This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 22 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: This is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m honored to be joined today by my colleague Monica Potts, who writes about economics, the middle class, and domestic politics, and who I’ve known for a long time. We were fellows at the New America Foundation together.
I’ve followed her writing for a long time. We didn’t overlap at FiveThirtyEight, but she got there after I did and did some great work there. So I’m really honored to be her colleague, and it’s great to see you, Monica.
Monica Potts: Good to see you too. Thank you and likewise.
Bacon: So what I want to talk about today is something that’s not in the news, but is embedded in the news all the time, which is this idea of the Democrats and the working class, or the working class in general.
And this idea that the working class is who you have to win—that the Democrats have lost the working class. I want to come at that, and that gets into affordability and autopsies, and we’ll come back to those things in a bit. But let me start with this: I find it frustrating, and probably misleading, when working class has become synonymous with people who did not get a four-year college degree.
Talk about why working class and not having a bachelor’s degree maybe should not be synonymous terms.
Potts: Yeah, so the first thing to understand is the vast majority of people who are talking about the working class in their writing and their commentary are using it as a synonym for those who don’t have college degrees. So they’re not talking about a certain slice of the income—a certain income level necessarily. They’re talking just about people who don’t have college degrees, and they’re also treating it as a majority of the U.S. because it is true that a majority of people now, in this day and age, do go to college—although I think that’s slipping—but they don’t always finish. Only about a third—a little more than a third now—of American adults have college degrees.
Bacon: You mean bachelor’s degrees? I think just make sure, MDX Paul uses loses like actually thrown four year college degree, which also gets tricky cause there’s community college, there’s certificates.
Anyway, go ahead.
Potts: Yeah, about a little more than a third of the American public has a bachelor’s degree. The reason—the argument that people make about why these two things are synonymous—is that generally it’s true that people with a bachelor’s degree make more than people without one, but it’s not true all across the board. And it’s really not true when you zoom out and you look at different kinds of communities in the United States.
So if you live in one of the populous areas on the coasts, it’s definitely true that people who have college degrees or advanced degrees are much more likely to have higher incomes, but it’s just not true across a lot of rural America, which is where Trump wins—which is part of the reason that we talk about the working class these days is because of the rural-urban divide. Because in those areas, just generally, college attainment is much lower. And so you have people who maybe started a business or entered a trade after high school who, by the time that they’re in their thirties and forties, are making pretty good middle-class salaries.
You have people who maybe inherited their parents’ car dealership or just kind of small business owners who don’t necessarily go to college, who are actually like the local elite, the local capitalists in town. And also it’s true that for much older Americans—and so you’re talking about senior citizens, voters over 60—in their generation, college attainment was lower anyway. And so for those people, it’s not exactly a perfect match to say that people who don’t have a bachelor’s degree in that generation earn less.
And the reason I point all that out is because there’s another idea of working class, another definition that is much more socioeconomic, that means usually slightly below a middle-class salary. It means a certain kind of blue-collar job or a certain kind of job that doesn’t have the kind of security that we think of people with college degrees having in their jobs. It usually means physical labor of some sort. And so I think when people say working class, they often think in their minds—or they see in their minds—this kind of person who’s struggling economically.
And that’s just not always true of people who don’t have bachelor’s degrees. Now, we could talk a lot about how everyone but the one percent in America is struggling right now, which I’m sure we’ll get to, but I personally think that saying working class kind of evokes this kind of blue-collar laborer who is struggling and is just trying to feed his family and wants to take a vacation every year.
But it usually evokes a male head of household, and they’re mad because they don’t have the economic opportunities that their parents did when they just worked in a factory after college. And so the phrase working class evokes that, and it just doesn’t describe our reality right now.
Bacon: If you were, the allowed to define working class and how we use it in election politics stories a way, is there a way you would more, I think as an activation of working class, you determine or need term itself is problematic?
Potts: I would. I think the term itself is a little vague because people do have different definitions across different disciplines, but I do think that it should denote a kind of socioeconomic position that is lower middle class. Economically, like you’re talking about incomes at the bottom of the middle-class kind of bracket—so high, not quite in poverty, higher than poverty, but not quite solid middle class. Vulnerable to changing—like, one of the most vulnerable groups of workers, because they tend to work in fields that are very vulnerable to shifts in macroeconomic forces, like construction.
