While Democracy Works was away over the summer, it was hard to miss stories about Democratic primary elections and seeming rise of the Democratic Socialists of America — followed almost immediately about the challenges DSA candidates will face in November's election. For our first episode of the fall season, we talk with a social movement scholar about whether the DSA's policies can win over enough votes to win in a general election and why political coalitions don't always align with the structure of America's two-party system.
Rory McVeigh is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements. He is the author of Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality, along with William Carbonaro, Chang Liu, and Kenadi Silcox. The book investigates whether Americans are more likely to support a social-change organization if it explicitly opposes racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry or if it focuses exclusively on economic equality. Drawing on the results, they argue that privileged groups’ desire to preserve their status is the primary obstacle to forming progressive alliances.
In this episode, McVeigh discusses what these findings mean for the DSA, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party as we head into the midterms and the next presidential election cycle.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Welcome back, everybody. We are back after our summer break. I hope you all had a nice summer. We're ready to dive back in here for the fall semester. And if you followed political news this summer, you probably heard or read or watched a lot about the Democratic primary elections that were happening around the country and the seeming rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, or at least candidates that are in that vein, whether or not they're officially part of the DSA or not, followed pretty quickly by questions about whether those candidates will be able to cobble together enough of a coalition of voters to win in a general election. And so, this interview, this episode we have for you today, gets at some of those things.
Jenna Spinelle
Our guest is Rory McVeigh, who is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Sociology at Notre Dame. He also directs the Center for the Study of Social Movements there, and he is one of the authors of the book *Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality* And the book is based on an experiment of about 2600 people, where they put an I put a fictional social political movement in front of people and ask them to weigh in on how much they support those ideologies, many of which align with things that we're seeing from the DSA and those kinds of things. As I said to Rory when we spoke, this book had been on my shelf for a while, and I decided to pick it back up in light of all the discussion that happened over the summer.
Candis Watts Smith
I think status. I think is a really important thing to think through and talk about. I think a little bit. We we talk about status without talking about status. What people feel like they're losing, what people are trying to gain when they are involved in social movements, the effort to solidify rights, to expand who is included as first class citizens, to make sure people are recognized as whoever they are at the moment, those are all questions of status. Sometimes we talk about them in terms of like woo-woo feelings, but to your point, people do want to feel respected. They do want prestige. They do want to feel like they have a part, a real part in a democracy, a system that requires everyone to be involved, or at least to have equal access if they want to be involved. Yeah, talking about status is important.
Chris Beem
No, I think that's, I think that is a good descriptor both of what the Make America Great Again movement is grounded in, and also what some of the the arguments among less privileged groups have against them, against the MAGA movement. When you accept the proposition that for the vast majority of American society there has been a presumed hierarchy that focuses on white Christian heterosexual males, and they were in charge, and whenever that is in any way challenged, that is perceived by a threat by anyone who has benefited from that state of affairs, and it's hard not to see or read that the whole "Make America Great Again" movement as not some effort to restore the status quo ante, right? But I also think that Rory is right, and this is something that you were just alluding to, Candice. That status isn't just about intangible things, feelings.
Candis Watts Smith
Identity politics from its earliest conception and coined by a group of Black women was about power and status. The reason why identity or your group categorization is important is because there is a status conferred to those groups. Your racial group, your ethnic group, your gender, your religion, your immigration status. There are hierarchies within those groups, and that means that there is status within those groups where there's high status and low status. Then, over time, though, identity politics has come. Mean representation or acknowledgement or feelings among what I would argue liberals and white liberals especially, and identity politics has come to mean political correctness gone wrong for many conservatives, even when conservatives and white conservatives in particular are very cognizant of the historical advantages offered to white folks, heterosexual folks, Christian folks, American folks, and men, and especially to people who are in all of those categories at once. I would argue that all of the discussions that we're having about who's a victim? Who's not getting what? That you know, there is actually someone in roy's book that says a white man has no contests to a black woman. She's always going to get the thing over him. That right there, ideas of anti-white bias and reverse discrimination. Those are all discussions of identity politics, enough as representation, and not as political correctness gone wrong, but about status and power. And so, I think it's important for us to just nail down this notion of status and its connection to identity politics, whether we want to talk about it in the woo-woo way or the way that it was conceived, but our identities do confer status. If they didn't, we wouldn't talk about them.
Chris Beem
That's great. I I think that's a perfect place to segue back.
Jenna Spinelle
So let's go now to the interview with Rory McVeigh.
Jenna Spinelle
Rory McVeigh, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.
Rory McVeigh
Good morning. Thanks for having me here.
