Transcript: Why Blue States Are Better Places to Live

TNR’s Monica Potts explains how “abundance” liberals ignore the real story of Red State America.

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........

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