Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.Later in the show: Pennsylvania is the state where this year’s election may well be decided—and where nearly two-thirds of voters don’t have college degrees.  Eyal Press went to Pennsylvania to find out what working class people there are thinking about and talking about in this election. 
But first: The Undecideds:  How can they still be undecided?  Rick Perlstein will explain – in a minute.
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We need to talk about the undecided voters. Last week, The New York Times reported that one in six voters were, quote, “still unsure of their choice.” That’s millions of potential voters, hundreds of thousands in swing states. Of course, our first response is how can anyone be undecided at this point. That is crazy. After eight years of Trump in our lives, what more do you need to know about him? But what many undecided say is that they need to know more about Kamala. Well, okay, that’s not completely crazy. When pollsters ask, people say they want to hear more from her about the economy, or the border, or something else. So what does Kamala have to do to win their votes? How can we understand the undecideds?
For comment and analysis, we turn to Rick Perlstein. He’s the award-winning author of that four-volume series on the history of America’s political and cultural divisions from the ’50s to the election of Reagan, including the unforgettable books, Nixonland and Reaganland. He’s written for Mother Jones, Slate, The New York Times and The Nation. Now he writes regularly for The American Prospect. Rick, welcome back. Where are you?

Rick Perlstein: I’m at my cabin out in the woods in Marshall County, Illinois, doing participant observation among the Trump voters.

JW: Great. Well, the pundits have lots of advice for Kamala. They say she has to be clearer on the issues or else how are the undecided voters going to be able to decide who to vote for in the couple of weeks that remain? You say the most important piece of political journalism you ever encountered was about the undecideds, and it was a while ago. Tell us about it.

RP: It was just about 20 years ago. All of us had suffered the heartbreak of John Kerry’s loss, and in The New Republic online, back when they kind of stuck the detritus on the internet, I read a magnificent piece by a fella relating what it was like to canvass among so-called undecided voters in Wisconsin. And long story short, when you would ask them what issues they were interested in, they didn’t know what an issue was. And when he would ask them kind of in a more open-ended way, what kind of things were they concerned about in their lives? And they would say something like, “Wow, my healthcare bills are going through the roof.” He said, “John Kerry has a plan for that,” and maybe spelled it out a little. And the writer of this piece said that people would respond to him as if he told them that John Kerry had a plan to extend summer into December.
I loved this piece so much, I sought out the writer. He was a young, struggling freelance writer in Chicago, my hometown, whose name was Chris Hayes. I was watching his career thrive since then, deservedly, because he was doing something and reporting on something that has to happen a zillion times a year whenever reporters go out and talk to undecided voters, which they supposedly do a lot. You see it all the time in The New York Times.
But the fact that this seems to be the ground state of what people who are identified as undecided voters think like, they’re not political junkies like us, and no one ever talks about it, it’s one of those very, very profound institutional failures in agenda setting, elite American political journalism that I’m always talking about. This fundamental conceptual Pravda-like misconception about what is going on in front of our noses. So who knows what these undecided voters are thinking? Are they thinking about issues? Maybe, maybe not. But in order to find that out, you’d have to have a trusting, open-ended, thoughtful conversation with them that is not bound by the rigid genre conventions of journalism in which voters are at these bundles of issue positions with legs and sometimes glasses.

JW: The New York Times took a slightly different approach in their most recent poll. Instead of asking the undecided, ‘What issues are most important to you,’ they said, “What is your biggest concern about each of the candidates?” And they had 10 categories that they sorted the answers into. Let me just report on what they found. With Trump, the number one concern was personality and behavior. 33%, seems to me nowhere near enough, but 33% said their number one concern with Trump was personality and behavior. Number two was, quote, “No biggest concern.” Number three was other. What do you make of that?

RP: Yes, that is not exactly the kind of sharp penetrating political analysis one would hope from the fellow citizens. And 33% who don’t like his behavior, how many among the 67% like his behavior? So I mean, I think that it kind of makes the point that people don’t think about politics like political experts think about politics, and it also makes the point that especially now when our political life is so up in the air and our old categories no longer signify anymore, maybe people should be starting over in their very conceptual work to figure out how American politics operates. And I see very little of that self-critical temper among the people whose job it is to tell us how the world works.