So they don’t have the job security that people with bachelor’s degrees have, and they make a little less money, and they don’t—they also probably don’t have a college degree, because people with college degrees do tend to have a little more stability in the job market. So I would use the broader socioeconomic definition that definitely involves income levels.
Bacon: So I looked at the National Exit Poll from 2024, and I guess they have categories of income. And I guess the lowest category they have is below $50,000 in household income. So I guess what you’re saying is you take maybe the $50,000 cutoff—or something like that—but also adjust it a little bit. Because if you have zero income, you wouldn’t say you’re in the working class, so you probably would not include college students who are literally in college. You’d probably say something like between $25,000 and $50,000 is okay. Is that what you’re getting at here?
Potts: Probably between 33 and 50.
Bacon: 33 and 50.
Potts: Maybe even right now—these days—between 33 and 70, even. That’s not nothing, because median incomes are higher than they were. So yeah, I think that’s what I would consider working class.
Bacon: Would you put the Starbucks worker who has a Ph.D. but is working at Starbucks—who’s been working there for five years—in the working class?
Would you put that person—I know this is a stereotype—or someone who at least has a B.A., in the working class if they have a college degree but can’t get a job in whatever they majored in?
Potts: Yeah, I think I would do that. And I would also exclude from the working-class definition a welder who is now earning $110,000 a year. Sure, been welding for a long time and is married to a woman who’s a teacher. I would exclude them from the working class.
Bacon: Based on their income, or just alone? Is that what you’re saying? Because you’re saying part of your point is that there are some professions that pay well—car dealership owners—that don’t require a college degree.
Is that common? Or is it—it’s not zero, but is it a big number, or is it more of a stereotype?
Potts: I think it’s not uncommon. And it’s much more common in rural areas than it is in really big cities necessarily. Or at least there’s going to be a higher proportion of that than there are cities.
Bacon: So that’s okay. So drill down a little bit. All right. So what has happened in the last 30 years, let’s say, is that the Democratic Party has done worse with—I think—let’s start with the clearest case: white people without college degrees, right?
Or maybe not right. I don’t know if it’s white people in the working class as you define it, because I think we don’t necessarily have the terms for that. What is very clear is that Democrats are doing worse with white people without college degrees, and this is a downward trend. So talk about why you think that’s the case.
Potts: Yeah, so I would just also say that if I were talking about this divide in the American electorate, I wouldn’t use the term working class if I could help it. I would use the term non-college-educated—people without college degrees. Yes, because that is what is being precisely measured in these exit polls and in all these other studies and in voter-verified studies. That’s the divide: the divide between people who went to college and people who didn’t. And I think a lot is going on, and especially white people who went to college and white people who didn’t go to college. That’s the divide.
Bacon: I should emphasize that in Massachusetts, white people without college degrees are much more Democratic than they are in, say, Kentucky, where I am now, or in Arkansas, where you were.
So even there, it’s not a monolithic white–without-college group. Some of them, in blue states, are more Democratic. That’s a geographic distinction, but let’s come back to that. Anyway, go ahead.
Potts: Yeah, we’re talking about broad majority care. So I think that part of it is that going to college takes you out of—you are much more likely to go to college, even if you just go to attend for a while and you go and you stay in whatever city the college is in, you’re out of your hometown. And so I think that has a... People who go to college... are much more, I think, to have a small-l liberal mindset, because they’re challenging authority and they want to explore new worlds. It’s like that’s fuzzy and hard to measure, but I think that’s part of it. Also, people with college degrees are concentrated in cities, and there’s a liberalizing effect of living in a city.
And also cities are liberal. So it’s a self-reinforcing thing. People who stay in their hometowns—people who stay in their small hometown, no matter how small—people who stay in their hometowns are much more likely to stay conservative. And there’s a lot going on there that I think we just don’t know why. And I also just think that there’s a liberalizing effect of college educations. You learn how to question authority. You learn how to dig down to sources of information, and you don’t necessarily trust people who are just saying things without backing it up with evidence anymore.
And so I think that process of learning to study that way and learning to think that way probably doesn’t lend itself to staying within the Republican Party right now, which is much more of a... it’s much more of a “authority comes from a source of power” kind of movement right now.
Bacon: So this college–noncollege divide has grown, but it’s not as if—New York City was liberal in the 19—cities have always been liberal. Moving from home has always been a factor. So what caused this? Why has this education polarization happened in more recent times, when it didn’t happen in the 1950s?
