This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 24 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: And I’m Perry Bacon, the host. I’m joined by one of my colleagues, Monica Potts, who writes about class politics, the working class, which we’ll come back to in a little bit, and policy, particularly on economics as well. So Monica, thanks for joining me.
Monica Potts: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Bacon: So we’re going to talk about two pieces you wrote recently that I thought were really important and interesting. The first is—I tell people all the time, “We don’t write the headlines,” but in this case I think the headline does capture something about the piece: “The term working class is useless.” So talk about—in political coverage, the term working class is used. But that really is a synonym for what? Why is the term working class being used improperly right now? What are we talking about when we’re defining the working class in most articles right now?
Potts: Yeah. I think part of the issue that I wanted to get into is that everybody means something different when they say it. But I would say most of the time in politics, people are using it as a shorthand for people who didn’t graduate from college, so they don’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Bacon: That’s about 60 percent of US adults, something like that, right?
Potts: Yeah. It’s a huge group of people. Only about a third to maybe 35 percent of Americans have bachelor’s degrees at any given time. It doesn’t mean that those other people didn’t go to college. A lot of people go to college and drop out, actually.
And so it’s just the majority of Americans. It encompasses a huge number of people who are making their living in entirely different ways. It includes people who might be married to someone with a bachelor’s degree. And I would say too, if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, that means something entirely different in New York City or Washington, DC, where a lot of writers live, versus where I’m from in rural Arkansas, or where I live now in rural upstate New York.
Bacon: So why has working class come to be defined as not having a bachelor’s degree?
Potts: I would say partly because it’s easiest. When we do exit polling, when we do surveys, a lot of the time the people who conduct those ask people about their education level, so it’s very easily measured.
And so a lot of people during the Obama era started to make the argument that was a good enough synonym, or a good enough proxy, to use for people who were working class, because generally having a bachelor’s degree correlates with having maybe a managerial position, or having a white-collar job, or making more money.
And not having a bachelor’s degree means that you might make less than the median, or you might be a worker that we think of, a blue-collar worker, or somebody who has a boss that they have to answer to. All of the other sociological definitions of working class are very involved and specific, and sociologists and economists are probably still going to use the term working class no matter what I say, because they have a very specific definition.
But I say it’s not a good proxy, and it’s especially not a good proxy for the people who are in Trump’s camp, which are older Americans—
Bacon: Let me jump back a little bit. You said something about the Obama era. In 1987, would we have defined working—there’s no defined view, but in 1987 were people less likely to say college, non-college means working class? How was working class defined in, like, 1987?
Potts: Yeah. First of all, the landscape was different. Even fewer people had college degrees. And I think that in 1987, working class, what it still connotes today, might have been closer to true. It was usually a man working in a factory, working in construction, working in a manual labor job or a physical labor job. And so I think that’s still what we think of. The economy has changed a lot.
What happened in the Obama era is that how people without college degrees voted switched. So it used to be that people with college degrees voted Republican pretty reliably, and people without college degrees, we tend to think of them as the union base in the past, voted for Democrats. And that completely flipped in the Obama era, and it’s still flipping today. It’s one of the biggest divides in American politics.
Bacon: So what would be a more useful definition of working class?
Potts: I think a more useful definition of working class screens out for income first. So in today’s economy especially, you have people with bachelor’s degrees who would otherwise identify, and be identified, as working class. So they are workers. They show up, they clock in, somebody’s monitoring them. They have bosses, they have managers. They’re not in control of their working hours.
The median income for families in America in 2026 was about 87,000, and for full-time workers it was about 66,000. Social workers, teachers, a lot of them make less than that. They have bachelor’s degrees. So I would lop off income first. Somebody without a bachelor’s degree who makes more than $100,000 a year, that’s a different story, and those people do exist.
Bacon: So let me just stop you for a second. The median income for a full-time worker is $66,000, you’re saying, for one individual. So somebody who makes $60,000, you’d say is in the working class, even if they have four degrees?