Jenna Spinelle
We were just chatting before we hit record that your book, Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality had been on my list for a while when it since it came out last fall, but has really I think taken on an interesting importance, perhaps given the state of the Democratic Party and some of the primaries we've seen over the past couple of months. So I'm glad that we have the opportunity to talk today, but before we we dive into that, that the concept of status is really at the core of this book, and I think a lot of your work more broadly. Can you just define for us what status means?
Rory McVeigh
Sure. The real quick to the point idea just has to do with the respect or esteem that one gets for displaying certain attributes or traits or values or something like that, and it's something that we talk a lot about. But I, in this book, I'm trying to make the case that we have underestimated how important it is in shaping political action.
Jenna Spinelle
And you also draw the distinction that status is not the same as identity politics. Can you talk a little more about that?
Rory McVeigh
Yeah, I think they're obviously related. I think that too often, when people are engaged in politics, pursuing interests that are related to status and their position can in a hierarchy of of a status, it's too often dismissed even by scholars as just something you know that has to do with a sense of recognition and a sense of acknowledgement for being who you are, which of course is very important. But it's often what's often neglected is the extent to which differential status granted because of gender or because of racial identity or something like that has real consequences for differential treatment, and those consequences can be at least or more important than any other thing, and you know, economic self-interest or something like that, or specific policy issues, and what's often you know treated as just you know why can't you just subordinate these interests and you know move toward the middle and worry about you know class position or something like that? It just doesn't recognize how central that differential treatment that comes from status gradations is in shaping our lives.
Jenna Spinelle
And so, let's dive into your experiment at really testing some of these things and perhaps creating a model to break us out of some of this thinking. Tell me about One America For working people,
Rory McVeigh
Sure. This is a we made it up. It's it's an organization, a social movement organization, a civic organization called One America for Working People, and one of the things that when you're talking to people about status. And when you're talking about status hierarchies, and when you're talking about something like privilege, it it can either create a situation where people are say they're colorblind, or they don't you know they don't recognize differences, or something like that. Or there's this kind of difficulty speaking honestly about how you feel about race and gender and sexual orientation and religion, even and so one of the ways that we thought we could get more honest responses from people was to take different narratives about these different status hierarchies and place them in the context of an organization, and so people could conceivably, instead of saying I am motivated to protect privilege based on my racial identity, they can instead reject the organization without openly talking about how they feel about racial identity. And so we created six different versions of this web page that is mainly focused on the plight of the working class and economic inequality and the corruption in politics and the money in politics.
Rory McVeigh
One version we have a mission statement that kind of describes those economic goals, and then we have a section in the the web page, fighting for a better future, that we manipulate the content of that, and we randomly assign people to different groups. The different groups are seeing different versions of the web page to see how those changes that we make provoke different responses to the content of the organization, and the beauty of an experimental design is that when we randomly assign people to these groups, the groups are very similar, and we can actually test that to make sure that's the case. But they should be very similar, and so if we observe differences across the groups in terms of how they respond to the organization, we can make a pretty strong statement that the things that we changed caused people to have different orientations toward the organization, and we were in particularly looking at one web page that only focuses on economic equality. The mission statement and other parts of the web page does say we all have to come together, but it doesn't say anything specific about different status hierarchies or different groups. But then we have a different version where you have everything is exactly the same, but we add one little paragraph side by side next to the paragraph about economic equality that makes the case that, for example, in order to bring about change, we also have to take on racial equality or gender equality or inequality based on LGBTQ status or citizenship, and so we're able to see how adding that paragraph really creates noticeable divisions in in how people respond to the organizations.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and just as as you were describing that, I'm sitting here thinking that it feels to me like some of these Democratic primary candidates are really doing a version of that in real time, right? We saw Mamdani come out with one version, Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, maybe leaning into some of the other aspects. Of course, Abdul Al-Sayed in Michigan. I guess how have you been thinking about this work as you've been watching these primaries play out over the summer?
Rory McVeigh
Yeah, one of one of the ways that this experiment is informative, I think, is it really does reveal kind of deep divisions not only between the major parties but also within within the major parties and where the the parties have shifted quite a bit in terms of their composition over the last couple decades and no longer is the Democratic Party really driven by working class interests, although they still are the party that's most favorable toward workers in terms of policy. But there are a lot of people who have joined the Democratic Party or support the Democratic Party that have to do with reasons that are unrelated to working class interests, where a lot of working class, especially white voters, have moved into the Republican Party, and so it's created this shift that creates a dilemma, really, for both parties. I think part of Donald Trump's success in motivating a Republican base is that he helped bring into alignment the way in which a lot of the people who moved into the Republican Party felt about economics, but also about things like race and gender and sexual orientation and other types of things like that.
