The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) may be the most powerful source of state capacity across the 50 states, employing over 1,400 people and overseeing the electricity, natural gas, water, telecommunications, and transportation of the world’s fourth-largest economy. The CPUC has used its power to deliver novel services for California: developing the country’s most ambitious renewable energy portfolio standards in 2002 and fueling a boom in rooftop solar; modeling comprehensive data privacy protections that allow Californians to reap the benefits of bold technological innovation without sacrificing their own security; and unlocking major advancements in battery storage to help California transition to a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2045.

But the CPUC is also one of the primary reasons California struggles to build and innovate. Too often, the CPUC has been at the center of California’s most vexing policy challenges—and responsible, in part, for some of the state’s most cataclysmic policy failures. For example, last year, the CPUC rejected a proposal that would have made preexisting community microgrids financially viable, instead opting for a centralized, utility-controlled alternative that critics warn will delay progress and create additional regulatory red tape. Or consider that the CPUC, responsible for overseeing efforts to prevent utility-related wildfires, imposes an excruciatingly long approval process for new transmission lines—even while, over the last decade, those power lines have ignited at least six of California’s 20 largest wildfires. As critics have noted, the CPUC approved Southern California Edison’s high-wind event plans, which failed catastrophically: The company’s equipment appears likely to have caused the Hurst and Eaton fires that burned thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area in January. And, as the state’s high-speed rail safety regulator, the CPUC is part of a smorgasbord of state regulators who collectively have spent many billions of dollars to deliver zero usable miles of high-speed rail over two decades.

The CPUC embodies both the promise of creative state capacity and the paralysis of regulatory excess and malaise. And that’s to say nothing of the California Coastal Commission, the California Air Resources Board, the California Energy Commission, the California Department of Water Resources, the California State Water Resources Control Board, and the state’s many other regulatory agencies. All told, California, once a beacon of the future, has become a growing tangle of red tape, too often serving as a cautionary tale of what happens when government prioritizes process over outcomes.

State regulation may not be the most enthralling topic, but it has recently received increasing attention. Proponents of the political economy of “abundance”—most notably, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in a book published in March by the same name—have seized on state capacity in general and California’s regulatory frameworks in particular as things desperately in need of reform. Abundance advocates like Klein, Thompson, Marc Dunkelman, Yoni Appelbaum, and Jennifer Pahlka are obsessed with developing what Klein has dubbed a “liberalism that builds,” which will require a range of regulatory reforms. Abundance also requires a full reimagining of public and private investment in things like housing, clean energy development, and modernized transportation networks—areas where current market and regulatory structures result in an undersupply of critical infrastructure that makes blue states more expensive and less livable.

We believe that abundance thinking provides an essential contribution to understanding how blue states can develop policy agendas and political approaches to navigate the Trump era and beyond. But abundance alone is insufficient. In this essay, we argue that abundance must be paired with another critical strategy to properly reorient the latent power of blue states toward the challenges that face them. That strategy is counteraggression.

Blue states are not failing just because of self-harm. They are failing because red states—and now, again, the Trump Administration—purposefully interfere in their economies and policymaking in ways that make blue states much harder to govern and life worse for the people who live there. We can’t wish that aggression away—not in this moment of political wilderness, nor even in a hypothetical future when Democrats regain some share of power in Washington. Blue states need to develop and deploy a set of policies and practices that are responsive to and help deter this aggression, now and for decades to come. For Democrats to do that, and to put the Trump Administration on its back foot, they’ll need to draw from the playbook used by red states in the Biden years and consider counteraggression table stakes. More on that in a moment.

The Blue-State Bind

Abundance is, in part, a playbook for California and other blue states to recapture a vision for the future—and to build a politics and reformed regulatory apparatus to deliver on what they promise. Klein and Thompson argue that we know what is needed to deliver a “cleaner, healthier, and richer” world, but we’ve simply chosen not to build it. They write that we’ve chosen scarcity instead, and we are living under a thicket of laws that are “meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions [but] have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.”

The program advanced by abundance advocates is especially pertinent to the states and localities where Democrats have control of both the executive and legislative functions. At the state level, that’s the 15 states where Democrats have “trifecta control” of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. (Throughout this essay, we define “blue states” as those trifecta control states rather than states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, because our focus is on understanding where Democratic governing power resides and what can be done with it, rather than interpreting a snapshot of voting behavior.)