Potts: You could make an argument. Because another component I would say that you have to look at, in addition to income, is the kind of job that they have. So a freelance writer with a master’s degree might make $66,000 a year because they’re working on a book, and they’re not earning as much income.
So I think that sociologists and economists look at the kinds of jobs people are doing as well, and that also matters, I think, to working class. Because if you’re in complete control of your workday, your work life, and you’re making less money for reasons that you chose, it’s a different story, I would say. It doesn’t mean you’re not struggling, but I don’t think the term working class is useful in that situation.
Bacon: But part of what you’re saying is that in 1987, the working class might be a man in a factory. Part of that was already always problematic, because plenty of people of color, and women—we’re probably really talking about white men—were working class in 1987. And also, factory never covered the—there were plenty of people working as domestics and so on, and all kinds of other jobs. So we want to define this away from the factory job, right?
Potts: Yeah. It was more true in 1987 than it is today that that described a lot of workers. And it always left people out. And now it leaves a vast majority of the working class out, because you have people, as you said, doing domestic labor, doing home healthcare, doing healthcare, that are working class by any definition, and they might have some certifications.
And you have people doing pink collar jobs who might have bachelor’s degrees or might not, and a lot of those are women, and they’re especially women of color. So I think that is a huge reason to stop using the word working class, because our political image of what that word means hasn’t caught up to the reality.
Bacon: All right, so college education, bad way to measure working class. You’re hinting that income, work conditions are more useful. So there’s the other framing, which comes from the DSA. I think Zohran Mamdani, if you listen to him carefully, is trying to say the working class is anyone who doesn’t own capital, functionally.
Anybody who—I think he would probably say if you have a 401(k) and a house, that’s one thing. But if you own a business, if you are an executive at a big company, then you’re not in the working class, you have a lot of capital. How do you view that? So working class is like the 99 percent, on some level. It’s everyone but the real capital owners.
Potts: Yeah. I understand what he’s trying to do, and I think that politically, especially for somebody who describes themselves as a social democrat or democratic socialist, it makes sense to set workers against owners, which is what he’s trying to do. I would just call them the workers, which you can do. You and I are both workers.
But I don’t think that it’s useful to call them the working class, because I still think that carries with it a lot of assumptions about how people’s economic struggles—and people’s economic struggles are different.
You can make a super solid argument that people in the middle class today, even the upper middle class, aren’t earning enough of what they should be earning. That they’re increasing productivity and the ownership class is getting it all. You can make that argument without using a word that I think is imperfect, and used too often, and has become useless, like the working class. You can just call them workers.
Bacon: We had an academic on, on Monday, and she was talking about the fact that people in academia, journalism particularly, but other fields too, there is a precarity that I think is becoming more important in these sort of white collar jobs that used to be more stable. Journalism, very unstable. Academia, but other fields too.
So I think it is useful to say we’re in an industry with some precarity, and maybe more than it used to be, without saying we’re in the working class, right? And we do have more threat than if we owned capital and owned the business. The precarity does matter here.
Potts: I think so, yeah. And a lot of small business owners are in a very precarious position.
Bacon: That’s fair. Elon Musk is not, but right, yeah.
Potts: Yeah, exactly. So you can make a lot of arguments about the way that the economy is set up against all of those people, for various reasons, and how we should change the structure of the economy in a way that helps the vast majority of us and not the Elon Musks who are getting their unfair share. You can do that without relying on words like the working class, I think.
Bacon: So the piece made a couple of interventions, but would your goal be to say we should define the working class based on income and work conditions, not college education? Or do you think we should just abandon the whole term and be more precise?
Potts: I do think maybe journalists need to think about abandoning it, because nobody defines it, and everyone defines it differently in their pieces or in their publications. And how readers are going to read it, at this point, has become so muddled that I think it’s worth it for us, most of the time—unless we’re quoting someone, or talking about an organization that specifically targets the working class, in which case we should say how they define it—I think we should try to avoid it and be more specific, because it’s just become meaningless in journalism.
