and, as a consequence, little trouble with affordable housing.
But one organization has bet its future on Utah’s continued reputation as the place where government can be small, capable and supportive of private sector innovation.
The Utah-based Abundance Institute launched its operations almost a year ago with the goal of preventing lawmakers in Salt Lake and Washington, D.C., from squandering opportunities around artificial intelligence and alternative energy sources.
Chris Koopman, the group’s CEO is a nationally recognized legal scholar on regulation and innovation who moved his family to Utah in 2018 precisely because of “Utah’s focus on abundance.”
“Utah has really been a blueprint for what an abundance agenda looks like in practice,” Koopman said. “If you were to ask someone, ‘Go, find a place where you could nail and scale some of the most innovative ideas around technology and government, it would be Utah.”
Despite the depressing housing market, Utah has led the nation on innovative AI policy, funding a “regulatory sandbox” to propose targeted AI regulations instead of pursuing blanket rules that could hinder the industry.
Under Cox’s “Operation Gigawatt,” the state — which consistently ranks No. 1 for energy affordability — has also spearheaded attempts to develop new nuclear energy technologies with $8.5 million for nuclear site preparation, the creation of a new nuclear commission and the signing of a tristate energy compact with Idaho and Wyoming.
The Abundance Institute hopes to continue this momentum with public education campaigns, expert policy briefs and an events partnership with the University of Utah.
As the politics of division push more and more Americans to view policymaking as an arena to fight over their stagnant piece of the pie, Koopman wants Utah to remain a place where smart growth can be seen as a positive-sum win for everyone.
“We have let fear and misunderstanding drive so many of our public policies,” Koopman said. “And so from our perspective, we want to flip that narrative from pessimism to optimism.”