Those 15 states are home to nearly 124 million Americans and 40 percent of the nation’s GDP (a combined economy that is notably larger than that of the 23 red trifectas). Blue states are also the places most hampered by a crippling attachment to process that is undermining their ability to achieve the things they say they care about: providing housing to meet the needs of all, facilitating a green energy transition, and modernizing inadequate transportation systems.

This focus on blue-state governance positions abundance in contrast to other emergent political economy frameworks of the left and center-left from the last decade. Both the post-neoliberal, anti-concentration market power movement (personified by Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan) and the “Bidenomics” approach to industrial policy (exemplified by the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA] and the CHIPS and Science Act) were squarely focused on the instruments of federal policy and power. It’s understandable—and appropriate—that Democrats placed a lot of attention on national policy during the Biden years. After all, they controlled most of the branches of federal power during that time.

But even in those years, holding federal power was not sufficient to rapidly deliver economic transformation to states. Among the obstacles were legislative design and federal regulatory barriers. IRA-backed clean-energy projects have been delayed in many instances by painstakingly slow National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews. These kinds of barriers were so significant that, in 2024, President Biden signed a bill co-authored by GOP Senator Ted Cruz to exempt the semiconductor fabrication projects of the CHIPS and Science Act from NEPA review. And at the state level, environmental reviews, zoning laws, and land use restrictions—many of which were adopted with the admirable goal of protecting the environment—often stood in the way of rapid approval of grid-scale clean energy projects, especially in blue states. Meanwhile, red-state attorneys general pursued every opportunity to block IRA implementation through litigation.

Flash forward two years and we find the same red-state leaders who voted against the IRA gleefully claiming credit at ribbon-cutting ceremonies in their states. Indeed, red states dominated the industrial policy investment lottery, with 51 percent of IRA and CHIPS incentives going to states Trump won by more than 3 points in 2020, compared to just 20 percent to states Biden won that year. While some of that is due to red states having cheaper and more plentiful land with lower population densities, it’s also because of the design of the bill itself, which favored investment in geographies more likely to be represented by Republicans, as well as blue-state regulatory obstacles, which often deterred investment. In other words, policy decisions by Democrats undermined clean energy development in states and districts controlled by Democrats. The failure of blue states to come out as clear winners in Biden’s $1 trillion industrial policy program should serve as a blinking red light for blue-state leaders.

The results of the 2024 election suggest that voters are paying attention to Democrats’ leadership in blue states, even if many party elites are not. Relative to his 2020 electoral performance, Donald Trump made larger gains in blue states (5.6 points on average) than red states (4.1 points) or purple states (3.5 points). And four of the five states where Trump made the largest gains were navy blue: New York (10.5 points), New Jersey (10 points), California (9 points), and Massachusetts (8.2 points).

The Problems of Blue-State Governance

What accounts for this abysmal drop in Democratic performance in some of the most Democratic-leaning states? We see three main explanations:

1. Blue states have, at least in some policy areas, been poorly governed in recent years;
2. Blue states are losing the narrative war around governance in the court of public opinion, even in cases where blue-state policies are not really failing; and
3. Red states have successfully leveraged their collective power in unprecedented ways to interfere with and undermine Democrats’ ability to run blue states well.

We believe that each of these explanations alone is only part of the story, and that all three together contribute to the political crisis Democrats now find themselves in.

First, we largely agree with abundance advocates that Democrats can be their own worst enemies on issues like affordable housing and clean energy development. Restrictive zoning regularly makes it too cumbersome to attract investment to build denser multi-family housing, which contributes to the cost-of-living concerns and housing shortages that were top of mind for voters in 2024. Not only are Americans making their feelings on those conditions known in the voting booth, but there is evidence that they are also voting with their feet: Over the last five years alone, blue states have had a net relative population decline of 5,394,340 people compared to red states (looking at states where Democrats and Republicans currently have trifecta control). In California, which has seen two decades of net negative interstate migration, surveys suggest that the cost of living is the most-cited reason for leaving. On clean energy development, red states have far outpaced blue states in deploying wind, solar, and other projects. Of the five states with the highest capacity for wind energy, four voted for Trump: Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. A similar dynamic is true for solar.

