“Affordability” belongs to the left

PBS Wisconsin’s Here & Now recently interviewed all the candidates in the Governor race. The summary highlights that every Democratic Party candidate talked about “affordability, affordability, affordability”. It appears the Democrats have learned a new buzzword! They are all constantly invoking “affordability,” presumably to tap left-populist enthusiasm. 

The question for 2026 primary voters is: which of them really means it? 

On a national level, Zohran Mamdani ran an “affordability-obsessed” campaign that won an upset victory against the Democratic Party establishment. Since then, centrist pundits, party leaders, and opinion columnists have been working overtime to modify and erode the meaning of that word, even as Democratic politicians embrace it. The fight over the definition of “affordability” has become a big part of the national fight over the future of the Democratic Party. 

The most egregious example of affordability word-play comes from David Lionhardt from the New York Times, who recently went on the Slate Political Gabfest and tried to reframe “affordability” as an aspect of “abundance” (around 34 minutes). Abundance is the current obsession of Ezra Klein and his followers. It is also pretty unpopular. It’s no surprise Lionhardt would try to conflate it with something that actually excites Democratic voters.

Affordability vS abundance

In reality, “affordability” and “abundance” are very different and, in many ways, opposing ideas. Affordability was popularized by Mamdani’s democratic socialist platform with the argument that the government can intervene as an equalizing force in the economy. The fast free buses, the rent freeze, the government run grocery stores, no cost childcare: all Mamdani’s plans involve using government action to assure people’s basic needs are met regardless of their ability to pay, to protect regular people from exploitation, and to give them public alternatives to the “free” market’s meager offerings. 

The abundance doctrine argues the opposite. Its supporters claim governmental regulation prohibits and discourages profitable investments, that profitable investments create growth, and growth eventually benefits everyone. If this sounds familiar, if it sounds like a rebrand of an old theory and rhetorical strategy that has been thoroughly debunked and is widely reviled these days, that’s because it is. Abundance is just Republican “trickle-down economics,” repackaged by centrist Democrats in their ideological vacuity and tone-deaf self-absorption.  

Have centrists really hitched their strategy to this old, clearly bad, Republican idea? Maybe, or maybe they’re just grifting. Last September, Mia Wong at It Could Happen Here reported that the funders and promoters of the abundance movement are shot through with tech billionaires and the same end times fascists who fund MAGA and want to hunt us with robots. Perhaps Ezra Klein and his neoliberal strategist friends aren’t so braindead that they think trickle-down economics 2.0 is good strategy, perhaps they’re doing it for ridiculous speaker fees, or to earn favor with the future tech-fascist overlords. Either way, Democratic candidates (and voters) should stay far the fuck away from Klein, his friends, and their terrible ideas. In Wisconsin, many are not. 

Wisconsin’s Governor Candidates

PBS Wisconsin’s introductory interviews with all seven candidates are each less than 5 minutes, a quick watch for easy comparison. Every candidate describes the problem of affordability, some in greater detail than others. They all say it’s a reason they’re running, but few actually say what they will do about it, and only one articulates straightforward Mamdani-style policies of government intervention to protect Wisconsinites against the ravages of capitalism. 

Let’s look closer at their interviews in context of their activities. 

Sara Rodriguez focused her affordability talk on healthcare, which she called a “complicated space” where she has expertise as an “executive within a health care system”. But Rodriguez held the position of vice president at three different insurance and healthcare organizations, including Advocate Aurora, who was later sued for driving up costs. Rodriguez’s expertise is not in providing affordable healthcare, but in operating the very system that makes healthcare unaffordable! Meanwhile, her primary political experience is serving as Lt Governor, helping the Evers administration collaborate with fascist Republicans. 

Joel Brennan describes rising costs and the frustration and anger they provoke, saying that his “main issue is affordability”. Then, when asked about fundraising, he says he is “going to lean into the relationships that [he’s] developed and cultivated over the course of the last 30 years.” Those relationships come from his time at Discovery World, in the Evers administration, and as president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee. They are relationships with wealthy donors from institutional and elite power networks, the very people who created,  maintain, and profit from an “abundance” economy that screws over working people. 

Missy Hughes is even tighter with those elites, as former head of the Wisconsin Economic Development Council. She said the “money factor in politics is really interesting and I have an incredible network”. She also says economic woes are “all because of Trump”. Has she forgotten that the economy was hurting people long before Trump came into office? She’s got it backwards; in reality, it is Democratic neoliberal economic policies–of which Hughes is emblematic–that contributed to the rise of Trump’s right populism in the first place. 

David Crowley says he’s motivated to run by “the affordability crisis, specifically” and that as County Executive he has “built solutions from the ground up” and “balanced billion dollar budgets”. He even celebrates “bringing stakeholders, government, business leaders to pass Act 12, which allowed for more money…to go to every local municipality… so they can invest in things that matter for them.” In reality, Act 12 imposed a regressive sales tax on the people of Milwaukee County and dictated that we must spend the money how state Republicans want. After Act 12, Crowley quickly put Milwaukee back into a deficit by dumping most of the money into budget increases for the sheriff’s office and raises for county workers. The mismatch between Crowley’s pitch and his practices is astounding. 

Mandela Barnes self-contradicts even more aggressively, talking about how he’s going to raise “an obscene amount of money”. He talks up fundraising without dark money or “corporate PACs”. In reality, Barnes already took $250,000 from genocide freaks at AIPAC. Even worse, after losing to Ron Johnson, an unhinged, unpopular, criminal, goofball, Barnes founded a PAC of his own, which spent far more of its money paying itself than on actually supporting other candidates. Barnes spoke of “the work [he] put in” in a way that suggests he’s running because he believes, as we’ve described before, that Wisconsin owes him another shot. 

Kelda Roys, at least, acknowledges that capitalists are the problem, and government’s role is not in helping them, but in reigning them back, saying “we need a governor who is willing to stand up to the bullies and billionaires and fight to protect Wisconsinites from their harms.” She also dismissed fundraising questions by saying there will be “money… raised by the Democratic Party and national partners for whomever our nominee is,” shifting the conversation away from Wisconsin’s pathological obsession with fundraising. 

Francesca Hong’s answer to a question on her defining “lane” is direct, and Mamdani-like: “Fully funding public education, universal child care, and expanding BadgerCare for all.” When she invokes affordability, she immediately connects it to “naming the billionaires and the culprits” and says, “the state is responsible for presenting and delivering solutions to help people live a life of dignity”. When asked about fundraising, rather than pulling on her connections to the wealthy, Hong says hers is a “people powered grassroots campaign [with] thousands of donors…[and] so many volunteers and folks across the state who are committed to being a part of our movement.” 

Defend Affordability, Reject Fakers

Stripping affordability from criticism of capitalism and inequality is how centrists will try and steal fire from left populists, and flatten the clear differences between candidates. In the process, they render political discourse meaningless, and lead us toward weak, shallow, uninspiring primary victories and general elections where Democrats lose to or only narrowly defeat the most detestable, absurd, unlikeable, authoritarian shitheads. 

We need to stop that from happening again. For Wisconsin Democrats to win a trifecta and put this state on track to care, true affordability, and community defense against apocalyptic fascists. To do so requires left populists maintain ownership of the concept of affordability. We have to define it clearly, pursue it vigilantly, and expose those who water down or pervert it, stopping them from turning this momentum into another loss.