Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed. This audio essay is adapted from my forthcoming book, “Abundance,” which I wrote with Derek Thompson. You can preorder it here. And learn more about our book tour here. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What challenges are Democrats facing in retaining population in blue states?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Democrats have a problem that runs deeper than the 2024 election. They have a problem that runs deeper than Elon Musk's assault on the government. Look at the places they govern. Strongholds like New York and Illinois and where I'm from, California. They're losing people. In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents.
In New York, 179,000. Why are all these people leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this. The cost of living is too high. It's too expensive to buy a house. It's too expensive to get childcare. You have to live too far from your work. And so they're going to places where all of that is cheaper. Texas, Florida, Arizona. I know these families. These families are my friends.
I've lived with them in these places, and I've watched many of them move away from the place they love, the city they wanted to raise their children, because they could not afford to live there. You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern or places working families cannot afford to live.
You are not the party of working families when the places you govern or places working families cannot afford to live. In the American political system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024, they'll lose about 11 House seats and Electoral College votes.
The states that Trump won would gain them. So in that electoral college, a Democrat could win every single state Harris won in 2024 and also win Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still lose the presidency. There is a policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. It's too hard to build homes.
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Chapter 2: Why are housing and infrastructure challenges critical in blue states?
It's too hard to build clean energy. It's too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn't technical. We know how to build apartment complexes. We know how to lay down solar panels and transmission lines. We know how to build trains. The problem is the rules and the laws and the political cultures that govern construction in many blue states.
The Second Avenue subway project in New York City, it was the most expensive subway project by kilometer the world has ever seen. Has New York dramatically reformed its policies to make the next one easier and cheaper? No, of course it hasn't. Did the decades of delay and the billions of cost overruns on Boston's Big Dig change how Massachusetts builds? Not really. California.
California is the worst housing problem in the country. In 2022, the state had 12% of the country's population. It had 30% of the country's homeless population, and it had 50%, 5-0, of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this unfathomable failure led to California building more homes than it was building a decade ago? No, it hasn't.
Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn't work and a right that wants to destroy government even when it does work. What we need is a political party that makes government work. Democrats could be that party. They should be that party. But it requires them to first confront what they have done to make government fail.
Chapter 3: What is the history and current status of California's high-speed rail project?
I could tell you a dozen stories. In the book I've just written, I do. But let me here tell you just one. In 1982, so more than 40 years ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would take to build a high-speed rail system across the state. He liked what he saw, and so did California's voters.
In 1996, California formed a high-speed rail authority to plan for construction. High-speed rail is not some futuristic technology like nuclear fusion or flying cars. Japan broke ground on high-speed rail back in 1959. You can ride on these trains elsewhere. I have ridden on these trains.
In 2008, California's voters approved Prop 1A, which set aside $10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. It would run through the Central Valley. It would get there in under two hours and 40 minutes. And it would cost, they thought, $33.6 billion.
California's high-speed rail authority estimated we'd be able to ride that train by the year 2020. And the news kept getting better for high-speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. That had hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure of the future. And high-speed rail in particular had captured Obama's imagination.
Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport. And across the terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.
Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America. Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It's been happening for decades. The problem is it's been happening elsewhere, not here.
Obama wanted it to happen here. In California, where the voters had already begun planning and funding high-speed rail, was the obvious place. And the political stars had just kept aligning. In 2008, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a high-speed rail critic, was governor.
But in 2011, high-speed rail's foremost champion returned when Jerry Brown won back the governor's mansion almost 30 years after he first left it. In his 2012 State of the State address, Brown marked high-speed rail as his signature infrastructure project.
If you believe that California will continue to grow as I do, and that millions more people will be living in our state, this is a wise investment. As governor the last time, I signed legislation to study the concept. Now, 30 years later, within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out.
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Chapter 4: How have political decisions impacted California's infrastructure projects?
But it didn't happen. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be rideable by 2020. And the cost estimate, it wasn't $33 billion anymore. It had risen and risen and risen. By 2018, it was $76 billion. The next year, 2019, Gavin Newsom, who had served as Brown's lieutenant governor, succeeded him as governor.
Let's level about the high-speed rail.
And in his first state of the state address, he said what everybody already knew, which was at high speed around California was failing.
Let's be real. The current project as planned would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were.
Today, California is trying to salvage something, anything from what has become a fiasco. It's now trying to build a line between the agricultural centers of Merced and Bakersfield. It's a line no one would have authorized if it had been the plan presented in the first place. The latest estimate is that line alone
will cost $35 billion to complete, as much as the entire LA to SF line was estimated to cost in 2008. And this Merced to Bakersfield line, it won't begin carrying passengers until sometime between 2030 and 2033. I'm told now that finishing the LA to San Francisco line will cost $110 billion at least. California doesn't have anywhere near that kind of funding for high-speed rail.
So they're building this line with no idea how they will ever finish it. What went so wrong here? In October of 2023, I went to Fresno, California, and I toured the miles of rail infrastructure that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has already built. What I heard as I walked that track with the engineers who have built it and the people overseeing it, it wasn't engineering problems.
It was political problems. I stood on a patch of the 99 freeway that had been moved in order to clear the Hope for Trains path. Not far from there, there had been a mini storage facility. In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land, and it gives you some money, and it takes it from you.
In reality, it took the High Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession and two and a half years of legal wrangling to get that little tiny spit of land. In this story, it repeated itself again and again and again everywhere we went. There are parts of the high-speed rail line that intersect with freight rail lines.
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