Abundance politics may not win over conservative Christian voters [View all]

Abundance politics may not win over conservative Christian voters
A new study finds conservative voters value religious identity over economic policy

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published July 5, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Last year, in the wake of the Trumpian seizure of power and Elon Musk’s vandalizing government agencies, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson sparked a brief tizzy among the chattering classes with their book “Abundance Liberalism.” The Democratic establishment was in a funk over losing the 2024 election, and the book seemed to offer a panacea for winning over the fickle American voter.

The idea was that Democrats should drop their phobias about environmental degradation, urban sprawl, interstate highway construction and other quality-of-life considerations, and instead engineer the economy to crank out more stuff for the masses — housing, green energy jobs, infrastructure. All they have to do is defang regulations contained in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, zoning restrictions and other examples of Luddite do-gooderism. Grateful voters would flock to the Democratic Party, and right-wing extremism would lose its steam.

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There is another, more important reason why “Abundance Liberalism,” at least as the authors conceive it, is unlikely to work: The groups it hopes to convert don’t want it.

The evidence for this startling conclusion comes from the most significant opinion study you’ve never read or read about. Published in May, the Johns Hopkins Agora Institute and ReD Associates conducted an in-depth research of conservatives in three red counties in Michigan, South Carolina and Wyoming. The authors describe the content of “Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy” as follows:



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Let that sink in. It’s what many of us expected, but it’s still surprising to see it in print, given the almost phobic avoidance by major media, academia and think tanks of any discussion of whether Americans actually believe in the nation’s unofficial civic religion of democracy. It may also explain why ordinary, non-elite conservatives are untroubled by Donald Trump’s assertions that he would be “dictator on day one” or that he intended to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. On the contrary, that’s what they want. .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/07/05/abundance-politics-may-not-win-over-conservative-christian-voters/