And again, I think that’s not true for organizations that do research and define it in a way that they specify every time.
Bacon: So let me push back, only to say—you cited at the beginning of your story an analysis that was published in Jacobin. I think the creators of it were the Center for Working Class Politics, and they defined working class so broadly it would include people whose incomes are $150,000 a year.
So they’re stretching working class to pretty upper middle class income. So my thought is that you and I, and most reasonable people, could agree that working class probably does not include people whose income is $200,000 a year if they don’t have a college degree. I think it’s obvious that working class doesn’t include Bill Gates, who doesn’t have a BA.
So is part of the effort here, by the sort of class left and the sort of centrist Democratic center, to define working class in a way that makes that bloc more Republican, if I want to say that? If you define working class the way you or I are defining it, you would include Black women who have college degrees with low income, and you’d probably include more Democrats, is my guess, right?
Potts: Yeah. All of this started in a way that was trying to figure out what had happened when people elected Trump in 2016. And that was the year that the non-college educated, especially non-college educated whites, but more recently there’s been a shift to non-college educated Latinos and Black voters, towards the Republican Party.
And there’s a certain group of people who want that to be a class story. They want it to be an economic story. They want it to be a money story. And I think using the term working class tries to communicate that in some way, that these people are voting for Trump because of the economy.
Bacon: And the centrists wanted it to be an elitism story. So the working class is a different set. But anyway, go ahead.
Potts: Yeah. And there’s been a similar effort at the same time by Republicans and by the right to define anyone associated with college, anyone who has a college degree, anyone who works at a college especially, as elite. And that is just not true. And so I think that partly I would want to avoid working class because I wouldn’t want to play into that game. Especially, but also because working class has become now a political identifier.
So you see Republicans being more likely, at any income level and no matter their job, to identify themselves as working class. It used to be that everybody in America wanted to identify themselves as middle class.
And I do think that those broad trends do speak to a sense of precarity that people feel, but they also speak to a lot of other things. A business owner, or somebody who owns a really big farm in the South who doesn’t want changes to the guest worker program that would require him to pay his workers more, and who doesn’t want taxes on the land that he owns, may be operating on thin margins, but their interests in the economy are different from someone who’s a social worker earning $45,000 a year who thinks that they should be paid more.
Bacon: Because I was reading your piece, I thought, if we define working class as $60,000 of income or below, and we can define different fields you’re in, and you don’t have paid leave, there probably are policies that would help everyone or most people in that class of people. Versus, what policy would benefit everyone who doesn’t have a BA seems very broad and hard to understand. Versus, what policy would help people who are below a certain income—I think I could get pretty closely to coming up with a policy, right?
Potts: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s where the specificity comes in. How Mamdani defines the working class is anybody who doesn’t own things. There are policies that would help that vast group of people. They’re different from things like increasing the minimum wage, which does help.
I think increasing the minimum wage usually helps everyone, but that specifically helps people who make minimum wage now. And so I think that if you’re talking about specific policy interventions, it’s just useful to be more specific.
Bacon: So this college, non-college thing is happening, as you said. It is true that college graduates have become more Democratic the last 20 years, and non-college graduates have become more Republican.
And by saying working class, that implies that Republicans have great economic policies for low-income people and Democrats don’t, when it’s, of course, the opposite. Or, Democrats aren’t great on that, but they’re better than Republicans are. So if the education story is not about class and economics, what is it about?
Potts: It’s hard to exactly say, but I think there are a lot of things going on. One is that people who live in rural America are usually much less likely to have a bachelor’s degree than people who live in cities. So that divide is already well-described, and I think it could partly be correlated with that.
I think that you have a lot of people without bachelor’s degrees who are trying to make their living as a business owner, and they have economic reasons that they might be invested in trying to align themselves with the Republican Party.
The economics of the Republican Party as traditionally the party of small businesses might be appealing to them for other reasons. And even if the income that they bring home is not that much, they think of themselves as a business owner.