Potts: Yeah, I don’t know if people have really figured out why it’s happening now. Part of it is that partisanship is getting stronger and stronger, so it could just be that maybe before you didn’t go to college and you just didn’t think a lot about politics and you stayed in your hometown and it wasn’t that important to you. But now it is, because it’s much more important to everyone and it’s much more important to everyone around you. Politics is a lot more nationalized.
I think people tend to not understand how people make decisions, but people—a lot of times people make political decisions by what they hear from their friends, by what they hear from their family, by the affiliations that they have in their personal lives—and those are much more divided now. And also cities, small-town cities, and rural areas have moved away from each other economically. And the jobs available to people in cities are growing, cities are thriving, and rural areas are not so much. And so I think that divide probably encourages a lot of other divides, including politically.
Bacon: So Democrats have a problem with—let’s say, for now—whites without college degrees. Those whites without college degrees, of course, tend to live in places that are not growing economically. Why does that—or why would that—make you more conservative?
Potts: I think it would make you partisan for sure. Everybody around you is already, because you don’t have the connections that you might have had in the past to bigger areas—ties to other communities—and you can’t travel as much and you can’t do those kinds of things as much if you wanted to before. And so I think it makes you more isolated. And also cities are more isolated from rural areas, and that encourages partisanship, I think.
And also I think it probably makes you conservative because you just feel like there’s less you can risk. You just can’t risk as much, because if your whole area is very poor, or your whole local economy is struggling, or your whole local government is always fighting a deficit—always fighting not having enough funding—then you don’t really see the United States as a place that can have a generous federal government that can pass all these new programs and everything. You think everything’s struggling.
Bacon: There are a couple of things that I want to get into that you didn’t address. One is the idea that Democrats became too neoliberal in the seventies and eighties, and that this scared off the working class. That they didn’t care about unions. They started ignoring NAFTA. They stopped paying attention to the working class and focused instead on big banks.
Why do you think that explanation is not correct—electorally, not in terms of policy? Why do you think that isn’t what’s going on here? Explain what we’re talking about.
Potts: So I will say about neoliberalism—this isn’t really about neoliberalism, but I’ll say that President Reagan changed the thinking and the story that Americans told themselves about economics. And so Ronald Reagan so effectively told a story about how the federal government was sucking away opportunity—that government spending was bad, that government spending crowded out investment, that letting the private sector boom would make us all richer. The story he told about that was so effective that I think it has influenced the way nearly everyone in the United States thinks about the economy and measures the well-being of the economy.
And so even though a lot of people know that trickle-down didn’t necessarily work, they still think that a booming private sector is good, that private-sector jobs are the way to wealth, that government spending crowds out private investment—they still think those things even though they don’t maybe always put them in those words. And so I think that... I think that has had an effect on the way that all Americans vote when it comes to economic well-being. But I don’t think that...
And also the other thing that Reagan did was hasten the decline of unionization and a decline in union density in the United States. And that has definitely had an effect on the way people vote, especially people in trades and people in highly unionized professions—and there also has been a decline in those jobs as well for all sorts of different reasons. So those things have had an effect because unions did organize around politics.
They did organize for Democrats, they did organize for a more generous federal government, around a lot of working-class issues. And yeah, all of those things have had an effect, but I just don’t think that people sit around and look at the way that Democrats design their policy platforms and say, “There’s not enough for me, they’re too... they’re not liberal enough on economic policies,” and therefore abandon them. Some people, some voters do make those kinds of calculations, but...
Bacon: So the other explanation for this often is—you said college is liberalizing, so you get a little bit of that. But there’s also this framing—let’s put it bluntly—that Democrats are too woke, that they’re too culturally liberal, and that this has turned off whites without college degrees.
The other explanation is that whites without college degrees—using different terms, I think the post–social science term is that they have higher levels of racial resentment—or, more politely, that they are more culturally conservative themselves.
So how do you view those explanations?
Potts: I do think that rural areas, especially, where there’s a high concentration of people without college diplomas—people without college degrees—those areas are more culturally conservative generally. They do tend to be older and whiter, and they do have a high amount of racial resentment, and they do resent cities, and they do resent urban elites. But that is not new. That was like a very old kind of attitude. And I think that it was mobilized by the Republican Party. And you can go back to Newt Gingrich, who started to rail about the urban elites... and I think what’s new now is that... this kind of inclusion—every single college grad is now an urban elite, which we know is not true.
