Abundance Mindset

Colorado governor Jared Polis is the weirdest Democrat in America. A self-described “gaymer,” he passes the time playing League of Legends when he’s not effusing on r/neoliberal or declaring ceremonial state holidays—over 1,180 of them since taking office, including an entire week dedicated to concrete pipes. His 2023 State of the State address contained more than one allusion to Star Wars and included a Yoda impression (“Two available jobs for every unemployed person, Colorado has!”). And with a net worth estimated in 2017 to be over $300 million, the five-term congressman is among the richer men to have ever served on Capitol Hill.

The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, a Polis ally, describes the governor’s political project as “a more individualistic approach to liberalism.” Indeed, Polis first received national attention after refusing to reimplement mask mandates in the face of the surging Omicron variant in late 2021. “Public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear,” he told a Colorado public radio station. An ally of the anti-vaccination movement, he vocally backed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Polis has offered Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s cost-cutting spree similar praise, going so far as to suggest that the government could save money by nixing its strategic stockpile of cheese.

These antics should not obscure the grave seriousness of the governor’s ambitions. Polis is uniquely poised to define the future of Democratic politics: he has repeatedly refused to rule out a 2028 presidential bid, and Politico describes him as among the Democrats best positioned for the nomination. And, to his credit, “Polis-ism” is, on its own terms, a coherent answer to the question of what ails the Democratic Party: excessive regulation has choked supply, driving up costs for housing and energy while driving Americans from the party synonymous with big government. And despite Biden’s substantial investments in green energy and infrastructure, environmental regulations have throttled these projects’ rollouts where Trump hasn’t nixed them entirely. What is needed, then, in Polis’s view, is a “pro-growth,” deregulatory liberalism.

Asked on X to explain Colorado’s resistance to the national Republican tide in 2024—in Colorado, Kamala Harris lost just 1.2 points off Biden’s 2020 margin—Polis’s reply began with a four-word phrase: “Prosperity and abundance agenda.” It’s a revealing response. The “abundance agenda,” a Koch-funded initiative to roll back regulation in the energy and housing sectors, has found in Polis its ideal Democratic messenger. The same network of interests that engineered the free-market revolution of the 1970s now sees in the Colorado governor their best chance at reversing the Democratic Party’s skepticism of neoliberal orthodoxy. If capital’s latest attempt to push the party further to the right succeeds, it may very well wear Polis’s face.

Polis’s biography follows a familiar trajectory from tech wealth toward libertarian politics. Like many tech barons of his generation, Polis launched his first venture—the internet service provider American Information Systems—from his Princeton dorm room in 1994. Two years later, he moved his parents’ greeting card company online. He sold both at the height of the dot-com bubble. Naturally, Polis then turned his attention to disrupting education. In 2004, Polis founded his first charter school, The New America School; he opened a second the following year. (The first has struggled with high teacher turnover in recent years—a crisis hardly allayed by its rejection of a union petition in 2022.)

In 2008, Polis made the leap into the 111th Congress on his own dime, with his personal injections into his campaign’s coffers surpassing the combined sums raised by his opponents 245 times over. Barely settled in the House of Representatives, Polis and seventeen other colleagues—commanding enough votes to kill the Affordable Care Act—threatened to sink the bill unless Democratic leadership stripped out its five percent income tax surcharge. Nancy Pelosi blinked; the ACA passed without the provision. Polis then became the only Democratic member of the Liberty Caucus, a libertarian-conservative grouping that grew out of luncheons hosted by Ron Paul. In 2014, he embraced Bitcoin and became the first U.S. representative to accept donations in the cryptocurrency—and in 2016, alongside Republication representative Mick Mulvaney, cofounded the Congressional Blockchain Caucus.

