Zohran Mamdani, if elected mayor of New York, would put the city at loggerheads with a reform movement within a Democrat Party that is searching for an answer to President Trump’s populist agenda—tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation.

Moderates are energized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book—Abundance. It posits that liberals focus too much on risk avoidance and regulation that impose barriers to innovation and growth. For example, excessive building codes and land use restrictions that limit development.

Running for President, former Vice President Harris embraced the YIMBY movement when promising to build 3 million new homes.

Reformist sentiments also object to Woke obsessions for public education.

Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel charges that Democrats talk too much about bathrooms and not enough about student achievement.

Hard-left progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani want to double down on tax the rich, green energy and union-friendly projects and regulations to curb corporate excesses.

That ignores the Democrat Party’s moribund voter approval ratings.

All this plays out against the backdrop of a federal government in financial peril. Biden’s big spending on infrastructure, industrial policies and expanding social programs increased the federal deficit from 4.6% to 6.4% of GDP.

Trump and the GOP congressional majorities seem intent on slashing taxes without curbing spending enough to break the upward trend.

If the Abundance becomes the new Democrat mantra, voters should ask if it’s just another ruse to raise taxes, something that seems inevitable given the bond market’s reaction to Trump’s fiscal plans.

Regulatory reform would be a tough lift for Democrats.

President Truman famously warned that voters given a choice between a genuine Republican and a Republican in Democratic clothing will choose the real deal every time.

Democrats depend on wealthy liberal donors who can skip the subway for limos and send their children to private schools. Unions heavily invested in protectionism for private sector members and having blue cities tied up in bureaucrat knots to boost public employment. And lawyers enabling all those regulations and public engagement that make improving public transit and a decent air traffic control system seemingly unaffordable.

I admit some suspicion of Emauel.

Chicago is hardly a well-run city. Thirty-one percent of its public-school teachers have so much confidence in what they do that they send their children to private schools.

The Abundance movement may seize the Democrat agenda. But lacking a charismatic leader like Trump willing to move fast and break things, the party’s seasoned apparatchiks will roll out high sounding market incentives to move public behavior that are a cover for tax increases, more regulation and municipal corruption.

Look at New York City’s transit system.

It cost $2.5 billion to build a mile of the first phase of the long-promised Second Avenue Subway.

That’s 8 to 12 times more expensive than comparable projects in Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain. Those places have mind-boggling regulations and unions, but none are so constraining and expensive as the bureaucracy-union cabal that grips the Big Apple.

To overcome the transit system’s moribund condition, the city is imposing a steep new congestion tax on motorists driving through the city’s midtown to encourage public transportation use and finance modernization. The transit authority can borrow against the projected revenue to finance capital projects.

Neglected in this rush to reason is that subway debt to pay for past unkept modernization promises is already financed by a myriad of other special taxes and fees on payrolls, motorists and petroleum businesses and a slice of the general city sales tax.

New York Governor Hochul says, “everybody needs to read Abundance,” but she’s done little to implement reforms that would lower the costs of mass transit projects.

Instead she is lobbying Washington for more money, because the congestion tax can’t nearly fund the system’s $68 billion capital improvement needs.

To break through, moderate Democrats need to find common cause with populist Republicans who share their suspicions of corporate excess and bureaucratic overreach.

If that sounds farfetched consider that Secretary Kennedy’s edition of Health and Human Services could thrive just as easily in a Democratic Administration.

They could start with an agenda to reform permitting and approval processes for housing and big construction projects by creating a one-stop, time-limited process where all the interest groups get their say but whose decisions would be final

This column in 2022 and the Manhattan Institute recently endorsed such an approach.

After Trump’s tariffs inflation and towering interest rates have disappointed Americans, they’ll be ready for a Third Way.

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Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.