Of course, some of this boils down to red-state fundamentals. For example, the big, wide open, sparsely populated windy plains states, which make better candidates for certain clean energy projects, are, for the most part, red states. But we see these differences even between states that are right next to each other and have largely similar geographies and weather patterns. As economics writer Noah Smith points out, a windy red state like Iowa generated almost double the renewable energy of neighboring, and similarly windy, Illinois in 2022; and last year, Texas outpaced sunny California on solar deployment. In the words of a former energy specialist in the Texas legislature, the reason may be that the Lone Star State—for all of its other policy failures—doesn’t have a “Mother, may I?”-style permission structure that would add time, uncertainty, and cost to project approvals. (Of course, there are many areas, like public health, where red-state residents pay the price for red-state governance—reflected particularly starkly in the large and growing life expectancy gaps between blue states and red states.)

Second, in addition to failing at governance in certain areas, blue-state Democrats are losing a battle of perceptions. An early 2024 poll of the entire country showed that more than twice as many people think California’s model of governance should be avoided by other states (39 percent) as think it should be copied (15 percent). Furthermore, 82 percent of Californians say the state is “too expensive,” with 88 percent of nonresidents agreeing. Nonresidents are generally pessimistic about the state:

• 55 percent believe California is unsafe.
• 52 percent believe California is too liberal and in decline.
• Only 39 percent believe California has a strong economy.
• Only 33 percent believe California is a good place to raise a family.

Even on issues where data suggests blue states are achieving better outcomes than red states, blue states often appear to be failing narratively. Take crime and disorder, for example. In recent years, Trump and Republicans, with a huge helping hand from right-wing media, have weaponized images of and public attitudes toward homeless people and undocumented migrants. This effort, along with a handful of high-profile killings—including fatal attacks on the New York City subway—has driven a perception that Democratic governance leads to more crime and violence. Meanwhile, actual crime trends have long told a different story. For decades, blue states have been safer, on average, than red states—and, if you look at murder rates, that gap has only grown in recent years. The murder rate in red states was 24 percent higher than in blue states between 2000 and 2021; in 2022, it was 33 percent higher.

A third, and too often overlooked, source of blue-state governing challenges lies in problems engineered by red-state Republicans. Take, for example, the efforts of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other red-state leaders, who began busing tens of thousands of undocumented migrants to blue-state cities like New York and Chicago in 2022. Texas alone sent more than 120,000 people out of state at a cost of more than $220 million to Texas taxpayers. These actions precipitated governing crises in Illinois and New York as state and local authorities scrambled to convert hotels and other facilities into shelters. The sudden arrival of migrants often placed local officials at odds with each other and with their governors, resulting in explosive divides within blue-state Democratic coalitions. Meanwhile, migrant busing was a political boon for blue-state Republicans, who leveraged the intense media coverage to make electoral gains.

This red-state campaign to interfere with blue states has not been limited to immigration alone: During the Biden years, red states leveraged their procurement and investment powers to target what they called “woke capitalism,” bullying companies out of pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. The campaign sought not just to change business practices within red states, but to drive a corporate retreat from stakeholder capitalism everywhere. It largely succeeded—and presaged the striking corporate acquiescence that has defined the opening months of the second Trump Administration.

If one of the threats blue states faced in 2022, 2023, and 2024 was an increasingly coordinated red-state aggression network, 2025 presents a whole new level of hostile interference. The Trump Administration is using power in novel and unprecedented ways to coerce blue states and undermine blue-state governance. The list of aggressive actions in just the first few months of the Administration is long: withholding wildfire disaster aid to coerce California into policy concessions; firing federal workers in a disproportionate manner (blue states including D.C. experienced more than 70 percent of the federal job cuts in February 2025, versus 22 percent of such layoffs landing in red states); re-engineering grant formulas for federal transportation projects to favor red states; and many more. There were gestures toward this targeted hostile policy design in Trump’s first term—for example, the 2017 Trump tax bill was overall very generous to wealthy taxpayers but penalized wealthier blue-state taxpayers by limiting state and local tax (SALT) deductions. These limits also deterred blue states from raising new revenue with progressive taxation because taxpayers would no longer be able to deduct much of those marginal state taxes from their federal taxes. There will no doubt be more where that came from in Trump’s second term, especially as tax negotiations heat up later this year. In fact, Republicans in Congress have now proposed extending the SALT deduction limits to corporate tax rates—a blatant effort to target businesses operating in blue states with higher overall tax bills. By any measure, the first five months of Trump 2.0 reflect a much larger and more ambitious offensive against blue-state governance than anything seen in Trump’s first term.

