Recovering alcoholics know their first step must be to admit that they have a problem. Democrats are beginning to learn the same thing when pondering their inability to govern.

A couple of months after President Donald Trump’s reelection, Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria noted that “90 percent of U.S. counties moved right” in the 2024 election, concluding that “people seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades – and the results are bad and have been getting worse.”

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Zakaria then noted that New York state, where he lives, has a $239 billion budget for 20 million residents while Florida, with 23 million people, somehow gets by with just $116 billion in spending. “What do New Yorkers get for these vast sums, generated by the highest tax rates in the country?” Zakaria asked.

Not much. “New York’s poverty rate is higher than Florida’s,” Zakaria writes. “New York has a slightly lower rate of homeownership and a much higher rate of homelessness. Despite spending more than twice as much on education per student, New York has educational outcomes — graduation rates, eighth-grade test scores — that are roughly the same as Florida’s.”

As a direct result of failing to deliver basic government services at twice the price, thousands of New Yorkers are leaving the state every year, often heading for states governed by Republicans, such as Florida. “Big red states are growing at the expense of big blue states, which will translate politically into more Republican representation in Congress and more electoral votes,” Zakaria finished.

This is what the latest report from the American Redistricting Project found. If current trends continue, California will lose three electoral votes in the 2030 Census; New York will lose two; and Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Oregon will lose one. Texas and Florida will each gain four votes, with Arizona, Utah, and Idaho each gaining one. 

This would mean that in the 2032 presidential election, Democrats could sweep Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. However, if Republicans can hold on to Arizona and Georgia, the GOP would still win the White House.

For Vox senior writer Kelsey Piper, this means Democrats should not nominate a presidential candidate who comes from a state that is losing population. “If the people voted with their feet against your rule, then fix your own s*** before you seek national office,” Piper wrote on X. “We can call this the Go Away Gavin rule.” “Gavin” refers to Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA).

In their new book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write that with its natural beauty and perfect weather, California, which is dominated by Democrats — the party has supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature and holds every statewide office — should be the shining example of why voters choose Democratic rule. Instead, Klein and Thompson write, “California has spent decades trying and failing to build high-speed rail. It has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country … As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.”

“Young families are leaving large urban metro areas so quickly,” they continue, “that several counties — including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under 5 population in the next 20 years.”

“Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families, while presiding over the parts of the country that they are leaving.”

Fortunately for Democrats, the authors believe they have identified why the party is failing to build a society where middle-class families can grow and thrive. The answer is that Democrats have made it impossible to build not just families but anything else as well. 

Starting in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, many localities began to enact laws and regulations that, often deliberately, made new home construction more difficult. The city of Petaluma, for example, put a hard cap on the number of new homes that could be built each year. Other restrictions were less about limiting the amount of housing per se but about controlling what kind of houses could be built. 

Many localities have minimum lot sizes, which means only large, expensive homes can be built there. Minimum parking requirements, residency limits, and height restrictions also make it harder to build more housing on limited space.

Environmental laws, especially the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (although there are many others such the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act) make matters worse. NEPA and CEQA are formidable because they allow citizens to sue block development. Anyone who wishes to stop a construction project, even when only one government permit or waiver is required, can go to federal court through NEPA and state court through CEQA to stop it by claiming the federal or state agency involved failed to conduct a proper environmental review. 

Agencies can spend years writing these reviews, which can run hundreds of pages long and take millions of dollars to complete. This adds delays and costs to shield a project from even greater delays and costs resulting from a lawsuit.

On top of environmental permitting requirements, many localities add conditions for unionized workers, minority-owned businesses, and access by disabled people. If the project is a business, Democrats have even been known to add requirements that the businesses provide transportation and subsidized child care. 

The result, for example, is that San Francisco permitted only 7,500 new homes in 2023 and had an average home price of over $1.7 million. Houston, Texas, permitted 70,000 new homes and had an average home price of $300,000.

The Left’s failure to build is not limited to domestic housing. Even projects that many Democrats favor, such as solar power plants, can’t get done. Texas recently passed California as the state with the highest solar power capacity in the nation, 22,000 megawatts to 20,000 MW. Considering all clean power sources, including wind, Texas now has almost double the clean energy capacity (70,000 MW) of California (37,000 MW).