And I think also that different things happen when you go to college. If you go and you stay in college and you liked it, then you liked the kind of education that college provides, which tends to be something that people with a more liberal upbringing would appreciate in a different way than somebody who has a more conservative upbringing, or somebody who believes that they should stay home and raise a family.
Bacon: Both choosing to go to college, and maybe attending college, puts you in a more multicultural, pluralistic environment. Is that what we’re hinting at?
Potts: Yeah, exactly. And so if you like it, and you stay—and also, if you have a bachelor’s degree, you’re going to usually find better job opportunities in cities, and so you’re going to go to a city, which helps reinforce that urban-rural divide.
And additionally, if you’re in a different economic bracket in your upbringing, you’re more likely to go to college as well. And so a lot of what we’re talking about with non-college-educated voters, and areas with a lot of non-college-educated voters, they are people who are eligible to vote, but least likely to vote.
So in places like where I grew up in rural Arkansas, you have people who didn’t go to college who are still working at the jobs they got in high school at Taco Bell or McDonald’s or other fast food places, or they’re working at Dollar General, or if they got lucky, they got a job as a clerk at the local government building or something like that.
And so I think that group of people, in their earlier years especially, are least likely to vote. And I think that’s who we often are thinking about when we’re thinking about the policies that would help low-income workers the most, and they’re not even voting necessarily. So I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind.
Bacon: So if the Democratic Party is trying to reach people with lower incomes, versus the Democratic Party is trying to reach people without college degrees, how would those look different, we think? I think the problem is the second, not the first. But if you were trying to reach people with lower incomes, you would do X. What would you do if you’re trying to reach people who don’t have college degrees? How would that be different, maybe?
Potts: Reaching people who don’t have college degrees?
Bacon: Yes. Versus reaching people who have lower incomes. We’re talking about two different dimensions of class, I think. How would they result in different politics is what I’m trying to ask.
Potts: I wouldn’t try to moderate on economic policy issues that are aimed at the kinds of people who voted for Trump. If somebody voted for Trump and is a non-college degree holder and is a car salesman and makes actually a pretty good living, then that person is not going to be swayed by—
Bacon: Raising the minimum wage. They have the money.
Potts: Yeah, increasing the minimum wage. I think it’s incumbent upon any progressive who cares about democracy in the US to really worry about how low our turnout rates are for elections, and to try to get more people registered to vote, make voting easier, and get them in to vote, which I think would change the map a little bit. It would change the denominator on who’s voting where.
And so then you might get the 22-year-old clerks at Dollar General who are least likely to vote now thinking about what policies would help them. I think things like increasing the minimum wage and a public option for healthcare would help a lot of people, whether they identify as working class or not.
And so I think the mistake that the parties make is when they try to misread why people are voting the way that they’re voting. And so, people without a college degree who are voting Republican, it’s not necessarily economics that has switched them over, or not economics in the way that we’re thinking about it.
Bacon: And we think using the word working class might put in your brain that we’re talking about economics. That’s part of the issue, right?
Potts: Yeah. We’re talking about people who are struggling economically. We’re talking about workers. And working class comes from a kind of materialistic view of the world. It’s just inherently part of an economic framework that we understand, and that’s why I think that talking about working class is not useful for political journalists, maybe not for politicians either.
Bacon: So the exit polls do include income, though, right? So should we just quote that more? I think Kamala did worse among lower income people than, like, Al Gore did too. But would it be better to start with income?
People are always going to write stories and so on. Your point would be to do income, education, race, religion separately, and not do a mega category of working class?
Potts: Exactly, yeah. Working class, I think, is not a good proxy for the things that people are trying to use it to talk about. And also, in 2024, people felt like the economy was bad, and so voting for Democrats in that context was a different story as well. So I think people overread these signals a lot as well.
Bacon: OK. Now I’m going to move to—”move” is funny. I moved to New York to pay more in taxes, and I’m glad I did. So talk about why you were living in Arkansas.