JW: Yeah, the basic problem it seems to me of what we call the forced choice question, which of the following issues concerns you, is the most important to you, or which concerns the most, is people often will give you an answer, often it’s a very conventional answer. “The most important issue to me is the economy.” And then the next question the pollsters ask is, “Which candidate do you think is better on that issue?” And they’ll say one or the other, and then it is assumed that that’s who they’re going to vote for because that person has the right position on the most important issue, but that is a leap that is not justified. I think you probably agree that just because someone can pick an issue and say who’s better on it, does not mean they will go to the polls and vote for that person.

RP: Like I said, start at square one and figure out actually how people do choose who they’re going to vote for. Not these pre-masticated categories. I mean some of these forced-choice issues, my research studying the Tea Party, The New York Times once gave a list of – Tea Party supporters were asked why did they support the Tea Party and what do they consider important? The choices were things like “the budget,” and “the government”; they were all things having to do with the cliches of what the Tea Party leaders said the Tea Party was about. There was nothing about “Barack Obama’s a Kenyan.” Or “I want a Christian Nation.” Or “Don’t take away my guns.” So the question frames the answer.

JW: I read one big research piece by political scientists about this.  Yhey said there’s two kinds of undecided voters. There’s the people who say they are undecided and maybe they feel undecided, but on election day, they vote for the same party they voted for last time, almost all.

RP: Vast majority do that.

JW: Vast majority.

RP: Sometimes they say they’re independents because they don’t like the Republican Party, but they’re in the John Birch Society.

JW: And then there’s another group that is truly undecided and they remain undecided until election day. And most of them don’t vote — because they can’t decide.

RP: Right. “Undecided” voter as a salient category is not necessarily useful.

JW: Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, had an interesting discussion of this a couple of days ago. He said, “Undecided voters are people who view politics,” and here he was quoting the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Ben Wikler, he said, “They view politics the way we view the Olympic sports. We know it’s there. We pay attention for a few hours when it’s in prime-time TV every four years. And that’s pretty much it. And we root mostly for our team. Sometimes, we root for somebody else if we like them for some reason. We like their country, we like the way they look, we like the story that we hear about them.”
His conclusion was campaigns actually know about this. They want to communicate that their candidates are – compelling personalities are likely to be winners because people also like to vote for winners. And supposedly that’s one reason Tomasky said that Trump has announced recently he’s going to have a rally at Madison Square Garden. It’s kind of an unlikely thing. He’s never going to carry New York, but it is kind of a grabber of an idea. Trump at Madison Square Garden, it brings up for people like you and me, other images.

RP: Yes. Right. 1939, the famous German American Bund rally where everyone’s – there was a big banner of George Washington amidst Swastikas. Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing is, it’s another one of these ways in which just the basic categories that political journalists use to understand political journalism just are so taken for granted. I mean, where’s it written that having a rally in a certain geographical location helps get votes in that geographical location? I mean, if 10,000 people go to a rally at an arena in Milwaukee, what does that mean even? I mean, New York being where the cameras are makes perfect sense to me. As for the Olympic thing, there are these freaks like me who watch every minute of every surfing heat online, but that’s how political journalists look at regular voters, when most of the people are tuning in for eight minutes of break dancing and three minutes of pentathlon. It’s really dumb.

JW: I was very interested on this score in Kamala’s media blitz last week. Just to remind our listeners, Monday, she went on a podcast I had never heard of, Call Her Daddy. Turns out it’s the second most popular podcast in the country, 2 million downloads. The audience is 70% women, 90% under 45. Then she went on Howard Stern to get the young white men. He has something like 10 million listeners who aren’t very interested in politics.

RP: Excellent for Kamala. That was a good one.

JW: And there she said her favorite Formula 1 driver was Lewis Hamilton. I don’t even know what Formula 1 is. It’s some kind of racing car. Then she went on The View, the number one daytime TV show with the all-female panel of hosts, I’ve heard of this, two and a half million viewers, mainly women. And she talked about serious family policy matters.