But you go to college and you study social work and you’re in the city and you’re a social worker, and someone who owns a car dealership in his hometown thinks of you as an elite person. That’s nice. That’s... that’s new and that’s different. And just calling anyone who has a post-secondary education “elite” I think is new, and that... that’s from the tribe. And that’s interesting and weird.
Bacon: Okay, so let’s—the story is a little bit more complicated now. My reading of the exit polls from, say, 2012 to 2020 and 2024 is that Democrats have lost ground among Asians, African Americans, and Latinos with college degrees, but also without college degrees.
So I don’t necessarily see it as a working-class story or a college story. But there is some evidence that Democrats have lost ground with Asian, Black, and Latino voters, particularly people without degrees. So I think I want to analyze that a little bit. What is the story there? Because that gets away from—you can have—that gets a little bit more toward a racial story, in a certain sense.
So how do you see, particularly, the non-college story there?
Potts: Yeah, so I will say that Democrats have lost ground with those groups, but it’s important to remember that they still win those groups. Yes, they still win majorities of those groups, which I think sometimes gets lost. But I think there’s a few things going on. I think that people tend to forget that for the past 10 years, the vast majority of voters—I won’t, I shouldn’t say the vast majority... a lot of voters still see President Donald Trump fundamentally as a businessman. And so when they think of who’s going to make things better for my pocketbook, who’s going to help me run my restaurant, who’s going to help me run my...
Bacon: Whatever small business I own, brings jobs to the country and bring them back or whatever.
Potts: I’m a local small business owner. I own a mechanic shop or whatever... who’s going to make it better for me? And they tend to just think Trump will because he is a quote-unquote businessman. And so I think they forgot. I think they forgot about the horridness of Covid in the beginning. And in retrospect, Covid didn’t seem as bad as we thought it might be—even though it was very bad actually. But people get nostalgic and they blur over the worst parts of things. And so I think that has a lot to do with it—is that it’s not necessarily a new affinity for Republicans or anger at the Democrats?
I think it’s just in the past few elections, Trump’s rhetoric has been really good at speaking to those groups. He will say some things that they like, and he will put on a hard hat and get into a semi-truck and act like he is going to do things for people who drive trucks for a living. And so I think that’s part of it. I think that’s a huge part of it and an underrated part of it.
Bacon: So unpack. With all that said, we’re now in a place where there’s a New York Times story about how every Democratic figure is using the word affordability now, and you can really see that even some Republicans are using that word.
I think Abigail Spanberger might mean different things when she uses it, but a lot of people are using that word right now. You also have the Democrats deciding to cancel the DNC autopsy—to decide that they’re not going to release an autopsy of 2024. So the question I want to ask is this: Post–2024 election, we’ve had a lot of discourse about what Democrats should do to win the quote-unquote working class.
If you were asked this, would you say, I reject the premise of the question—Democrats should win voters of all kinds, and this working-class framing is silly—or is there a Monica Potts plan for Democrats to win? How do we define the working class, and is there a specific set of things they should do?
Potts: I think, yeah, I think I would reject the premise of the question because I think that one of the things that is always under-discussed when looking at results is the role of non-voters.
And I think that the turnout in the United States is so low in general—a high-turnout presidential election has 66 percent of eligible voters voting in it or something like that. That’s high, and so that’s abysmal, to think about how much is at stake. How many Americans are not voting who could vote? So I think that you have to think about why aren’t people engaged in general, and why aren’t people... so many people who do vote are just voting just on partisanship.
And I’m not a strategist, but I think the idea that Democrats need to go through their policy platform with a scalpel and excise the things that might be bothering working-class voters is really silly because that’s just not how voters make their decisions. I think the thing that Democrats have to decide if they want to win is what to be loud about and how to be loud about it.
And so one of the things we know for sure is that their message is just not getting through as well as Republicans’ messages about them. And there’s a host of different reasons for that. But the decline of local news plays a huge role. We don’t live in a world anymore where you can sit down with a local editorial board at a newspaper, and that holds a lot of sway with the voters in that area.
We don’t live in a world anymore where a nationally televised interview is going to be watched by a lot of people at the same time who are going to use it to make up their minds. And I think that the way to reach voters is changing. And I think that how to be loud about the thing that voters care about over and over again—in a way that makes them believe that you too care about it—is really this: just do politics, go door to door, talk to people, get your message right, repeat your message over and over. I think that this idea that Democrats have tried to become too much of a surgeon and they need to just be a politician.