Potts: I’m from Arkansas. I’m from a small town in the southern part of the Ozarks. I had been living in DC for a lot of years as a journalist, and I’d lived on the East Coast since I left for college. And I was working on a book about my hometown, and that was a big part of the reason I moved back.
And so I lived there for five years with my partner. And there are a bunch of reasons that in the beginning we thought we might stay. It’s affordable, it’s beautiful, it’s where I’m from, my mom’s still there, and we like to live out in the country among trees and cows and horses.
And we changed our opinions over the course of being there. And one big part of it, and it wasn’t the only part, was this sort of disregard for the idea that governments can provide social services to people and can make life easier for people. So that was a huge part of it, in addition to the summers being way too hot, and climate change disrupting the climate I was used to there.
It just was really hard to get normal life done. Everything took more time. Everything from getting our city water fixed to taking our trash to the dump became a huge hassle, and I just realized how much of my life that was taking up, as opposed to the things I wanted to do, which was invest in my community and live my life and work. So that was a huge part of it, and so we moved to New York State.
Bacon: And talk about why New York State is better. What community are you in? You’re not in New York City, you’re in New York State. So what community are you in, and why is that better?
Potts: Yeah. I’m in northern Oneida County, north of Utica. And Utica’s kind of the city that we shop in, although we have stuff here too. We’re not in a super small town. But first of all, trash pickup is so much better. That sounds so—
Bacon: Very practical, trash pickup. Yes.
Potts: Yeah. It matters. That sounds so quotidian. But when you live in a place that doesn’t do stuff like that routinely, or well, it makes a huge difference on your quality of life, and everything else is like that too. Our electricity is better. Our heating system in the winter is better, and we are always in communication with those services if anything goes awry.
There’s no stray dogs and cats running around, which was a huge stressor for us in Arkansas, because dogs would just show up in your yard and there was nobody to come pick them up, because there wasn’t really robust animal control services.
Now we have roads that work. The roads are always plowed. There’s not potholes everywhere. There’s a really well-funded library system. Just everything that you don’t think about until it’s not there is better, and it makes our lives easier in that way.
Bacon: Did you move from very small town Arkansas to medium-sized town New York? And would it be different if you lived in very small town New York and medium-sized Arkansas? Or do you think these differences are state-based?
Potts: They’re state-based, yeah. And also, I live in a medium-sized town compared to—the town I moved from was 2,500 people, and the town I live in now is about 5,000 people, so it’s not that big.
Bacon: Oh, OK. I don’t think I realized that totally.
Potts: Yeah, but it is in a bigger county. But I know from experience that there was a county south of my home county in Arkansas that had the same problems that we did. They didn’t have a county level animal control. Animal control is a huge issue that, if you don’t think about, can really—
Bacon: No, I didn’t think about it.
Potts: —can really change your life. Because dogs and cats need to be taken care of and controlled. And if somebody has a loose cow, you need to know who to call about it. And so those things matter, especially in rural areas.
And then also, even when we travel up into the mountains, it’s more densely populated. Even though there are small towns here, they’re more densely populated. That makes a difference as well. But I think that there’s just a sense of an idea that we have to preserve and take care of the place that we live, that is taken for granted here, and I think it’s something you don’t realize until you move to a place where that doesn’t exist.
Bacon: So part of what has resonated with you—I live in Louisville, Kentucky, which runs better. We don’t have animal control problems. But we do have, and we didn’t get into the politics of it, all these crazy bills to ban speaking, to limit our universities. You can’t say X word in public, and all the sort of normal things: lower taxes, weak social services. The Appalachia part of the state is being disinvested from rapidly, low wages, right to work, so all the things that happen.
So when the abundance book comes out, and then we’re having this discourse about how Texas is great because you can still build up there, and California is terrible because it’s expensive, I was thinking, there’s a lot of other things going on in Texas beyond housing. The housing is—what are we missing here? And then, as far as I know, the author of Abundance, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, does not live in Texas or Alabama.
