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........

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