Elizabeth Warren’s Abundant Mistakes
The Democratic Party has two competing plans to “pick up the broken pieces from the 2024 election,” claimed Elizabeth Warren, in a widely touted speech she delivered Monday at the National Press Club. “One vision says that we should shape our agenda and temper our rhetoric to flatter any fabulously rich person looking for a political party that will entrench their own economic interests,” she argued. The other vision—hers, as you might guess—is noble and pure.
Warren’s account of the party’s internal divide is nonsensical demagoguery. Almost nobody in the Democratic Party—perhaps literally nobody—believes it should design its message to flatter selfish billionaires.
But the existence of an internal schism is quite real. And the fact that Warren, who has long styled herself as an intellectual and political leader of the party’s progressive faction, must resort to grotesque mischaracterization of her opponents within the Democratic Party is an indication of how poorly the argument has gone for her side over the past year and a half.
The actual claim moderates tend to make about why their party lost in 2024 is that Kamala Harris was unable to credibly separate herself from the toxic social-policy stances she adopted during her 2020 campaign—the highest-profile being her promise to support taxpayer-financed gender-reassignment surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants. She also did too little to distance herself from the Biden administration’s unpopular governing record.
Many progressives reject that analysis, especially the first part, which implies that the party needs to abandon unpopular positions. They argue that the social views held by a majority of the electorate are (as one progressive strategist put it) “unacceptable.” Rather than compromise with the holders of those unacceptable beliefs, Democrats can simply focus public attention on the evils of the billionaire class, a message thought to be powerful enough to overcome the political drag created by any nonnegotiable social-policy stances.
Warren’s speech articulates this strategy—though it might be more accurate to say that it carries out this strategy by ignoring or mischaracterizing the views of her internal Democratic Party critics and instead depicting them as puppets of the wealthy.
In her speech, Warren repeatedly argued that the moderate analysis of Democrats’ shortcomings is that they lost because they offended rich people and therefore failed to raise enough money. She decried “the temptation—in this moment of national crisis—to sand down our edges to avoid offending anyone, especially the rich and powerful who might finance our candidates.” She insisted, “A Democratic Party that worries more about offending big donors than delivering for working people is a party that is doomed to fail.”
[Jonathan Chait: Democrats still have no idea what went wrong]
Revealingly, Warren did not cite any Democrat who holds this supposedly influential belief. Through insinuation, however, she tried to associate it with advocates of the abundance agenda. “Reid Hoffman is sending everyone he knows a copy of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book on abundance and backing pro-abundance candidates,” she warned. “Running on small, vague ideas that may also raise costs for families—instead of on full-throated, economic populist ideas—is a terrible plan for winning elections.”
In fact, the abundance agenda is neither small nor vague, nor a plan for winning elections. It is not a political strategy but a set of policy arguments that have caught the attention of liberal intellectuals. The agenda, in short, argues that cities should permit more housing to be built, that the government should make building public infrastructure easier, and that the government has been too bound up by procedures and regulations that prevent swift action.
The abundance agenda is designed to make it easier for government to carry out the energetic work that progressives desire, which has inspired an earnest debate over its wonky particulars. Yet it has drawn withering fire from the left, perhaps because it points the finger at progressives themselves for tying up government in knots. In particular, it blames left-leaning interest groups for upholding well-intentioned rules that make governing costly and slow and that freeze the built environment in place. Progressives such as Warren believe in maintaining a firm alliance with the very groups that the abundance agenda blames.
The abundance agenda intersects with the political arguments moderates have made, because both the abundance proponents and the moderates decry the excessive influence of the groups. Many people who believe Democrats should move to the center also embrace the abundance agenda as a set of governing priorities. Despite their somewhat common set of targets, however, abundance proponents and moderates are not the same thing.
The biggest reason some progressives detest the abundance agenda seems to be that they, like Warren, genuinely adhere to the populist analysis of American politics, which takes it as axiomatic that every problem is caused by nefarious wealthy interests.
At one point in her speech, for instance, Warren claimed that Donald Trump “is trying to push out the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and complete his corrupt takeover of America’s central bank—so that it serves his interests, along with his billionaire friends’.” Is it true that Trump’s billionaire friends would benefit from undermining central-bank independence? The billionaires don’t seem especially excited about this aspect of Trump’s power grab. An alternate explanation for Trump’s behavior is that, rather than carrying out a clever plan to enrich his allies, he doesn’t understand monetary policy very well. To the populist monomaniac, however, there are no dumb ideas, only plots.