RP: They talk about politics all the time on The View.

JW: And then she went on Colbert that night and they drank a beer together and laughed about stuff. And then of course, she went on 60 Minutes for people like you and me. But she’s hitting here, the podcast audience of young women, the white men who follow SiriusXM. I think that’s probably a pretty good approach for the people who, quote, “Want to know more about her.”

RP: I think it’s fantastic. I mean, there’s nothing to object to, right? I mean, it’s like, first of all, I think that the agenda setting elite political media have disqualified themselves as mediators, as honest brokers. They talk by and for themselves. And if you want to reach citizens, you reach citizens. And this is where people live. The idea that this is even remarkable, it seems strange, is strange in itself. I mean, the media has changed. The only people who haven’t realized it is kind of potentate at the top, the towers on Avenue of the Americas. I listened and watched to a lot of those shows.

JW: What was she like? I didn’t listen to any of them because–

RP: There was also one she did with two basketball podcasters. She was great. Mostly, they were friendly, and she framed herself as a normal human being, which is obviously a big part of the campaign strategy. And she showed a lot of passion on issues that she cares about that are very profound. She did her dodging. It’s still very dismaying that she has these pat formulas for Israel-Palestine. But just to give one example, when she talked to Colbert about how mad she was that Donald Trump was sharing COVID tests with Vladimir Putin, she spoke about the calamity of Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID crisis in more depth than I’d seen her do before. So that was an engagement that caused a deeper connection with some very important issues that kind of went by the wayside. I did a column, it’s kind of surreal that this isn’t one of the main issues of the campaign.

JW: A million people died.

RP: If America had the same rate of deaths from COVID as Australia, we would’ve saved 900,000 lives. Australia was run by a conservative government, but they just turned it over to public health experts. And so the fact that she was able to get across the sheer callousness of Donald Trump and not wanting people to say that they had COVID because it would look bad for him, that was probably her best performance of the campaign and her deepest issue engagement of the campaign.

JW: And it was in a, let’s call it unconventional format, late night talk shows.

RP: Yeah. And it gets people out of their normal ways of thinking about politicians and just her presence there shows that she’s kind of someone to trust. And it’s places that Donald Trump isn’t going to. So when she does an interview that Donald Trump won’t do, everyone gets an announcement that Donald Trump is weird and he’s hiding from people. So two thumbs up.

JW: Finally, your piece about the undecideds at prospect.org, you offer your own theory of what it means when they say they are undecided, and how they might decide starts with Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

RP: Right. Well, I have this crazy idea that people who like Donald Trump like Donald Trump. And they like the way he acts, and they like the way he talks, and they find something attractive about him. And conceptually, I find it hard to understand how and why they like him without the political category of fascism, which says voluminous, voluminous research about how fascism works psychologically. And it’s basically an invitation to retreat from the complexity and the scariness of the modern world and kind of subsume yourself under this strong man who kind of invites you symbolically to kind of return to the womb. He’s going to be your protector. He’s going to avenge you. And if you look at some of his key rhetorical tropes, the idea he’s going to build a wall, right? He’s going to keep out the scary people. And to me, one of the most striking and fascistic things that he said during his acceptance speech was that he was going to, quote, unquote, “Build an iron dome over America,” which was crazy.

JW: Well, it calls to mind Israel’s Iron Dome, which has protected Israel about 99% from the Hezbollah rockets.

RP: And the Hezbollah rockets are like things guys make in their backyard with scrap steel and fertilizer. And we have to be protected by intercontinental ballistic missiles that are laser guided that have 16 warheads on them. So it’s just like a fantasy. It’s like saying he’s promising all us gentlemen on the short side that it’s going to make us 6’2″, right? It’s completely made up. But in terms of the logic of him as the protector who’s going to mystically protect you from everything that threatens you with the fear of bodily or psychic disintegration, it’s amazing stuff.

JW: You cite a compelling historical example on this Iron Dome question. Remember “Star Wars”?