Abundance’s Necessary Partner: Counteraggression

Momentum around abundance hasn’t emerged in a vacuum; rather, it is manifesting at a particular moment where Democrats lack national power, and where the people who have that power instead are explicitly trying to use it to destroy Democrats and the places they govern. To meet the moment, and to survive and thrive, progressives need to conjoin a blue-state abundance framework with a strong counteraggression strategy.

To understand what’s required of blue states today, we should pay close attention to how Republican state actors operated when they were similarly out of power in Washington during the Biden years.

First, they emphasized collective action. For instance, Republican governors, attorneys general, and legislators were all prepared to act swiftly when Roe v. Wade fell. Beyond in-state bans, they quickly innovated new restrictions on abortion that included bounties and local travel restrictions, joint litigation to defend those policies, and maximal executive action to impose anti-abortion policies. They also used extraterritorial aggression to take the fights they wanted to have directly to blue states. From interstate abortion travel bans and collective litigation to the “anti-woke” corporate pressure bills and migrant busing operations, significant Republican initiatives have been explicitly designed to coerce activity beyond the border of the origin state and to disrupt the governability of Democratic-governed areas. Red-state leaders like Governor Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis engaged both in coordinated collective action and creative competition. (It often seemed as if Abbott and DeSantis were vying for the title of “most aggressive governor in America.”)

And while Abbott and DeSantis have somewhat faded from the national news as Trump and Elon Musk have shone under golden chandeliers, a symbiotic relationship continues to operate in the background. If Democrats have had an on-again-off-again relationship with federalism, Republicans treat it more as an all-of-the-above menu for wielding power. At the state level, Republicans are always building (and using) power. And unlike Democrats, they don’t give up on state power when they achieve federal dominance: They double down on it. Late last year, DeSantis joined every other Republican governor except one in a vow to “utilize every tool at [their] disposal—whether through state law enforcement or the National Guard” to support Trump’s “vital mission” to deport illegal immigrants, sparking fears of red-state invasions into blue states. Abbott went a step further, signing an agreement with the Trump Administration to grant the Texas National Guard arrest powers during Operation Lone Star, the state’s unprecedented campaign to use state forces to control parts of the border with Mexico. In return, Trump and Musk are at the ready to clap for Abbot’s efforts to push vouchers onto Texas schools and cheer DeSantis’s pre-inauguration call for a special session to ready state resources for the anticipated federal crackdown on immigration.

So, what would it look like for blue states to draw from that red-state playbook?

Such a strategy would have a variety of elements. Among them:

