Josh Harder

And it's, you know, scale in places that, like Western Massachusetts, like D.C., bright blue parts of the country where there's not anyone really organizing the people who want to win national elections because they're blue parts of the country.

And so a big part of swing left scale was people in San Francisco who don't realize they're a 90-minute drive from the California Central Valley and can actually help elect now Adam Gray, then Josh Harder, things like that.

But after that election, scale and innovating on sort of like barriers to grassroots action winning election, those I think were the through lines of what Swing Left was all about.

The founding team looked at themselves in the mirror and they're like, well, we became a website.

Today, we head to California's 9th congressional district.

Ahead on Insight, I'll interview Republican John McBride, who is challenging incumbent Democrat Josh Harder.

Also, the Sacramento City Unified School District continues to face a massive financial crisis with impacts that go beyond just numbers on a spreadsheet.

We'll break down the human cost of the problem and how officials are trying to keep cuts away from the classroom.

Today, we're focusing on California's 9th congressional district.

Newly redrawn, the district spans parts of San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties, including parts of Stockton and Lodi, stretching south to Manteca and Tracy and west to Antioch.

The incumbent is Democrat Josh Harder.

We're working with his campaign to find a time for him to join the show.

But what changes here is the relationship between procedure and progress.

Rather than say, "Oh, let's just take as long as possible to make sure every single stakeholder has a fair chance to stop this project," instead we say, "Let's hear everybody we can on deadline." Today's guest is Representative Josh Harder, a Democrat from California, and the co-chair of the bipartisan Build America Caucus, which has developed its own abundance style agenda spanning housing, healthcare, energy, education, and innovation.

Today, we talk about the surprising political victories of abundance, why some of its ideas seem to be winning even as commentators declare the movement dead, what it would take to turn a handful of legislative victories into something bigger, a government and maybe a liberalism that actually builds, that actually puts points on the board.

I'm Derek Thompson.

Um, it is, uh, uh, it is, uh, procedures that get in the way of outcomes that are for the public good.

Um, but there's not a face to those villains, and, uh, the best villains have a face.

Um, Representative Josh Harder, I really appreciate you not only talking about all the great work that you've done, but also, as in the last answer, just listen, uh, to me as, as if a psychotherapist.

Just, you know, um, uh, unpack my, my own thoughts about abundance.

It says, "Bipartisan group wants more pro-housing legislation." Okay.

So some of you may remember that we had Congressman Josh Harder as a guest here on "The Rent Roll" a few months back talking about the Road to Housing Act and the need to protect the build-to-rent, uh, business and, and construction.

He talked about the, uh...

And he, on that podcast episode, he talked about the need to go beyond what's in the Road to Housing Act.

The Build America Caucus has released its Build More agenda ahead of the twenty twenty-six midterm elections, and one of its most consequential provisions for our audience is a proposed exemption of affordable housing from Buy America Build America requirements, commonly known as BABA.

The caucus is co-chaired by Representative Josh Harder, a Democrat from California, and Representative Celeste Maloy, a Republican from Utah, making this a rare bipartisan signal on a topic that has quietly become one of the more frustrating cost drivers in LIE tech and HUD-assisted development.

BABA requirements mandate that federally funded projects use American-made materials across a range of construction inputs.

The problem for affordable housing developers is straightforward.

Oh, I was just going to say, you know, the clip earlier was talking about when the Democrats flipped the House in 2018.

And in that cycle, I went and knocked doors that ultimately elected Josh Harder to Congress in California.

And I was walking through working class Latino neighborhoods in Modesto, you know, talking to people about voting.

And they were like, are you a cop? Why is there a white guy in my neighborhood? Uh-huh.