Big-Ass Truck Abundance

The economic course-correction that can win swing states

I was at WelcomeFest a couple of weeks ago, and my role was to moderate a panel featuring rural Blue Dogs who overperformed the national fundamentals by enough to win in districts that Donald Trump carried.

And I’ve been annoyed that the leftist hater community has since dubbed the event “Abundance Coachella,” because I think this massively overstates the actual role that abundance ideas are playing in the larger push for a big tent Democratic Party.

The main disconnect here is that if you read the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson book, it is very much geared toward addressing the governance pathologies of the most progressive places in America, and to talking about how progressive omnicause thinking undermines progressive goals. These are good topics for a book, but I think Ezra and Derek would agree that they are not necessarily the top issues for winning an election in Iowa, because Iowa is obviously not one of the most progressive places in America. But the specifics of the book have a lot of juice among heterodoxy-inclined donors and writers, because they (we) tend to live in California and the Northeast and are very exposed to these problems.

The main project of WelcomeFest, which is complementary but different, is to get people to pay more attention to the politicians who win the toughest races.

Lakshya Jain did a great presentation about his WAR metric of candidate quality, which is relevant to the abundance debate mostly in the negative. He shows that fourteen House and Senate races in 2024 were decided by differential candidate quality, of which Republicans won only two. One of those victories was the Pennsylvania Senate race, where Bob Casey did more than any other frontline Democrat to make opposition to greedflation and price gouging the core of his campaign message. He hit the stump with Elizabeth Warren and scored headlines like “Bob Casey’s Inflation Plan Has Become a National Talking Point.” His Shrinkflation Prevention Act was hailed in The American Prospect.

It didn’t work.

He underperformed and lost his seat. Warren herself put up one of¹ the worst performances of anyone in the Senate. I’m not going to claim this as proof that abundance wins, but I do think it underscores that left-populism is invested in a bogus politics of evasion that does not work.

And beyond that, while I don’t think that talking about zoning reform and high-speed rail is the route to the hearts of persuadable voters in Iowa, I do think there is a version of the abundance agenda that’s useful for electoral work — just probably not as good at selling books.

Let’s call it Big-Ass Truck Abundance.

An abundance agenda for normies

The name comes from Ruben Gallego’s remarks to Lulu Garcia-Navarro about the importance of articulating an aspirational agenda of material prosperity as part of Democrats’ pitch to working class people:

It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream.

This is, pretty literally, abundance. It’s about economic growth. In a good progressive way, it’s not indifferent to questions of distribution — it’s a pitch aimed at people in the bottom half of the earnings distribution. But it’s not about inequality as such, it’s about raising absolute living standards. It’s not about environmental goals, and it’s definitely not about process or proceduralism. But it’s an abundance agenda every bit as much as a take about the need to make it easier to build rural broadband or high-speed rail.

The difference, and what makes it more politically relevant, is that Gallego’s phrasing centers something — “a big-ass truck” — that has a kind of right-wing cultural valence.