• Adopt a more combative, zero-sum approach to interstate economic competition with red states. As we’ve described above, blue states represent a disproportionately large share (relative to their population) of the nation’s economy. With the federal government dramatically cutting federal aid to states, blue states need to leverage their own market power and consider innovative policy reforms to replace federal funding streams and outcompete red states. Even if red states, which are generally poorer, are likely to face even greater hardships due to the loss of federal funding, blue states will need to engage in creative problem-solving to navigate serious budget disruptions like anticipated cuts to Medicaid—preferably without shifting costs to their own residents and thereby further increasing the costs of blue-state living. That could involve creative revenue measures like blue-state versions of severance taxes (excise taxes on the extraction of natural resources such as coal, oil, and gas, typically found in Western red states). By taxing extractors, severance taxes effectively socialize the costs to the entire marketplace for a given good. For states like North Dakota and Alaska, severance taxes can account for almost a third of annual revenue depending on the year. One could imagine similar taxes on blue-state products where markets are inelastic and substitution is challenging—e.g., Maine lobsters, California almonds (a notoriously high-water-use crop)—from which states could raise revenue to offset the fiscal crisis promised by a hostile federal government. And, even better, severance taxes would do so by imposing at least some percentage of their costs on people who don’t live in-state. Some blue-state policies already function this way: For example, legal marijuana sales in Illinois generate hundreds of millions in tax revenue, with nearly 20 percent of sales going to buyers from states like Iowa and Indiana who cross state lines to buy the product.
• Force red-state leaders to own the political costs of their governance failures. For example, in February, 22 Democratic attorneys general sought to block the Trump Administration from cutting billions of dollars in NIH medical research funding to universities and other research institutions. Instead of seeking a nationwide injunction, the Democratic AGs asked the court to block the funding cut-off only in their own states. As a result, for a brief period (before a separate suit on behalf of universities resulted in a nationwide injunction), only 22 states were protected from cuts to critical medical research while the other 28 (largely red) states remained subject to them. Exclusion from this relief could have meant red-state losses totaling more than $1.3 billion. And if red states actually had to bear such costs, we might see Republican lawmakers breaking rank to protest the Administration’s policies (as Alabama’s Republican Senator Katie Britt began to do on the NIH cuts). So, as the Trump Administration continues to cut off federal funds, blue-state AGs should stick to their guns in seeking blue state-only relief. If red states want protection, their attorneys general should join the suits or own the political costs of not doing so. This approach would allow blue-state AGs to reanimate the political bind that Medicaid expansion created for red-state leaders. There, a Supreme Court decision made billions of federal health care dollars contingent on states choosing to accept the money. In many cases, the resulting political accountability for state leaders who then chose not to take the funds propelled Medicaid expansion in red states, either in the legislature or by ballot initiative.
• Design policies that drive a race to the top and force red-state adaptation. Blue states can up the ante for all states by forcing competition with their neighbors. For instance, after Democrats gained trifecta control in Minnesota in 2022, they passed the North Star Promise program, which provides free college tuition for low- and moderate-income residents who attend Minnesota public and tribal colleges. Because there is intense competition for students between Minnesota and North Dakota, the program’s launch had the effect of forcing some state universities in Republican-led North Dakota to institute similar programs, lest they lose out on the best students from both states. Similar programs might work in other regional combinations—particularly where the promise of tuition breaks coincides with the option of attending college in a state with other attractive laws (for example, where abortion is safe and legal, or where recreational cannabis is legal). Blue states could also create loan or other incentive programs to attract out-of-state entrepreneurs, teachers, doctors, nurses, or other skilled workers to their states, perhaps particularly targeting migration to rural or other communities where skilled workers are in short supply. For example, New Mexico has erected billboards inviting Texas doctors to move to a state where they are free to practice medicine without political interference. If successful, these kinds of incentives might create pressure within red states to increase pay for critical positions or eliminate extreme restrictions on individuals who wish to practice their crafts. Finally, as we note above, cross-border marijuana sales already extract significant revenues from residents of neighboring states. States where sales are legal could ratchet up extraterritorial pressure by levying taxes on sales to out-of-state residents—buyers who might then pressure their own states to legalize sales in protest or, failing that, who will contribute even more revenue to already-permissive states’ coffers.
• Use carrots, but especially sticks, to push corporations and the wealthy to pay for state programs. Blue-state counteraggression should not be confused with defending the status quo or pink-hat resistance. Functionally and narratively, Democrats must be more than the defenders of elite institutions and bureaucracies. For example, in addition to cutting NIH funding, the Trump Administration is targeting universities with broader grant recissions, pressure campaigns, and threats to expand the modest endowment tax initiated under Trump’s 2017 tax law. Rather than reflexively defend universities in all instances, blue states should race to tax those endowments first. Some of the investment returns on the endowments of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford (the nation’s three wealthiest universities) should be taxed to fund public education and other state investments in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California. (Yale’s not going to pack up and move to Texas, after all.) Blue states should also learn from the red-state aggression directed at corporations during the Biden years. While red states continued to offer corporations carrots (such as tax incentives) to relocate, they also increasingly wielded sticks (like Texas pulling $8.5 billion in public school fund investments out of BlackRock to punish it for ESG investing, or Georgia threatening to strip Delta’s tax incentives as retaliation for the airline’s support for voting reforms, or Ron DeSantis’s multifront war on Disney). These campaigns against some of those states’ largest employers cast red-state leaders as anti-corporate populists and reoriented the targeted companies’ future political engagement. That state-level aggression set the stage for the corporate capitulation and acquiescence we’ve witnessed since November’s election.

Blue states should take a page out of that playbook too. For starters, they should cancel any contracts and bar the possibility of any future work with law firms like Skadden, Paul Weiss, and others that have capitulated to the Trump Administration. Those firms’ actions have raised questions about their capacity to vigorously represent any client, let alone a state whose interests may often be opposed to the current federal government. Blue states could also step up enforcement of consumer and other protections in the absence of federal action. For example, Elon Musk has been working to develop a payment system through X that he hopes could one day undergird half of the global financial system, even as he used his position at DOGE to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the principal federal regulatory agency that would have had oversight of such activities. Because no federal licensing process exists, X must obtain permission from all 50 states to operate a payment system; New York and eight other states have not yet granted X the licenses it needs. They should exercise their regulatory authority to ensure that consumers are protected—and use the process of reviewing X’s application as leverage to obtain policy concessions and commitments from X that are important to those states. It’s hard to imagine red states not operating this way if the shoe was on the other foot.