Bacon: I want to probe this a little bit. Okay. So it seems honest to me that Trump in 2016 was very loud about immigration—build the wall, the Muslim ban. And we can say Zohran Mamdani was very loud about affordability—freeze the rent.
I also thought Kamala Harris was pretty loud about Donald Trump as an authoritarian, crazy person who would end democracy. And I would say Hillary Clinton was loud, too. So are you saying don’t be loud about certain issues that don’t work to be loud about? Or what are we saying here?
Potts: Yeah, I think that there’s a few reasons that didn’t work. I looked at polling, and voters believed that Donald Trump would try to do bad things. But they didn’t believe the worst things that he said he was going to do, and they believed that there would be institutional stops on him. They believed Congress would be able to stop him, and they believed the Supreme Court would be able to stop him. And so they just didn’t see it as a real threat.
Another thing too—one of the things that voters did in states around the country is that some of them voted for Donald Trump while they also voted for a constitutional amendment in their state to protect abortion rights. So they didn’t believe that Donald Trump would go after abortion because he said he wouldn’t, even though he was head of a party that’s had that on their platform for generations.
And so I think we have to keep that in mind again: that voters did not think that he could do... they think he just says crazy things and maybe he would try to do it, but the United States itself is a strong enough institution to stop anything really terrible from happening. And I think that’s a lesson to be learned too, because being head of a party that has promised to raise the minimum wage and protect workers’ rights for decades doesn’t get you anywhere unless you as a candidate are also saying that all the time.
Bacon: So when you say get—okay, so that’s an interesting point. Because I guess there’s this discourse about the party and the platform, but there’s also a discourse that the groups have too much of a voice and that they’re getting in the way. And it’s probably the case now, the way you framed it.
The groups are loud. They are the people who were saying defund the police. They were small in number, but they were loud, and they were very clear about what they were saying. Abortion-rights groups are very loud. I guess you’re right—if you’re Kamala Harris and you have a complicated tax credit to do X, and a group says something loud, that cuts through.
Okay, so this is—so what does a party look like when it’s doing that? Is that what it is? How would they sound loud, about what? How would that look? Play that out. They need to sound loud about some things. What does that look like?
Potts: Yeah, I mean I do think that part of what they need to be loud about is changing the economic story of America, because I do... overall, Americans do say they vote based on the economy—like that’s their number one issue almost all the time. And that’s... the economy is a huge word, and we could get into what they mean when they say that, but they do want to feel that they’re doing well in their lives. They want to have savings. They want to be able to relax and afford the things that they need. They want to think that their kids are going to do better than they’re doing. That’s like the fundamental American dream. That’s what they want: that they want a president who helps us do that, or doesn’t stop us from doing that.
And I think that Democrats need to work really hard to change the economic story that Ronald Reagan told. And they need to say, “Right now, private wealth is bad. It’s keeping you from affording the things that you want. America right now is actually still one of the wealthiest societies that the earth has ever seen, but it’s really unfair that there’s no starter homes to buy if you’re, like, a family where the one person is a teacher and one person is like a mechanic.” Like, it’s hard to buy a house if you are that family.
And I think that those kinds of stories are really important to change about the economy. I think that it would be undermining that idea that, like, private wealth generates wealth for all of us—that the government has no role in ensuring your economic security. I would change that story. Have a campaign speech written.
Bacon: As we were talking, I was thinking that maybe fighting oligarchy—I liked that, and I was glad that tour happened. But is Zohran Mamdani’s campaign a more effective form of whatever we’re talking about here? Like economic—I hate the term economic populism; it doesn’t really say anything. But is Mamdani, in a way, talking more about your life and how to make your life more affordable?
The oligarchy may be making your life unaffordable, but maybe you want to lead with affordability and then talk to people about the oligarchy, rather than leading with the oligarchy.
Potts: Yeah, no, I think fighting the oligarchy is a little too abstract. And sounds uninteresting—sounds like a class assignment or something, all due... But I think that, yeah, I think Mamdani’s campaign was better because it was... it started from the person’s position. And also just Mamdani was a fantastic campaigner. Like, he was out in communities getting to know people, knocking on people’s doors.
