The three-way battle for the Democratic Party

A three-sided debate has broken out over the Democratic Party’s future.

On one side is the party establishment, damaged by the disappointing end to the Biden era but seeking to rebrand itself with a new agenda it hopes will better appeal to voters.

Two main factions have emerged to challenge that establishment, from opposite directions. And they both have some recent news to be happy about.

The first is the Abundance faction. This faction argues that the Democratic Party has become overly focused on pleasing progressive interest groups and nowhere near focused enough on building things like housing, infrastructure, and clean energy. Abundance won a major victory two weeks ago, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed new laws loosening restrictions on homebuilding in cities.

The second faction is the left, reinvigorated by Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Charismatic, savvy with new media, and armed with sweeping leftist policy proposals — rent freezes, free buses and child care, city-owned grocery stores — Mamdani instantly became the left’s new standard-bearer.

Both these factions — each composed of commentators, advocates, operatives, online influencers, and some actual politicians — argue that the Democratic establishment has too often failed to deliver to voters what they actually want. Both want to present voters a much more inspiring vision of the future, and there are some areas of overlap in their proposals — but in practice, many in the two factions have been at odds, presenting rival visions and having heated public arguments.

Meanwhile, the current party establishment isn’t planning on going anywhere. A group of prominent Democrats are putting together a Project 2029 policy agenda full of ideas they’d want the next Democratic president to implement. This project is still in its early stages, but since top Biden White House aides and longtime figures in the nonprofit world are involved, it appears to be the establishment’s attempt to suss out where the party should go.

What electoral strategies should Democrats adopt? How should they actually govern? And who should have status and influence within the Democratic Party? All of these questions are freely intermixed in this debate — and they won’t really be settled until at least 2028. But the debate is on.

Democratic elites’ debate over the party’s future has, to a surprising degree, been centered on Abundance, a book written by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

The book summed up a critique Klein (a Vox co-founder and my former colleague) and Thompson had been making for years. They argued that Democratic governance had become dysfunctional and unable to deliver — that it had become so hobbled by bureaucratic processes, legal restrictions, and the demands of progressive interest groups that it was hard to get anything built.

Klein and Thompson called for a new focus on actually delivering abundant housing, clean energy, new infrastructure, and scientific breakthroughs. But what made their critique bite was that they argued Democrats themselves had been a big part of the problem — that the party needed to be more open to cutting regulatory red tape and less deferential to progressive groups.

Abundance became a surprise best-seller, and the term came to mean more than just the book; it became a sort of banner under which center-left commentators, advocates, and operatives dissatisfied with the Democratic establishment have rallied. In particular, Abundance-world overlaps with a skeptical eye toward “the groups”: the progressive nonprofits that have helped push the Democratic Party leftward in recent years.

The book also was met with fierce pushback from many on the left, who argued that the Abundance agenda was too tech- and corporate-friendly — that it isn’t focused enough on fighting concentrated economic power and that it’s too quick to paint progressive groups as the bad guys when they’re, in fact, crucial coalitional allies.

But some longtime members of the party’s establishment sound like they’re being won over. Barack Obama praised what he called the “quote-unquote abundance agenda” at a fundraiser last week, saying, “You want to deliver for people and make their lives better? You got to figure out how to do it.”

Most interesting of all was the conversion of Newsom. Klein has been criticizing California’s dysfunctional governance and failure to get anything built for years, including to Newsom’s face on the governor’s podcast this year.

Those critiques seem to have hit home, as Newsom threw his political capital into getting two new housing reform bills passed over the protests of environmental and labor groups — and succeeded. The bills reined in California’s environmental impact law, which Abundancers blamed for making housing extremely difficult to build in the state. It was the biggest policy win for the Abundance faction yet — but, as they know well, the next challenge is actually getting all this new housing built.

The other challenge to the Democratic establishment is coming from the left — which, after a period of disillusionment, has finally found a candidate to get excited about again: Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s defeat of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary last month thrilled the left. He was a fresh face that went up against and defeated an establishment figure that’s viewed as corrupt. But more to the point, he pulled it off while standing behind a sweeping left agenda — making bold promises of new free benefits and services, rather than just telling people better things aren’t possible.

The team-up of Mamdani and another candidate, city comptroller Brad Lander, against Cuomo was also noteworthy. While Mamdani is relatively new to politics and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who inspires a following, Lander is a wonky progressive who has deep experience with the mechanics of city government.

The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote that the two represent the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wings of the party, respectively, and that, unlike Sanders and Warren in 2020, they managed to unite against the establishment and win.

Furthermore, though Mamdani did not make foreign policy central to his campaign messaging, he did stand strong on the cause that has most animated activists on the left recently: condemning Israel’s war in Gaza. He said, for instance, that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to New York City while he was mayor, he’d have him arrested, because of an International Criminal Court warrant. During the primary, he also refused to condemn activists’ use of the phrase “globalize the intifada” — though he said this week that he’d “discourage” the phrase.

Mamdani’s critics argue that his “free stuff” proposals may not be practical, given budgetary realities and legal constraints, and if he wins the general election, he’ll inevitably face a host of governing challenges. For now, though, he’s made the left feel hope again — and put forward a model for a winning race they hope can be used elsewhere.

Amid these challenges, leading figures in the Democratic firmament have come together to try and chart the way forward for the party in what they’re calling Project 2029.

The name mirrors the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 initiative, a conservative policy wish list. Organized by Andrei Cherny, a former Democratic aide and state party leader, the group plans to put together an agenda for the party’s next presidential candidate to adopt and roll it out in Cherny’s publication, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Project 2029’s advisory board includes Biden’s top foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his top domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden (currently president of the Center for American Progress). It also includes other prominent figures in the nonprofit world, like Anne-Marie Slaughter (president of the New America think tank); Felicia Wong (former president of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute); and Jim Kessler (founder of Third Way, a centrist nonprofit).

In other words, it’s a big tent of the leading center-left and progressive thinkers and operatives who’ve influenced the Democratic Party over the past decade (and, in some cases, longer).

A similar debate took place after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, as the party grappled with how to respond to both his win and the unexpected challenge from Sanders. The consensus that emerged was that the party needed to move left, on both economic policy and social issues.

“Democrats should not blush too much, or pay too much heed, when political commentators arch their eyebrows about the party moving left,” Sullivan wrote in Democracy in 2018. “The center of gravity itself is moving, and this is a good thing.”

Now, the political winds have changed, and progressives have been on the defensive, so it remains to be seen if Democratic elites will come to the same conclusion or push in the other direction — toward moderation.

It’s also unclear whether Project 2029 will amount to a genuinely new agenda or whether it will be more akin to an attempted rebranding of the party for better electoral marketing. But it does appear to be, at heart, a consensus-building exercise aimed at uniting the party’s existing factions around a plan for the future.

So there’s one challenge from the center-left Abundance faction, another challenge from the left, and then there’s the existing establishment in between trying to chart its own course. This is just the start of this debate, which will take years to play out. But it’s the debate that will help determine whether Democrats can win in 2028 — and what they will do if they regain power.