And so I was thrown off by—there are problems in red state America, and there are benefits of being in blue state America, and I thought that discourse was frustrating to watch. And now Nick Kristof is very focused on, the test scores have gone up in Mississippi or Alabama, and why doesn’t the rest of the country learn from that?
I still think you want your kids to go to school in Massachusetts over most places. I think that’s obviously true. And so what do you think that’s about? I found this discourse to be very strange.
Potts: Yeah. I think part of it is that the lived experience that you have in those places isn’t something that you can always know from the numbers. Housing is cheap in Texas, cheaper than it is in California. But if you have a disaster in Texas, if your house is destroyed in a hurricane or a flood in Houston, you have less recourse, because the state probably allowed you to live in a place that was a flood zone without proper flood insurance, because there aren’t as many regulations.
And actually there are stories coming out of Texas like that, where low-income people who may have been able to buy houses have a much harder time recovering from those disasters and moving back to their towns, and aren’t getting back their money from the houses they bought.
And so there are a lot of regulations and a lot of protections for people that make sense, that we shouldn’t think about waiving just to build housing. If we built housing without thinking about those things, then it costs the poorest people on the back end. So yeah, you can get a cheaper house up front, but you’re more precarious, like we were talking about before, for a variety of reasons.
And I would say the same is true of Arkansas. We definitely spent more money on our house and pay higher taxes now to live in New York, and we wouldn’t trade it for the world.
There is a huge affordable housing problem, and a lot of it does come down to a lack of supply. But there are also cheap houses in places where life doesn’t provide as many opportunities, and I think that was the component missing from the abundance argument. How do we think about ways to get people opportunities in cities that they are trying to leave now?
Bacon: I guess the thing is, you’re living in New York, but not New York City. California, I think, has high housing costs in a lot of places, but Illinois, Maryland, Rhode Island—I’d be curious. Is housing unaffordable or super unaffordable where you live? Because you don’t live in New York City.
Potts: No, it’s not. Here’s the thing, and I’ve also written about this. There is very cheap housing here. It tends to be old, and it needs serious remediation, especially for things like lead paint. And so the opportunities for people to get naturally affordable housing, which is what we call just cheap housing, are slimmer, because it’s harder to get a loan, because the house might not appraise.
There are loans specifically for first-time home buyers that provide funds for doing the kinds of renovations that those homes need. They’re impossible to get, and they’re impossible to use. They’re really difficult to use. And so there are houses here that are less than $100,000, less than $200,000, that are difficult for people to buy, even though they could easily afford the mortgage payments on those. So I think that’s another component.
Bacon: Need policy in that area, probably. That would be helpful to have policy.
Potts: Yeah. We need policy for more low-income people buying cheaper, older homes, and think about how to revive that housing stock. Because if you went through Utica and tore down all the old houses and built new houses, they would be less affordable, so I think that’s part of it too. You could encourage remote workers to move to places like where I work, but unless they have a lot of cash, they can’t deal with the challenges of owning an old home.
Bacon: Because I was left, at the sort of abundance discourse, knowing what it’s like living in a red state, being like, maybe we should have better housing policies in San Francisco, in Boston, in Los Angeles, but also we should move to a blue state, but not the most expensive area in that state, is what I was thinking.
Don’t move to Alabama, and probably don’t move—maybe Texas is better, but I think if you look at the state government sitting in Texas, I don’t think you want to necessarily invest in Texas all the time, especially if you’re Black, a college professor, transgender, all these identities that the governments in these places are really against and very hostile to. I know there are plenty of Black people who live in Houston and Atlanta, but I think those state governments are not necessarily investing in them. I think it’s fairly obvious to say.
Potts: Yeah. And those cities tend to have their own money, to some degree, not always. But if you’re in a big city in a red state, you’re still going to have interventions from the state government that make the way that you want to live in that city harder. And the things that you’re talking about are really important. I experienced Arkansas as a woman, and it became harder to get OB-GYN care, because people don’t want to practice in a state where they’re—
Bacon: They’re nervous about all these laws.