Unfortunately, Klein and Thompson are not very specific about how Democrats should get rid of this regulatory mess. They call for NEPA reform and praise Democrats for entirely exempting some projects from NEPA. But this is a poor case-by-case approach, not a systemic solution, yet it seems to be the Californian way.

Recently, residents stopped a new dormitory being built at the University of California at Berkeley using CEQA. Instead of repealing CEQA or reforming it for everyone, California Democrats merely exempted state universities from its requirements. That is good for state universities that want to build more dorms, but what about everyone else? What about all the other regulations that drive up the cost of construction? Should those be repealed? Reformed? Klein and Thompson don’t say.

Their silence on details is probably strategic. The Democratic Party is a party of interest groups, each with its own highly paid and highly educated elite. Unions, environmentalists, and minorities all have activist networks that would pounce on Klein and Thompson or any Democratic officeholder if they suggested ending the special obstructive powers they command.

Getting Democrats to praise a vague “abundance agenda” is easy. Getting states that the Democratic Party controls to make real reforms will be much harder.

The Democratic Party simply and generally mistrusts market forces, which is another way of describing the choices of free individuals. Just one X post after praising Klein and admitting that “We need less restrictive zoning laws & say yes to more building,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) in his next post added, “We also need to stop wall street from buying up single family homes (my stop wall street landlord act) and allow local jurisdictions to cap rent.”

Rent control may be a winning populist message for the Left, but it discourages spending on new homes, decreasing supply and driving up costs. If Democrats want to make housing more affordable to more people, they need to abandon everything they think they know about economics and copy Republican states. This, for one thing, means no rent control.

Then there is the 800-pound gorilla in the room that Klein and Thompson don’t mention. As important as housing costs are in driving the exodus from Democrat-run states, it is, as Zakaria notes, the reason New York has a budget twice the size of Florida’s despite serving a smaller population. The bigger reason is the malign grip of government unions.

States that allow government employees to bargain collectively with state and local governments have far higher labor costs, particularly pension costs, than states that don’t. New York is a heavily unionized state, and its state and local pension employer contributions were some $18 billion in 2020. Florida, where government employees do not bargain collectively, spent just $5 billion.

Not only do government unions drive up the cost of government services, but they also drive down quality. California, where unions are also strong, spends $24,000 per school student but ranks 40th in reading proficiency among fourth graders and 44th for eighth graders.

Texas, which has an almost identical demographic profile to California, spends $14,000 per student and ranks ninth in fourth-grade reading and 10th in eighth-grade reading.

The problem with government unions is that they are undemocratic, even antidemocratic. When collective bargaining agreements control the working conditions and practices of government workers, local elected officials are powerless to reform the provision of services. They are under unions’ thumbs.

Democrats used to know this.

When former President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, government workers were specifically excluded from the legislation’s protections.

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote. “It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”

New York City was the first jurisdiction to reject Roosevelt’s wisdom and embrace government union collective bargaining in 1958. The practice quickly spread to Democratic states nationwide.

In the private sector, when unions extract too much from a company — pushing costs so high that it can’t offer a competitive product — the business loses customers and either renegotiates with the union or shuts down. Governments, though, are monopolies. If a local government fails to maintain safety, fix roads, or offer a decent education in public schools, taxpayers have few options. They can leave the area, which many poor and middle-class families are doing now. If they are wealthy, they can retreat to private schools and gated enclaves with private security guards, which Newsom and most Democratic Party officials have done.

Democrats don’t have to abandon all their principles and accomplishments to govern effectively again. The Clean Air Act has done a good job of ridding the atmosphere of harmful pollutants. Thanks to sensible regulation, city air is much more breathable and clear today.

But the magic of the Clean Air Act was letting polluters know what they needed to do to comply and then shielding those who did comply from litigation. By focusing on measurable results — less pollution — and providing industry with a standard of care to meet, the Clean Air Act allowed both a cleaner environment and a growing economy.

ONE WEIRD TRICK TO END POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Laws such as NEPA and CEQA only measure procedure, not outcomes. They are enforced in court. All they do is add costs and uncertainty without providing any environmental benefit. They are worse than useless. The fact that Klein and Thompson can’t find the courage to call for their repeal shows how far gone to ruin the Democratic Party really is.

The nation would benefit from a reformed Democratic Party able to provide a livable alternative to Republican rule. But until the Democratic Party shows it can deliver effective government at the local level, no one should trust it to wield power nationally.