Sure, voters want affordable homes, dependable healthcare and economic security. But California shows why spending and regulation cannot substitute for growth, abundance and competent government.
According to LZ Granderson of the Los Angeles Times, “Voters want what the Democrats’ left wing offers.”
Except they aren’t getting it.
Voters may indeed want much of what the Democratic Party’s left wing is selling. Of course voters want affordable homes, dependable healthcare, higher wages, safer neighborhoods and a working government.
The more important question is whether the left can deliver those things — or whether it can only promise them.
That distinction is becoming harder to avoid. Democratic socialists are very good at identifying pain. They understand that a family paying half its income in rent does not want another lecture about incrementalism. A young adult who cannot afford a starter home does not want to hear that the economy is healthy on paper. The left’s diagnosis — ordinary Americans are being squeezed — is often correct.
But diagnosis is not the same as treatment.
California offers a warning. It is home to some of the most productive companies and inventive people in human history, yet its governing model has helped make ordinary life extraordinarily expensive.
California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office reports that a mid-tier home costs about $775,000 — more than twice the national figure — and that only about 23% of California households are likely to qualify for the mortgage needed to buy one. Even a bottom-tier California home is more expensive than a typical mid-tier home elsewhere in the country.
That is not an example of capitalism failing. California’s enormous wealth was created by capitalism: entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, filmmakers, farmers and businesses building products people voluntarily chose to buy.
The housing shortage is better understood as a failure to let capitalism work. California’s own analysts identify inadequate construction and local resistance to development as principal causes of the shortage. Restrictive zoning, lengthy permitting, environmental litigation and local veto points constrained supply while demand kept rising.
The result is the central contradiction of modern progressivism: politicians promise affordability while making it harder and more expensive to produce the things people need.
Housing is the clearest example, but the principle extends much further. Government can subsidize rent, but it cannot subsidize its way out of a housing shortage forever. It can promise free healthcare, free college, universal childcare and expanded benefits, but every promise must eventually be paid for through taxes, borrowing or inflation. Renaming a cost does not eliminate it.
Capitalism produces wealth. Socialism spends it.
That does not mean capitalism requires no rules, no safety net and no public investment. Competitive capitalism depends on honest courts, enforceable contracts, sound money, infrastructure and laws preventing fraud, monopoly and political favoritism.
But redistribution can only redistribute what a productive economy has already created. A society that punishes investment, restricts construction and treats profit as morally suspect will eventually discover that there is less prosperity available to divide.
Even Bill Maher — a longtime liberal hardly confused with the religious right — recently told Vice President JD Vance that his vote was “in play” if Democrats continue moving toward hostility to capitalism, permissiveness toward crime and extremism on Israel. Maher said he had generally concluded that the Democratic candidate was better in previous elections, but he was no longer willing to make that assumption.
His warning reflects a broader danger for Democrats: voters may dislike Republican excesses while still deciding that the progressive alternative looks economically reckless, culturally hostile or incapable of governing.
Which is why the polling does not yet show a midterm Republican wave. Democrats still lead the national generic ballot. But Nate Silver’s average shows that their advantage has slipped from 7.1 points in early June to 6.1 points, with several recent surveys placing the lead between two and five points. That is modest movement, not a revolution — but Republicans are not collapsing despite the normal headwinds facing a president’s party during a midterm election.
The left’s habitual answer is that government simply has not spent enough. More subsidies, public programs and higher taxes will finally solve the problems created by previous rounds of intervention.
Voters have reason to be skeptical.
The real test of a political movement is not whether it can describe suffering or promise relief. It is whether its policies produce more homes, businesses, energy, jobs and upward mobility.
Americans want abundance. They want to earn more and have their money buy more. They want a realistic chance to own property, raise children and build wealth.
The party that delivers that future will win. The party that merely promises to redistribute an ever-shrinking supply of prosperity will eventually run out of both money and suckers.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)