RP: Yes. So Reagan’s Star Wars was similar. It was not quite as crazy, but it was verging on crazy. All of Reagan’s experts told him you couldn’t build a space shield to protect us from nuclear weapons, but it sounded great. And in 1984, he won 49 states. How many of those people who decided that Ronald Reagan was their guy were just attracted by this fantastical vision that he was going to protect us from the bad guys using laser beams? For the people who are kind of on the cusp of deciding whether to kind of surrender to this infantile way of feeling and thinking in this world that’s scary, that’s the kind of stuff that might move them from, well, I’m going to stay with you guys here in the scary reality based community, or I’m going to go over there in the kind of infantile world of going under Donald Trump’s security blanket.
And I think for at least some people, saying that they’re undecided might be meaning that they’re on the cusp of deciding whether to make that surrender or not. Which might be true, it might not be, but it’s not part of the conceptual framework. In order to find out, you need to ask people in an open-ended way without these forced choice questions. You’d have to do real journalism.

JW: “Some are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. Undecided is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community.” Rick Perlstein – he wrote about the undecided at Prospect.org.  Thank you, Rick. Great to speak with you today.

RP: Always a pleasure.
[BREAK]

Jon Wiener: Pennsylvania is the state where this year’s election may well be decided, and where nearly two-thirds of voters do not have college degrees. We’ve heard, for many years now, how the white working class has moved from the Democrats to Trump, and some Latinos have done the same thing. Eyal Press went to Pennsylvania to find out what working-class people there are thinking about and talking about. He’s a contributing editor at The Nation, and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and on The New York Times Op-Ed page. He’s a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the type media center, and author of the unforgettable book, Dirty Work. We talked about it here. And his new report from Pennsylvania titled “The Worker Revolt” appears in the October 7th issue of The New Yorker. Eyal Press, welcome back.

Eyal Press: Thanks so much, Jon. Great to be here.

JW: You open your new piece with a report about your conversation with a former president of a steel workers local outside Pittsburgh. Tell us about Scott Sauritch.

EP: Scott, like many union members and working-class people in the Rust Belt, grew up in a union household where everyone assumed the party that was on the side of workers and unions was the Democrats. And his father, Herman, die hard Democrat, still is, but Scott is not a Democrat. Scott, this year, will be voting for Donald Trump. He is no longer the head of the local near Pittsburgh that you mentioned, and so he was able to speak about that pretty openly without fear of – because the USW, the United Steelworkers has endorsed Harris, but what he told me that should help explain to people why this election, and why the polls in places like Pennsylvania are as close as they are, he said, “It’s not just me, right? It’s,” as he put it, “All the grunts in the lunchroom,” that he knows, meaning the rank and file. Regardless of what the heads of the union say, they all love Trump. Now, clearly not all of them love Trump, but a large number appear to, and that is a big problem for the Democratic Party and has been for a while.

JW: Of course, once Trump was in office, everything he did was for the wealthy and for employers. It wasn’t just his famous tax cut for the rich that hurt working people. His administration was resolutely anti-union. His infrastructure jobs program was a complete joke. Did the working class people you spoke with in Pennsylvania know about Trump’s record on working class issues while he was president?

EP: I sense they did not, Jon, or if they did, they chose not to remember it, at least those who continue to support Trump. I think this gets to, really one of the takeaways that came out of my reporting, and also the reading I did for this piece, including a very fine book by Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman called Rust Belt Union Blues, which documents the decline of unions in Western Pennsylvania. And the theory in that book, and really one that I heard over and over again from different sources for this piece, is that working class people, maybe not so differently from upper middle class people, don’t vote on the basis of specific policies.
They vote on the basis of social identity; which party they believe is on their side, which party they believe is not on their side, and also a sense of what voting means within their community. One of the things that has happened in these former factory towns is that social identity is now right-wing, right? It’s a Trump voter with a MAGA hat, driving a pickup. It’s no longer the card-carrying union member who in Herman Sauritch’s day, this is the father of Scott, he told me that in his day you wouldn’t go on the shop floor talking about voting for a Republican, because everybody knew that’s the party that the bosses supported, but we have a kind of upside down world in America today, where a lot of working class people, particularly white working class people, but as is increasingly evident in the poll, not exclusively white, working class people, are feeling like the Democrats took them for granted for too long, are drawn to some aspect of Trumpism.
Now, in the case of the white working class, that’s clearly related to his relentless racism and xenophobia, and no one can write about the revolt of the working class and the shifting allegiances of working class voters without taking account of that, but I think we also have to, when we see how Harris and Walz are struggling with voters without college degrees, and even in some working class Latino and Black neighborhoods, not getting the level of support they will need to win, it points to a larger problem with the Democratic Party’s identity at this point, even though the policies of the Democrats are much more pro-worker and pro-union, undeniably so and especially so after Biden.