Potts: They’re nervous about all the laws, and that’s true. And nobody wants to live in a place where they’re worried about what they’re going to say, and what their kids are going to learn in school, and whether their kids can get the books that they want from the library. Those are really important things about how people live their lives that I think are also underappreciated.
Bacon: So you’re in New York. What do you think about the housing issue, though, in the big cities? There is a problem there. If you were advising Zohran Mamdani, what would you say about the housing issue?
Potts: I think he’s already doing a lot of cool stuff with the land that the city already owns. I’ve written about this too, but I think the supply folks miss that developers can develop luxury apartments that go half rented and still pencil out their investment. And so nobody’s ever going to invest in building housing for very low income people. And housing for low income families in New York, as it is now, goes off area median income.
Whenever developers are required to set aside 10 or 20 percent of the units that they’re building in a building to be affordable for the area median income, the incomes can get quite high, because the area median income in New York City is quite high. So you’re still going to leave off people at the bottom.
And I think that the only answer is also more robust public housing, and people call it social housing now. But almost any country that houses its lower income people and low income workers, and even early career workers who aren’t making as much as they will later, is doing it through government intervention in the private market.
Bacon: Last thing. The piece mentions the fact that in blue states you generally have better health outcomes. That’s the main—better, usually, what else? Educational attainment, food security, median income. By most measures of societal health, blue states are ahead of red states. So that could be two things.
One, it could be that richer people choose to move to blue states, and therefore this is an effect of cohorts. Or it could be that blue states create these better conditions. Why do you think it might be the second and not the first? Or do you think it’s a combination of both?
Potts: It probably is a combination of both, especially for cities, because cities with really good numbers, it’s because they’re pulling in people who are already in a better position. And it’s self-selecting. But I have people in my family and in my life who rely on social services.
My husband is a case manager for people with health issues, and I see the kinds of services that they have access to, and the kind of care that they get, as opposed to places like Arkansas, where the social service interventions tend to concentrate on trying to get people off government programs—getting them off food stamps, getting them into work, getting them off Medicaid. Things like the work requirements that we’ve now seen pass at the national level for Medicaid, which—Medicaid’s not designed to get people into work. It’s designed to get people medical care that they need.
And once you start introducing those other ideas into that program, it interferes with the care that they need. Here I’ve witnessed with my own eyes people getting the care and the help that they need in a much more robust way.
Bacon: So you would assume the better outcomes of blue states are in part because they are providing better services?
Potts: Yeah, I believe that is true from my own experience, yeah.
Bacon: OK, final question. Since you worked at FiveThirtyEight, as did I—what are you making of, do you believe the polls? I hate to ask this. I know Elliott Morris and a lot of my friends do polling and believe in polling.
But on the one hand, I keep reading polls about the generic ballot is Democrats plus 10, Talarico’s doing well, and so on. And I know that a general election is different, but the primary polls were so bad. The Wisconsin result was totally different than what we projected. The Michigan result in the primary was much closer. I know we had these huge polling failures two months ago, but now we’re—so how do you view the polls right now?
Potts: Yeah. Elliott Morris was on On the Media talking about this, and it was no surprise to me that the primary polls were very bad. And I think that they were probably bad because of their likely voter screens. The people who turned out to vote in those primaries weren’t the same that they thought would turn out. And so I believe what the polls are telling us right now. I just don’t know what that means for November.
Bacon: Why is the likely voter sampling better for general elections than primaries? Couldn’t the same problem happen in the same way?
Potts: Yeah, the same problem could happen. I think this has been one of the challenges in the Trump era, is figuring out who’s actually going to vote. I think that it was already baked in that Democrats were going to have a much easier time this year. I think that one thing we have to be careful of is looking at races where—like in Texas, where the Republican candidate does seem very bad.