During his ten-year run in D.C., Polis saw his personal wealth double and left the House its third-wealthiest member. He then turned his eyes toward the Colorado governor’s mansion. His platform consisted of a peculiar synthesis of progressive and conservative priorities—just enough to bridge the state’s business interests, urban wage-earners, and socially liberal upper middle classes. To the party’s left flank, he promised universal full-day kindergarten and pre-K, alongside a nebulous proposal for a “multi-state consortium to offer a universal, single-payer option out West.” To the state’s small businesses, Polis promised deep tax cuts. And for the state’s Brahmin left, Polis simply restated his libertarian priorities: pardons for those convicted of marijuana possession, death penalty abolition, and fierce defense of abortion rights. There is no state limit on how much personal wealth Colorado candidates can spend on their campaigns; Polis dropped nearly $20 million of his own money on his gubernatorial campaign in 2018, outspending all other candidates combined. When the primaries concluded, he’d spent nearly $40 for each of the votes he earned.

Like any good Democrat, Polis’s public relationship with the Koch brothers has been mostly adversarial—in 2012, he loudly opposed their abortive takeover of the libertarian CATO Institute. Even so, his priorities sometimes make for strange bedfellows with the Koch network. In April 2024, Polis joined Americans for Prosperity (a Koch-founded libertarian think tank) in seeking to kill HB24-1363, a bill that would have required charter schools in the state of Colorado to meet increased standards for spending transparency and parental involvement on school boards—the same standards met by the state’s public schools. Polis often chums it up with beneficiaries of Koch money: in 2021, Polis addressed the Koch-backed Steamboat Institute’s “freedom festival,” flaunting his cuts to Colorado’s tax rates to the election-denialist think tank. And for decades, Polis has maintained a close friendship with Art Laffer, a Reagan economic consigliere whose “Laffer Curve” mapping tax rates to government receipts laid the theoretical groundwork for trickle-down economic theory. In late 2024, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—another Koch-backed think tank and a Project 2025 advisory board member—brought Polis and Laffer together for a panel discussion. As Polis advised conservative legislators on how to cut property taxes in their home states, Laffer, a leading figure within ALEC, gushed: “He’s the greatest ever, fun guy . . . I could talk about him for hours.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Polis’s economic positions often align more closely with Republicans than with his own party. Early in his gubernatorial term, he endorsed a GOP-backed plan to cut state income taxes, though it was ultimately rejected by the Democrat-controlled legislature. Polis has resisted granting state employees collective-bargaining rights and has vetoed legislation meant to restrict union-busting practices. The result is an incipient rift with organized labor: Polis’s relationship with the state’s AFL-CIO can be uniquely tense at times. The same goes for his rapport with his party. On two separate occasions, prominent figures in the state’s Democratic Party—including its chairman—have participated as speakers in what amounted to anti-Polis labor rallies. As governor, Polis has overseen four rounds of property tax reductions, leaving Colorado with the nation’s forty-eighth-lowest property tax rate. His ambitions go even further—Polis has explicitly called for the abolition of the income tax altogether. “It penalizes success,” Polis explained to the libertarian podcaster and editor Nick Gillespie. “Income is something that’s good.”

Polis’s fusion of irreverent authenticity with deregulatory, supply-side governance is a long-established strategy within the state. Colorado served as a staging ground for the Democratic Party’s transformation into a party of knowledge professionals and affluent suburbanites. In 1974, the soon-to-be Colorado senator Gary Hart campaigned across the state with a stump speech titled “The End of the New Deal.” As metro Denver’s health care, telecommunications, and financial services sectors replaced Colorado’s old extractive industries, the state’s Democrats assured their national counterparts that they had identified the constituency of the future in the “new economy.” As Colorado representative Tim Wirth explained in 1981: “Democratic constituencies used to be labor, blue-collar, and minority-oriented. Now, as in my case, they are suburban, with two working parents—a college-educated, information-age constituency.” In 1982, Hart became the first congressman to embrace the “Atari Democrat” label—a term first used mockingly—launching a congressional movement that would evolve into the New Democrats a decade later.

