Potts: Yeah, I did reporting earlier this week on a report from Way to Win. It’s a left-leaning strategic group that does polling and kind of strategy for Democrats. And one of the things that they found was that messages that concentrated on a kind of populist economic message—saying, we need to tax corporations, we need to make the economy fairer for the working class—messages like that really did sway people. And people are open to that kind of messaging because they can see now, I think they can feel and see, that there’s an economy right now where the wealthy are looking out for each other, the tax cuts are helping the wealthy, that some of Trump’s billionaire friends are benefiting the most from this economy.
And in the meantime, people are drowning in debt, just trying to pay their energy bills and trying to pay their grocery bills. And so I think that there’s an opening to say that we need to tax corporations more, corporations are treating working people unfairly. There’s a lot of polling, even in swing states, even in states that are kind of more approving of Donald Trump’s presidency than the nation as a whole—voters in those states, voters that are gettable, voters that need to be persuaded to vote for Democrats—they’re swayed by messages like that that say, you know, we need to kind of resort our economy and refocus our economy.
Sargent: And it seems like there’s really an opening in another way too, which is that like everything is really in flux to an unusual degree, I think, right? Because if you sort of think about the trajectory from Reagan to now, like all of a sudden, everything’s kind of up for grabs and up in the air.