He had the ads against him about stealing pens, stealing people’s pens and stuff, which I think would be very damaging in any normal year. And compared to that, Talarico is a better candidate. I don’t know how many voters who are going to actually vote are evaluating candidates on those scales.
I don’t know if they’re just purely motivated by partisanship anymore, and partisanship is kind of this alchemy that doesn’t have to do with how people think about the issues as much as we think it does. It has to do with who you’re around, and what you’re feeling, what the vibes are. And so I think polls against vibes is always really hard to tell.
Bacon: And I guess what I’m getting at is, if you told me—if I didn’t see a poll the entire cycle, I would tell you the Republicans just won the presidency, so the Democrats are likely to win the House. It’s this very small number of seats that’ll flip. And because the Senate map is where it is and so on, the Democrats will gain one or two seats, but be short in the House.
So in some ways, I can trust the models in the sense that they already told me stuff I already knew, which is that Democrats are favored for the House, the Senate is close. The models right now are saying the Democrats are the favorites in the Senate, but I’m guessing many of these people, if they sat down with me and we discussed it, and I bet money and they bet money—if I had to bet, I would bet on Paxton winning in Texas despite every poll I’ve seen, and I would bet on Jon Ossoff not winning by 10 points or whatever. I would bet on Roy Cooper winning by two and not 12.
And so in some ways I do worry that if we’re looking at the polls seriously—but none of us really believe Roy Cooper’s going to win by 10, do we? You don’t either, it sounds like.
Monica Potts: No, I think Nate Silver’s projection the last time I looked at it was 59 percent odds of capturing the Senate for Democrats, or something like that. That’s almost a coin toss. That’s almost even.
Yeah. So I think that’s fair. I think that everything that we’re looking at, versus partisanship and structure of the Senate—you can say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Democrats might have a better than normal year for the Senate races,” and I believe that’s true. I think Talarico’s going to do better than we think. I don’t necessarily know if that’s going to be enough to win.
And I would be suspicious, because Texas is just conservative. It’s a conservative state. And so it really is a matter of who stays home and turns out, I think, for the most part.
And then I think the same is true of Maine. I’ve always thought Susan Collins is vulnerable, especially now, but I don’t think people there associate her with MAGA as much, and she has incumbency, and people just don’t think about politics as much as we do. And yeah, I would say they’re probably going to win the House. I don’t know by how much. And I would say the Senate is almost a coin toss.
Bacon: The Democrats are probably going to win the House.
Potts: Yeah, the Democrats are going to win the House, yeah.
Bacon: Related to the polling, I guess we’re seeing polls where Trump is in the low 30s now, or 35, 33. Again, I think it’s fair to say Trump is less popular than he was at the start of his term. I think that’s true, because the same polls are showing Trump going down. So that’s fine. I’m dubious.
I wonder if the election day exit poll will show Trump’s approval rating among the voters is more like 39 than 33. Again, I’m suggesting that maybe the sample is underselling. Is Trump more unpopular than he was this time last year? Yes. Is Trump at George W. Bush levels of unpopularity? I would say I don’t know, because the surveys are too liberal-leaning. That’s what I would say.
Potts: Also, I would say another thing that I feel like is always underappreciated is that people don’t like Trump and they still vote for him. They will think he’s doing a bad job and still vote for him. That happened in 2024. People who said, I don’t like Trump and I don’t like all these things he said, still voted for him.
Bacon: So do you mean—that doesn’t matter in this case, though. Do you think people who don’t like Trump, who are Republicans, are going to vote for the Republican? I’m saying they’re going to vote for Ken Paxton despite disapproving of Trump. Do you agree with me?
Potts: Yeah, I agree with you. So even if they disapprove of Republicans in general, they’re going to be like, Oh, it’s still better than the Democrats, or, Ken Paxton, there’s other things in place that’ll keep the worst things that they’re saying from happening. So yeah, I just don’t know.
Bacon: All right. Monica Potts, great to see you. Thanks for talking. Good to see you.
Potts: Yeah, thank you so much.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