But, unlike the market fundamentalists of the American right, the Colorado “Atari Democrats” were not antigovernment. If the United States were to transition to a high-tech economy, the Atari Democrats insisted it would require substantial public investment in computing, fiber-optic connectivity, and electronics manufacturing—investments that free markets could not deliver without a helping hand. Polis has long favored hands-off, market-based climate action, and resisted efforts within his party to enact strict regulations upon emissions. Neither Polis nor his antecedents among Colorado’s proto-neoliberals denied the existence of market failure; nor did they reject the idea that the state might have a role in resolving it, though only through the narrow channels of targeted tax breaks and subsidies. “Polis-ism,” likewise, may bear the hallmarks of market fundamentalism, but it isn’t just a redux of supply-side economics. Polis eagerly sold the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act to his constituents, refusing the suggestion—standard among doctrinaire libertarians—that the Biden administration’s supposed overspending had fueled the inflationary surge of 2021–23.

Yet the Atari Democrats, like Polis, were politically and culturally estranged from New Deal-style labor politics: they opposed not state intervention but worker power. Where Polis departs most egregiously from the Biden administration’s philosophy is his Clintonian zeal for attacking labor unions—and his apparent belief that the fruits of deregulation are enough to outweigh his sharp antipathy toward organized labor. After the 2020 Biden campaign vigorously pursued the white working class, national Democrats have sought to mend fences with organized labor; Polis shows little interest in doing the same. Whether intentionally or not, his approach further cements Colorado Democrats’ dependence on affluent, professional-class voters.

The limits of Polis’s market-fundamentalist experiment—and that of Colorado’s New Democrats more broadly—are plainly visible. Despite Polis’s ambitious land use reform, Denver’s housing crisis shows few signs of abating: the city experienced record-high eviction filings in 2024. Colorado has resisted the national red shift but not because its Democrats have managed to win over the demographics moving rightward elsewhere in America: Republican-trending working-class voters have simply been drowned out by highly educated newcomers or displaced altogether.

The Democratic Party’s relative success in Colorado is really just a function of the state’s unusually highly educated, urban, white, and secular demographics: hardly results that offer a practical template for Democrats beyond the state’s borders. And Polis’s tax cuts have significantly strained Colorado’s budget: the state now faces a $1.2 billion deficit, and, largely due to falling property tax receipts, Colorado’s education fund risks complete depletion within the next three to four years. Colorado is hardly heading off a fiscal cliff, but—if it were to be applied nationally—Polis’s fiscal policy plainly could not coexist with his developmentalist impulses. Nor does the governor have a clear answer to how his militant advocacy for free trade, a sticking point with the Biden administration, aligns with his ostensible commitment to nurturing Colorado’s fledgling green industries.

However rough around the edges, Polis and his political tradition offer a distinctly Democratic form of pro-business politics. The business lobby has benefitted handsomely from the industrial policy of the Biden years and has little interest in seeing it rolled back—certainly not in the GOP’s move-fast-and-break-things style. But nor does it wish to return to the modestly pro-labor, modestly regulated capitalism of the Biden years. Kamala Harris tried and failed to achieve this synthesis: at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, while Polis spoke beneath the words “CHOOSE FREEDOM,” Harris had already retreated from her praise of unions and her fighting words against sellers’ inflation in favor of an anodyne “opportunity economy.” And with Trump’s administration threatening an already unstable American capitalism, the Democratic Party seems poised to become obsessively business-friendly in response.

The abundance agenda’s fundamental sleight of hand is that, by unleashing the private sector from burdensome consumer protection, labor standards, and zoning regulations, American consumers might recover their lost purchasing power and living standards without the state directly tampering with workplace standards or wage levels. The private sector would supply more goods at lower costs—if only it could. That hasn’t panned out in Colorado, and it’s unlikely to elsewhere.

But the appeal of Polis’s narrowly consumptionist politics will likely extend beyond the capitalist class itself: with Trump’s agenda certain to whittle away at Americans’ already-atrophied purchasing power, a message centered upon “abundance,” free trade, and lowering prices—even at the expense of consumer protection, antitrust, and organized labor—will hold obvious purchase. “We have no coherent message,” Democratic representative Jasmine Crockett told the New York Times in February. As America barrels through the first months of Trump’s second term, that could very well be the Democratic Party’s slogan. But, with midterms on the horizon, the party must settle on a program. As that struggle takes shape, few national Democrats stand better prepared than Polis. His success or failure could determine whether the party continues to shift away from neoliberal orthodoxy or whether its future lies in simply being less threatening to business interests than Trump.