Rep. Jake Auchincloss on Why Democrats Need New Big Ideas

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Rep. Jake Auchincloss’s Massachusetts district is so safe he didn’t even face a Republican opponent in 2024. So while some of his Democratic colleagues are focused on the careful messaging needed to appease swing voters or keep their purple seats, Auchincloss, 37, is fixated on the broader question facing his party: what are the big ideas that Democrats can offer the American people? TIME spoke to the rising House Democrat about owning up to the party’s COVID-era mistakes, getting tough on social-media companies, building new cities, and what the Democratic vision of the future should be.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What went wrong for Democrats, and how can it be fixed?

It’s encapsulated in the school closures. The school closures were a catastrophe. Those are elementary school kids who didn’t learn reading and writing because it was on Zoom. That’s high school kids who missed out on baseball practice. That’s college kids who didn’t get to enjoy the college experience. And what defined those school closures was a condescension, it was an inflexibility, and it was a resistance to feedback about the effects of our government’s decisions. It was this toxic confluence of smugness with inflexibility, and frankly, poor governance.

Democrats need to acknowledge that we were wrong as a party on our stance on school closures. It’s not enough to say we were wrong on this. We also have to have a plan of action for how we’re gonna remediate it. 

What do you think that plan should be?

I think it’s twofold. One is we should make a commitment of one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring for every kid who’s behind grade level in this country. We know it’s one of the few educational interventions that are rigorously tested for efficacy. It’s scalable, it’s complimentary to the work that teachers are already doing, and we should be saying as a matter of party principle: every single kid who’s behind grade level, Democrats are here to ensure that they get one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring.

The second thing we should do is hold the social-media corporations to account for their generational attention fracking of our youth. I have legislation that’s bipartisan to revoke Section 230, and make social-media corporations accountable to a duty of care for things like deepfake pornography that target young women. But we gotta go even further, and tax the daylights out of these social-media corporations. A 50% tax rate on all digital advertising that they accrue on the revenues. And use it to fund initiatives like local journalism and education.

Does the party need a new direction? What should that direction be?

That’s the core challenge we have. It’s that we are bereft of big ideas. And that’s what I’m worried about. Everyone’s focused on ‘we need a new message frame’ or ‘we need we need a new angle’ or ‘we need new leaders to emerge.’ I can assure you there is no shortage of ambition out there, candidates will emerge. There’s a shortage of ideas. It’s all kind of hand waving unless you actually have some big ideas. Let’s put the big ideas out there. Let’s talk about them. Let’s see what people will get excited about. And then organically, I think a narrative starts to emerge from that.

And this is to a certain extent what MAGA did and Donald Trump did. He came out talking about ‘build the wall,’ right? We forget, ‘build the wall’ was the foundation of MAGA, which has since engendered many other ideas and narratives. But you can see why it’s kind of the intellectual genesis of that movement.

So what should be the Democrats’ next big ideas?

Let me put a few more out there. We have got to stop focusing on expanding health-care coverage and focus instead on lowering health-care costs. Community health clinics account for about,1% of U.S. health care spending, but they treat 10% of Americans. They are primary and preventative care and if they could team up with hospitals in particular, they can be incredibly effective stewards of health care dollars. We have to start subsidizing them directly, as opposed to what we currently do, which is subsidize the health-insurance companies. For 15 years we’ve been subsidizing health-insurance companies, and they keep on telling us everyone’s going to get healthier, and all I see is that they get richer. How do we subsidize these community health centers? How about a value-added tax on junk food, in the way that the Navajo Nation has. The Navajo Nation put a tax on junk food. It’s modest, but they’ve used it to fund wellness initiatives. We could do that nationally.

So in the same way that we tie the attention tax to fund journalism and education, we tie the tax on junk food towards radically expanding funding to community health centers. So that everybody under 300% of the federal poverty rate has access to primary and preventative care.

What should be at the core of Democrats’ economic agenda?

Cost Disease needs to be the centerpiece. Our Democratic economic agenda really could be seven words: “treat cost disease and protect Social Security.”

What is cost disease? Can you explain it to me like I’m five?

Let’s use two examples to explain it. The average family spends relatively less on TVs and electronics and relatively more on health care than they did 50 years ago. Why did that happen? The reason is that in sectors where they are able to do at-scale product manufacturing, the cost goes way down. In sectors that are very labor intensive, costs tend to go up over time. TVs got really cheap to make, and so a relative share of your budget they went down. Health care is very labor intensive, child care is very labor intensive, and so they, as a relative share of your budget, go up.

The goal then, if we’re serious about treating cost disease in housing and health care, which are the two sectors that are most affected by it, is: how do you turn a service into a product and then how do you mass produce that product?

What does that mean for housing?

We totally have to do land-use reform. We gotta make it easier to build. I’m here in Massachusetts, and it’s impossible to build in this state with our zoning code. But we also have to figure out how to turn housing construction from a very service-intensive endeavor into a product. And we actually know how to do that: offsite construction.

One way to break through is for us to get serious about building new cities in this country that just totally bypassed the local zoning issue, right? Americans used to build new cities every time we ran into a river. We stopped building new cities, but they’re very important ways to foment economic dynamism and mobility. We’ve got lots of decommissioned military bases that are not locally zoned, federal land that’s not locally zoned. Let’s invest in building new cities there, and it’ll open up lots of opportunities.

What other big ideas do you have?

We need to get rid of the primary system. Get rid of the primary system like California did or Alaska did, try to limit the influence of big money like Maine is trying to do. Every state should be pushing for those reforms and Democrats should be leading the charge there. Because what that does is it unlocks the power of the median voter. Right now, of 435 members of Congress, only 35 of them are oriented towards the median voter. The other 400 are oriented towards their primaries.

So if you take all these big ideas together and package them, how would you describe them? How would you explain this worldview to somebody if you didn’t have time to go through each idea step by step?

It’s a great question, but I’m gonna reject the debate, actually. I am insistent that right now, we need to be talking about the ideas, the merits of the ideas. I am sure that some people will agree with what I’m putting forward. Some people will disagree. We need to be seeing what excites people. What actually galvanizes the electorate? What do people see as relevant to their lives?