An Abundance and Counteraggression Synthesis

On one level, counteraggression is the bad cop to abundance’s good cop. If abundance is an optimistic, futurist vision of a program that can transcend scarcity, then counteraggression reflects an acknowledgement that blue America is in something like a long cold war with red-state leaders and a hostile federal government who are purposefully trying to destroy it. Ignoring that fact won’t make it go away. Blue-state leaders need to build on the coordination their attorneys general are already demonstrating to push back against Trump and build a blue bloc strong enough to overcome the obstacles they face. That means governors, attorneys general, state legislators, and treasurers operating in the fullness of their powers—individually, but also collectively, through both informal alliances and formal agreements.

The conjoined strategies of abundance and counteraggression are not just a framework to get us through the next four years; in truth, we face a more durable challenge. First, the extent to which Trump is undermining federal government capacity will be his long-lasting legacy—even if Democrats are lucky enough to retake the White House in 2028. More fundamentally, an increasingly conservative federal judiciary has been steadily dismantling the federal government over the last two decades, and we can expect continued motion in that direction as Trump fills the federal courts. And, while Trump has asserted executive powers (often unlawfully) to tear down the federal government, Democrats may be less able to rebuild federal capacity without controlling both Congress and the White House—a scenario that seems remote. Adding to that disadvantage, the 2030 census is expected to result in the loss of around 9 congressional seats in states Kamala Harris won in 2024, putting House majorities just that much farther out of reach.

For all these reasons, building blue-state power and capacity is a strategy of existential importance not just for the 120 million people who live under blue trifectas, but for the country as a whole, because leveraging blue-state power is Democrats’ most likely path to eventually regaining national power and overcoming the threat to democracy that Trumpism and red-state revanchism represent.

Neither abundance nor aggression can chart that path on its own. Simply descending into preemptive and retaliatory counteraggression will not build the economic power and sustain the popular support that blue America needs to grow its base, appeal, and population. We need a compelling vision of the future and a credible governing approach that makes it real. Likewise, although abundance policies on their own may succeed in reforming narrow areas of blue-state governance such as housing, counteraggression will be a necessary ingredient if abundance is going to underpin a broad-based revitalization of how blue states exercise and communicate their power.

These strategies of abundance and aggression are not just complementary; they have the same norms-breaking DNA. Abundance and aggression share the view that greater blue-state power and prosperity reside in a strategy of reforming and disrupting the institutions of the administrative state, rather than simply defending them. Both approaches reject a reflexive defense of norms and institutions in favor of a calculus about the importance of key goals (taking climate action, rejecting authoritarianism) and a commitment to using latent state power to achieve them. In sum, we cannot increase state capacity enough to build what blue states need and support a powerful counteraggression strategy capable of addressing the existential crises of our day unless we also get rid of some of the rules, regulations, and government lawyers whose knee-jerk answer to elected officials who want to drive action is: “No.”

This aspect of our argument prompted readers of a draft of this essay to ask: Aren’t you just arguing for a blue-state version of Elon Musk’s DOGE?

Well—yes and no.

What we’re calling for is a massive shift in Democrats’ approach to government power. That shift would pull blue states and the Democrats who lead them away from a timid posture that emphasizes protecting the status quo over rapid change, and it would seek to overcome an institutional small-c conservatism that reflexively defends bureaucracy even when it is no longer helpful. That preference for action and nimbleness may point Democrats in the direction of a range of policy actions that don’t follow a single obvious ideological direction. The strategy we’re advocating is not about pushing blue-state Democrats uniformly toward the center or the left (though on balance, we think it will tend to pull somewhat toward the center-left). What we’re arguing for is a transformation in the character of action toward boldness and disruption that transcend the ideological valence of particular policies.