JW: Yeah. Joe Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, partly because he did not make Hillary’s mistakes. He did not take workers for granted. In the White House, Joe Biden was the most pro-worker president since FDR. Kamala was part of that. Kamala knows how he got there, but especially the white men that you talked to, do they know about Biden’s record, and did they know about Kamala’s program, the expanded child tax care credit?

EP: Well, I did speak to an organizer, a guy named Aaron Joseph, who’s with DC 57 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades in Pennsylvania. He said, “Look, there are Trump supporters in this union,” but that Biden built up a lot of goodwill within DC 57, because of some of the policies you just mentioned, right? It created a kind of boom for that union, and that was true of a lot of unions in the Rust Belt and across the country. It was true in Michigan. It was true in parts of Pennsylvania, but will it translate?
Joseph was honest with me that it would’ve translated more easily had Biden been on the ticket, and that’s partly because he’s from Scranton, the policies had his name on them, they felt like Biden was a friend. And with Harris, for better or worse, she is seen as different than Biden. I think in some ways that will benefit her, but being a woman, being a Black woman, being from California, all of those things are potentially factors that will lead some of these working class voters to not vote for her, despite her being part of an administration that really benefited these unions and these workers.

JW: So some white workers don’t want a Black woman to be president. Did you talk to anyone who would admit that?

EP: No, I didn’t. I can’t say that I interviewed someone who explicitly said that. I will say that Scott Sauritch, who you mentioned at the outset, while talking about Harris, referred to her as an evil bitch, and that kind of language suggests, very strongly, that there is an undercurrent of, “I won’t vote for a woman, and I certainly won’t vote for this woman, and this woman is evil,,” that he then went on to talk about how he doesn’t share her values, he’s a Christian, and so forth.
I asked him, “Well, how do you feel about Donald Trump, who’s a multiple divorcee and tried to pay off a porn star he had an affair with?” and there was a quick change of the subject, so Trump gets away with things with these workers that a Democrat will not, and certainly not Harris, because of her gender, her race, and her background.

JW: You say, “There are many working class communities where being a woman of color in a contest against an older white man, a candidate notorious for his vulgar attacks on immigrants and Black people, could be an advantage.” Please explain that part.

EP: Yeah. I mean, if you go to places like Reading Pennsylvania, which is the fourth-largest city in Pennsylvania, it’s two-thirds Latino, and has an expanding Latino voter registration and voting base. So that’s a place where, again, at least in theory, Harris has the advantage not being someone who has spent years demonizing not only immigrants, but specifically Black and brown people, and immigrants from Mexico and from Latin America, and Latinos, by the way, are the fastest growing part of Pennsylvania’s population.
This is a really important voting block, but there, as in maybe parts of Philly that are also more advantageous demographically for Harris, a lot of working class voters also have a very high level of cynicism that any candidate is really going to change the difficult hardships in their lives, and I’m talking about folks who work minimum wage jobs, who are juggling two and three jobs just to get by, and who, in recent years, have had a harder and harder time paying the rent, buying groceries, making ends meet. That’s a message that they have to hear. Those voters have to hear from Harris, a very clear message of how voting for her will make a difference, because a lot of them have come to feel, these politicians just come around when there’s an election, and then they leave, and nothing changes.