He was listening to the things that they were saying, and he was framing a lot of his... a lot of his messages around the things that people were concerned about. But he also brought people together, created a sense of community around his campaign. He did fun things and reminded people about why they live in New York, even though it’s so expensive. So it wasn’t just all “New York’s a hellscape and you can’t afford anything.” It was like, “Look at this fantastic city. Let’s do a scavenger hunt in it and look at your neighbors and how great they are. And also let’s try to make sure that it stays this great for...” I don’t know how you nationalize it, but I think it’s doable, and I think it... it would be really important to do.
Bacon: So your autopsy would start with worldwide inflation. Joe Biden waited too long to run. Kamala had a hundred—or whatever—107 days. I guess she has a book. So I guess I do know this: You’d start with that.
But then what was—so I guess, on some level, I know there’s a debate. It’s bad the party did not release its autopsy. On the other hand, I do think I know why Kamala Harris lost. Do we need it? What did you make of this whole thing over the last week?
Potts: I would personally be interested in reading the autopsy.
I’m a journalist. But I don’t think it matters. People aren’t going to remember in six months that they didn’t do it.
Bacon: No. Forget about voters. Do you think we would’ve learned anything?
Potts: No. I don’t think we would learn anything. I think we know why they lost. I don’t see in retrospect any way that she could have won. She was handed almost an impossible job. Fundamentally, I think that the thing that people keep forgetting—that I think it’s really important not to forget—is that last year was an anti-incumbent year across the board, around the globe, around the world.
Because there had just been in the four years that Biden was in office just a massive upheaval of the world—a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, a crazy economy that followed that, a lot of destruction and death and sadness. The start of the war in Ukraine, just a lot of stuff that really was no individual leader’s fault and a shifting world underneath their feet, and they wanted change. And so I think that was hard to combat across the board. And I think it’s really important not to think too much more. I don’t.
Bacon: The country was not—as this tells us—very little about the Democrats. It tells us the country is frustrated with incumbents and frustrated with Trump, not necessarily that Democrats have figured out affordability based on Mikie Sherrill saying these four things.
But how did you see the last result? I think the Democrats are right that they don’t necessarily need to release an autopsy, because they’ve figured it out. Because Trump being in the White House fixes—or accounts for—88 percent of their problems. Is that how you see it, too?
Potts: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like, I do think voters still want change. I think people voted for Trump not believing a lot of what he said, or not even really knowing a lot of what he said he was going to do. And now that he’s in, obviously they don’t like it, and for the next four years that is going to continue to be served up on a platter to Democrats. It’s easy to run against that. And so I do think that Democrats have to think about if they do get back in Washington, if they do get back power, they have to think about how to keep it.
And I do think that the affordability issue is important because it is true that people feel that they can’t be comfortable financially in their lives—that no matter how hard they work, it gets sucked up into their electricity bills. They end up paying more for their home insurance; every raise that they get goes out the door straight away. And that is incredibly frustrating and disheartening for thinking about what the future holds. And so I think pounding on that is good.
Bacon: Last question. You said when I said about should they focus on the working class, you were like, “I reject the premise of that...” So do you think about the world in terms of voting blocs, in terms of states, in terms of racial groups, in terms of like... how do you? Just think voters are the moderates? Ideology? Do you think about the world? Because we’re having a lot of discussion about which, how, who they need to woo. And your... and you said nonvoters is one thing you said. So is that the group you’d press on the most?
Potts: Yeah. They need to make sure that all their voters get out. They need to make sure that—which is going to entail getting them back in the game, because they’re frustrated and upset. They need to make sure that marginal voters get out and vote for them. They really should try to reach out to nonvoters. That’s harder, and that’s why politicians don’t ever do it. But that would probably change the game a bit. But I think also they just need to be loud about the right things.
And then swing voters who make their decisions in September of 2026 will just have heard more about them and be more likely to listen to what they’re saying because it takes so much to break through. I think they need to think about that. I think they need to—as far as voting blocs—think about how to reach those groups best. But the message, I think, is the same. Enough thinking.
Bacon: Is that something they should be loud about? Or do you mean loud economics, or being loud about a lot of other things, too?
Potts: Yeah. They should be loud about what’s going on with ICE, because it’s terrible, and people truly did not want that.
They voted for it, but they might not have realized that they were voting for it.
Bacon: Great place to end on. Great to see you. Happy holidays. I don’t think I’ll see you before the holidays. Take care.
Potts: Yeah, you too. Happy holidays, everybody. Thank you.
Bacon: Thank you.
Potts: Bye-bye. Thanks.