In 2023, a tanker truck exploded along a portion of I-95 running through Philadelphia, collapsing a bridge and jamming a corridor that typically saw 160,000 cars and trucks pass through daily. Initial reports suggested that in a best-case scenario, it would be months before the road could fully reopen, at enormous costs to people up and down the Eastern seaboard. Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro got it done in 12 days, shortcutting typical approval processes, using novel and locally available construction materials, borrowing a jet turbine from a nearby NASCAR raceway to speed-dry the pavement when rain threatened to delay lane striping, and setting up a webcam to show the public the round-the-clock effort in real time—all while employing union workers and touting their contributions. We don’t see Governor Shapiro’s success in ignoring a bunch of regulations to quickly build a bridge with union labor as either “progressive leftism” or “centrist moderation”—rather, it reflects a “get-shit-done” character of action that defies neat ideological labels.

We think this “get-shit-done” approach has the potential to be effective more broadly—and we think it will be popular. (In Shapiro’s case, it helped launch a newly seated governor into immediate presidential contender status.) And if replicated across many different blue states, we believe it could both change the narrative around what Democratic governance can actually achieve and help serve as the bedrock foundation for building more national power and leverage for decades to come. Successful blue-state counteraggression cannot be decoupled from developing and implementing highly effective policies that make more Americans want to live in blue America.

A recent poll of Democratic voters by Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini contained two findings that are seemingly at odds with each other, but that we think relate to Shapiro’s triumph over the bridge collapse. On one hand, 42 percent of Democratic voters say they want the party to move “to the center politically” to win the next presidential election, compared to just 20 percent who want the party to “move left.” On the other hand, 81 percent of Democrats want their party to be “more combative” with the Trump Administration, compared with just 10 percent who favor a more conciliatory approach. Democratic voters aren’t looking for middle-of-the-road compromisers: They are looking for pragmatic leaders who fight back.

To be clear, while our vision of abundance and aggression involves a more combative (albeit less ideologically pure) Democratic style of governance, it should not be confused with the drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub, blindly-hand-power-over-to-oligarchs approach of the ketamine-clouded architect of DOGE. He is about moving fast and breaking things. We are about moving fast and building things.

Our vision is aimed at cutting through red tape, marginalizing the too many always-say-no government lawyers who throw sand in the gears of action, and creating state capacity so that government can do more, not less. Part of that will require taking on concentrated wealth and the power of special interests. As Klein and Thompson have noted in their arguments for abundance, building this kind of state capacity must include pulling away from the reflexively skeptical Naderite mentality that has dominated the left’s view of government power since the 1970s. The consumer protection state built via Nader-era reforms sought to protect people (and plants and animals) from the government. But now, government must be unleashed to (among other things) take on the monopolies and special-interest oligarchs who are actually debilitating government power, undermining competition, creating scarcity by hoarding wealth, and kneecapping economic dynamism. It’s a shift toward something more like the muscular promise of newer federal agencies like the CFPB. Our goal, then, is to have more CFPBs with clear and aggressive mandates to deliver for people, rather than vast, overlapping bureaucracies that “protect” by refusing to act and venerating the status quo.

In the end, a blue-state liberalism that builds houses, roads, bridges, high-speed rail, and solar farms is necessary and desirable. But unless blue-state Democrats also build power, abundance will be not only insufficient for this moment, but impossible to achieve. When asked to justify what he’d built, Robert Moses—a man who had many flaws, but who also knew how to build fast and wield power unapologetically—quipped, “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

Our present moment is one of monumental consequence. We are on a knife’s edge between two very different visions of the future. In one, blue-state leaders continue to defend a status quo in which they keep bleeding population, influence, and economic might while red states and the Trump Administration gain ever more power over their people and policies. In the other, those same leaders shift tactics to embrace the enormous power and potential that’s at their disposal. By doing so, they can make blue states the definition of safe, healthful, innovative places of economic promise, both in reality and in narrative terms, and underline the contrast between them and failing red states with their higher murder rates and worse educational and health outcomes. It is essential to start driving this shift now: Continued net population loss portends a looming disaster for blue states in the 2030 census—a further contraction that not only makes it harder to win majorities in the House, but also further distorts Electoral College representation and makes it even harder to achieve national power.

The 15 blue-state trifectas are the only deep source of power that both small-d and big-D democrats have right now, and it may be that way for some time to come. The choice before us is whether to build what’s necessary in blue states and sell it convincingly, or to watch blue states burn at the hands of a red state-Trump alliance that seems intent on destroying their ability to self-govern. With those stakes in mind, we urge Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Maura Healey, J.B. Pritzker, and many other Democratic state leaders to seize their power and use it creatively, boldly, aggressively, and quickly—not only to build prosperity in their own states, but also to create real leverage in the battle to preserve democracy in our nation while we still have the chance.