California Democrats look for a path forward for their party

As Democrats soul-search for a new message to meet the current Trump era, many lawmakers are pointing to the ideas at the center of “Abundance,” the much-hyped book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, as at least a partial solution to the party’s woes.

“This is one of the most important books Democrats can read — wake up!” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said on his podcast during an episode with Klein. Newsom said he sent copies of the book to Democratic leadership in the California Legislature.

California Democrats like Newsom and Rep. Ro Khanna have endorsed the book as an accurate depiction of some of the most important issues affecting their party. Mainly, that a convoluted regulatory environment in reliably Democratic states like New York or California makes it impossible to build new infrastructure on time and under budget. In the book, Klein and Thompson argue the lack of timely and tangible results from Democratic administrations is part of the political blowback the party is facing.

“We have to have outcome-based policies. The biggest goal in California being that we need to get rid of the restricted zoning that has stopped housing from being built,” Khanna told NOTUS.

“Abundance,” Khanna said, might be part of the answer to Trump’s populism, and that if Democrats were to learn one lesson from the book, it’s that “execution matters.”

“I think it’s part of the message: We are a party that’s gonna rebuild America,” Khanna said.

While the congressional Democratic caucus may be full of “Abundance”-heads, swaths of the progressive left have panned the book’s ideas for being too niche at best — given the many issues Democrats are facing — and “Koch-funded “at worst. They have argued that putting zoning and permitting reforms above the interests of core Democratic constituency groups like environmentalists and labor unions only divides the party further.

California lawmakers like Khanna and Rep. Scott Peters are well aware of those criticisms.

“It’s one perspective and it’s an important one, but it’s not a silver bullet,” Khanna said of the ideas in “Abundance.”

“I’m not sure that the party’s mindset has changed,” Peters told NOTUS. Bringing along other parts of the Democratic coalition like environmental and labor groups, Peters says, will be a challenge.

But Peters also sees where overlap exists: The legal protections and public review process set up in the 20th century to protect the environment are often the same processes working against the rapid development of green energy infrastructure “Abundance” calls for.

“In climate then, it used to be our defense in environmental laws just to stop bad things from happening,” Peters said. “Now with climate change, we have to build a lot; offshore wind, solar, direct carbon capture, and we have to do it fast. So there’s a climate case for it now and there wasn’t maybe 10 or 20 years ago.”

Some groups like the Center for Biological Diversity told NOTUS they are concerned that Democrats adopting some of the ideas in the book would be a step backward for environmental conservation.

Others like the Sunrise Movement and the Environmental Defense Fund said permitting reform and expediting the process of building green energy infrastructure are necessary steps Democratic states and future administrations must take if the U.S. wants to meet decarbonization goals.

“We have a legacy in the environmental community of being really good at saying no to new infrastructure. In the past, new infrastructure development was viewed as at odds with the environmental goals, but that calculus has changed,” Nicholas Glover at the Environmental Defense Fund told NOTUS.

Peters and other California lawmakers have been working for a long time trying to get their colleagues on board with permitting reform and hope the attention the book has received helps create a coalition of pro-development, pro-abundance members in Congress committed to streamlining red tape.

“One of the great accomplishments we made as Democrats with President Biden was getting all that money in the bank for infrastructure and for energy and broadband. Unfortunately we didn’t clear the process, so a lot of it’s still not done,” Peters said.

For other Democrats like Rep. Ami Bera, the idea of permitting reform that allows the U.S. to meet the energy demands posed by artificial intelligence and climate change might be a new doorway for bipartisan negotiations.

“If we want to build more housing,” Bera told NOTUS, “we should produce a regulatory environment allowing more to get built out of a more affordable price point — and those are things that sometimes Democrats will get in the way.”

There must be a way, California progressives argue, to reconcile the need for outcome-oriented policies with core Democratic values, even if it means some reform in blue states.

“The reality is that housing gets caught up in a lot of bureaucratic quagmire,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove told NOTUS.

“I certainly believe in both…You can build affordable housing with union labor.” Kamlager-Dove said. “If we have the capacity to send people to the moon then we should have the capacity to build affordable housing that’s environmentally sustainable and affordable.”

Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San José Spotlight.