The abundance agenda, by contrast, is premised on the belief that at least some problems do stem from misconceived ideas, including the left-wing variety. The abundance proponents do not defend the role of the wealthy, nor do they imply that Democrats should steer clear of taxing the rich and regulating harmful business practices. (Most of the prominent advocates of the abundance agenda, including Klein and Thompson, favor such steps.) They simply call attention to the existence of some problems that are not entirely the fault of billionaires.
[Elaine Godfrey: What happened to Elizabeth Warren?]
If you are unable to imagine any economic problem that is not the product of billionaire greed, then you naturally assume that anybody who sees the world differently is a tool of the rich. Yet the Democratic Party is completely unified on the merits of raising taxes on the rich and spending more on benefits for the poor and middle class. Its true divide concerns Warren’s fixation with wealthy interests as the source of all evils, and whether this political style offers the party a path to the majority.
We have three broad ways to measure the political appeal of Warren’s message. First, she has run for Senate three times. She has won those races. But because she is a Democrat in Massachusetts, one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic states in America, winning alone tells us little about her appeal. The election-data-analytics firm Split Ticket found that in 2018 and 2024, Warren ran 9.4 points and 10.8 points below the vote share that a generic Democrat would have attained—making her one of the party’s poorest performers each cycle. The database in that measurement does not include 2012, the year Warren first ran for Senate, but in that race she ran seven points behind Barack Obama in her state, even though Obama was facing Mitt Romney, the state’s well-regarded former governor, at the top of the ticket.
Second, Warren ran for president in 2020 and performed miserably. Lots of candidates ran in that cycle and failed to break through. Warren attracted huge amounts of donor support; the media covered her like a front-runner. Her problem was that the voters simply didn’t choose her. She finished third in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada, and fifth in South Carolina before dropping out after losing her home state. Her high-profile defeat did not inspire any obvious recriminations. Warren’s campaign memoir expresses bewilderment that her successful courting of progressive activists did not translate into votes among Black and Latino primary voters, without questioning whether those activists represented large numbers of real voters as opposed to just the progressive donors who funded their work.
Third, and most revealingly, despite crashing and burning in the primary, Warren built enough prestige among Democratic Party elites to gain deep influence over both the staffing and the policy agenda of its ultimate victor. As the nominee and as president, Joe Biden adopted many of Warren’s campaign proposals, co-authored an op-ed with her, and frequently solicited her advice. “President Joe Biden is enlisting a small army of her former aides and allies to run his government,” reported Politico in 2021.
How did Warren’s speech process the humbling fact that her policy blueprint was implemented, and Americans rejected it at the ballot box? Mostly by ignoring the entire four years.
The moderates have blamed Harris for failing to separate herself from Biden—most infamously, when she told The View that she couldn’t think of a single policy on which she differed from him. In the speech, Warren’s only specific criticism of Harris’s relationship to Biden came when she attacked her for failing to pledge to keep Lina Khan, a Warren favorite, as head of the Federal Trade Commission. (Warren, of course, blames this decision on billionaires.)
[Jonathan Chait: The coming Democratic civil war]
Warren’s speech also insisted that “we can’t rebuild trust by excommunicating Biden-administration law enforcers who, for the first time in decades, actually fought to hold corporations accountable for driving up prices.”
Excommunication in general is a rather stringent penalty that ought to be employed only for serious offenses, and ideally by a church. Still, it is revealing that Warren’s only takeaway from the Biden administration is that the Democrats should bind themselves to keeping his staff in place indefinitely.
Warren blithely credited the Biden aides with holding corporations “accountable for driving up prices.” But did this actually prevent inflation? Or did it at least make the public give Biden credit for fighting inflation? The answer to both is no. Yet this is the blueprint she demands the party follow into the future.
In the airtight world of populist logic, no evidence for Warren’s beliefs is necessary. Blaming corporations for any given problem is self-evidently correct, and failing to embrace this logic can be explained only by corruption. Warren has put Democrats on notice that if they resist her moral certitude, she will question their integrity. The lesson they should draw from her speech is that, if they want to build a majority more durable than Biden’s, questioning Warren’s dogma is a necessity.