JW: You suggest it’s a mistake for Kamala to focus more on high prices than doing something about low wages. Tell us about that.

EP: I’ve really been baffled by this, to be honest. While reporting this piece, I just kept hearing over and over, “What would make a difference in a place like Reading? What would make a difference to Black, working class voters, who maybe aren’t entirely sold on Harris or are not registered or aren’t really particularly interested in the election? What would really get their attention?”
And I kept hearing, “Raise our wages. Make it easier for us to earn a living wage in the jobs we have.” Harris has said she will raise the living wage. It’s actually on her policy platform if you go to her website, but it’s a single line, and it’s not front and center. To get voters in these communities to believe it, you’ve got to talk about it all the time. In the same way that Bernie Sanders, when he ran, he didn’t say occasionally that the problem is too much wealth in the hands of the few and too little for working Americans. He pounded that message over and over and over again.

JW: Yes, he did.

EP: She’s not doing that, and there is a difference in emphasis, and working voters in these communities, they may not be persuaded in the end. If the voter turnout in these communities is not high enough, it could really hurt her.

JW: In Reading, you also went to a Trump field office for Latino supporters of the Republicans. What was that like?

EP: Well, on one hand, it was sort of humorous. I saw all kinds of signs, reaching out to folks in Reading to come on in. When I went inside, there was actually a meeting that was about to happen, and there were about a half dozen people in the room. There wasn’t a single Latino person in the room, so it kind of looked just like you would imagine, a bunch of older white men in MAGA hats, waiting around. And so, that’s the humorous side of it, but I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. I think it actually is important that, when you go to a place like Reading, you see, and it’s right in the center of a very busy commercial intersection, this big Trump field office. He is very strategically placing these field offices in these communities, thinking, “I’m not going to win Reading, but if I can peel 5% of voters off or even less than that, and just sow confusion and narrow those margins, then I’ll be okay.”
By the way, I spoke to a very shrewd local assemblyman, Manny Guzman, who serves parts of Reading, and he said the same thing. He said, “Look, I’m not surprised all the people you saw were white people,” because that’s what he apparently sees when he goes in there as well or walks by, but he said he thinks that Trump actually will appeal to some people in his community. He’s quite concerned about it. Democrats bear some of the responsibility for the alienation of working-class voters because of things like embracing NAFTA, because of the fact that the party embraced the deregulation of Wall Street. Really, policies that for a very long time hurt a lot of working people, and that’s real, but let it also be said, and it must be emphasized, that Elon Musk and Donald Trump had a conversation on X, Musk’s platform, in which Trump praised Musk for firing workers who were attempting to form a union.
We have to also see that this is a very stark choice for working people who actually care about the right to organize, who care about having an NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, that will actually hold companies that fire their workers illegally accountable for what they’re doing. Under Trump, what workers are guaranteed to get is what they got before, which is a labor department that is run by management side attorneys, like Eugene Scalia, who was the head of the Department of Labor when COVID happened, had spent his entire life helping companies evade regulations, including safety regulations, had represented corporations that were dismissive of OSHA’s authority and tried to rein it in.
This is what workers will get. Workers will suffer, workers will die, workers will get fired without recourse for any kind of hearing. And so, all of that does need to be kept in mind, even as it is true that both Harris, herself, and the Democrats more broadly have not done a good enough job in communicating why working-class people should vote for them.

JW: You went to some Tim Walz campaign events when you were in Pennsylvania, including a big rally in Erie. Tell us about that.

EP: Yeah. I went to Erie. I heard Walz give this rousing speech. I think he’s something quite unique in the Democratic Party right now, which is he has an ability to talk about issues like healthcare, Medicare, and belonging to a union, that doesn’t feel forced. It doesn’t feel like he’s a Harvard graduate, looking down on working class people, and speaking from a very different social community and a place, because he isn’t a Harvard graduate from a very different place, right? He’s from Nebraska. He wears his rural roots very proudly on his sleeve. He did at the rally. He’s a former football coach. There were coach signs that were being waved throughout the crowd, and I spoke to some steelworkers who were there and spoke to them afterwards as well. He made a really good impression, and I think a lot of that is just who he is, the fact that when they look at him, they see a guy who has represented rural areas and smaller towns and seems to have lived a lot of the things that they’re experiencing.

JW: I wonder how much of the support for Trump is based on issues, the economy, immigration, crime, and how much is based on what we might call the fascist aura of his campaign and his persona, the aura of violence, the hyper-masculinity, the contempt and ridicule for opponents, the promises of retribution. I wonder if the Trump supporters you talked to didn’t want to tell you what their real reasons for supporting Trump are. You quote one person saying his friends love Trump. Maybe they love him for reasons that are very scary to us.

EP: I think that’s certainly true of some of Trump’s working-class supporters. By the way. I think it’s also true of some of Trump’s elite supporters, including perhaps Mr. Musk, but certainly everything he seems to retweet and highlight on X seems to suggest really reveling in the kinds of politics you just described, but there’s no question that the demonization of immigrants, the scapegoating of Black and brown people is at the core, not only of Trump’s message, but also, sadly, of Trump’s appeal. To the extent that’s true, it makes the policy debates beside the point. You can raise people’s wages and offer them that, but if what they’re really voting for is kicking Haitians out of Springfield, because they actually believe they’re stealing people’s pets and eating them, how far are you going to get?
But I also think, Jon, that it is a big mistake for Democrats, for progressives to write off working-class voters, and keep in mind, we’re talking about two-thirds of the electorate, to write them off as a kind of loss, because they don’t even bear being engaged, because they are racist, they hate immigrants, or they love the toxic masculinity of Trump. That is certainly true of some of them, but there are also a lot of working-class people who don’t live the prosperous, comfortable lives of the professional, educated, more affluent voters who increasingly donate to the Democratic Party. They don’t eat out at restaurants a couple of times a week. They don’t have disposable income to go on vacations and travel to Europe. They don’t have portfolios that are rising as the tech industry booms.
And so, there is both a truth to what the challenge is. In some places, I think it’s true that that challenge is insurmountable, because these are very ugly ideas that have appeal, but I spent quite a bit of time, when I was in Pennsylvania, talking to folks at an organization called Pennsylvania United, and this is a grassroots, working-class organization, whose motto is to bring working-class people who are Black, white, immigrant, rural, urban together to fight for their common interests against things like evictions in their community, or rapacious landlords who kick people out of their apartments because they complain that there’s no heat. They start with these local level battles, and then they build out. And they’ve had some extraordinary successes. In fact, I went to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Meadville is 87% white. Meadville, until a few years ago, had never elected a Black person to public office.
The mayor of Meadville today is a woman named Jaime Kinder. She is a Black woman, who grew up poor, and she represents this community. She was all excited about Harris’s campaign. She had been on one of the early calls, Black Women in Support of Harris. She was a delegate at the Democratic Convention. There are folks like her in these rural areas. There are members of Pennsylvania United, and some of those members, by the way, started out as Trump supporters, or started out as people who just thought both parties were equally awful, and who in the last election cycle were making phone calls to prevent Trump from getting a second term, because they had kind of gotten a political education through their activism, and realized it’s actually really beneficial to them not to have a president whose anti-union, and who will strip the NLRB of any pro-worker advocates and so forth.
And so, when you think about these places and what progressives should do, I would encourage listeners to this program to go online and look up Pennsylvania United, click on some of the things they’ve done, and look at some of the communities they’re in, Johnstown, Meadville, and these other very red parts of Pennsylvania. People live in those places. People struggle in those places. People are homeless in those places. People get evicted in those places, and if we just give up on them, guess who they’ll vote for? I think that Democrats have learned the lesson of needing to show up in these communities, to engage folks who might become members of groups like Pennsylvania United, and not just think it’s a lost cause.

JW: Eyal Press – his report on Pennsylvania, “The Worker Revolt,” appears in The New Yorker. Eyal, thank you for all your work, and thanks for speaking with us today.

EP: Thanks so much, Jon. It’s great to be here.