Rory McVeigh
They moved and. Initially, historically, into the Republican Party, sometimes as a backlash against the civil rights movement, or sometimes because we see we saw conservative Christian organizations kind of latching on to the Republican Party and promoting a certain set of values, and for decades, people who made shifts because of these these issues, they had to put up with the notion that you're all going to benefit from trickle down economics and everything. Everybody is going to benefit from the policies that help promote business and and generate wealth. But Trump, when he first hit the scene, he spoke much more directly and openly and explicitly about some of the things that people were feeling in terms of there's something's wrong with the economy. People were getting impatient with trickle down economics, but he was also speaking much more directly to some of the views that they hold regarding race and religion and other types of things like that. The Democratic Party has been interesting in that when it comes to when it comes to economic policy, they've largely been ineffective, and there are a lot a lot of people who feel left out, especially younger voters who feel that the party is too beholden to big money interests, similar to the Republican Party. They talk differently, but nevertheless, they're still thinking within a very narrow box.
Rory McVeigh
And there's a general dissatisfaction with how the party is responding to economic transitions that are creating a lot of new hardships for people, younger people coming out of college or not, or having difficulty finding the type of employment that they want, but also having difficulty paying for housing and things like that. So there's this this sense that the the Democratic Party too has been ineffective. And one of the really interesting things is when you look at the data from our experiment. If you just look at the how people feel about the mission statement, that again it doesn't address any of these kind of status issues, but only focuses on the economy. There's strong support for that mission statement that just cuts across educational differences, gender differences, even cuts across differences by political party, cuts across differences by the way that people identify themselves as conservative or liberal, or a lot of people who think of themselves as conservative are actually quite favorable toward progressive economic policies or the populism, at least as expressed by Trump, but also it's expressed by someone like Bernie Sanders. So there is this problem of bringing an alliance together when not party policies don't necessarily align very well with where people are.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, yeah, and I think another critique of the Democratic Party, and I think that this comes out in your study as well, is that there perhaps the the Democratic Party has focused too much on issues of racial equality or gender equality, LGBTQ equality, and as you said, that there the the support for those things just is not there as much as we might like it to be. It just the really it is the economic message that has to come first.
Rory McVeigh
I don't think I I don't think I would agree with that. I think this this is what makes it such a difficult puzzle to solve. Is that the findings of the experiment indicate that for Democrats and to a large extent those who identify as independent as well, if it weren't for the positions that my fake organization is taking on race or on gender, whichever or LGBTQ, whichever version that they're getting, they wouldn't be terribly interested in that organization, it's the when the extra paragraph is added that addresses one of these status hierarchies. It makes organization much more popular and much more appealing to Democrats. And it again, I think that's related to the way that scholars and others haven't taken seriously enough what it means when people are trying to overturn a status hierarchy, and it's not just a case of identity politics and a case of recognition for my worth or your worth or something like that. It has real implications for how people are treated, how people are channeled into different positions in the class structure, the occupational structure, but also implications for violence and discrimination that that plays out in the workforce, but also in everyday life.
Rory McVeigh
So I think that's the the real dilemma: is that the Democratic Party? I think when it tries. To move toward the middle, and they're talking about reaching across the aisle. They're alienating some of their strongest supporters because most most people who are on the left they don't want to compromise on these these status based issues that are really consequential for their lives and for the lives of their loved ones and friends.
Jenna Spinelle
Thank you for that. and I'm glad you brought up about the the moving to the center. That's what I wanted to ask you about next. So it sounds again, you this is just one one study, one experiment, but it seems like a lot of that the guidance, what we hear from the pundit class, right about oh now it's time to move to the center, or else you're not going to be able to assemble the coalition that you need to win in a general election. It sounds like your advice or your guidance might be that no, the the coalition might just you know might already be there. You're just not thinking about them in in a way that is relevant to activating everyone as a social movement scholar, how are you thinking about the DSA right now? There's every every day I see a headline. This is the next Tea Party. Like this is the next big social movement to hit our politics. I wonder if you would agree with those assessments.
Rory McVeigh
I think it's fascinating, and I don't think we know yet. But my hunch is that a lot of a growing number of American voters don't get scared by these kind of the red scare rhetoric, and they they never talk about the Republicans are never talking about them as being democratic socialists. They're talking about them as being radical communists and things like that. And my sense is, especially given that we're all witnessing extraordinary corruption in our politics, and we're witnessing extraordinary growth in inequality. Where somebody like Elon Musk was going back and forth between being a billionaire and a trillionaire, and money is being concentrated so much in the hands of a few people, I just don't think this red scare rhetoric is that scary anymore to a lot of people, and clearly, people who are using that rhetoric are hoping that people are not actually knowledgeable or not actually thinking about. They they want us to think about the old Soviet Union, or they want us to think about China, or they don't want us to think about social democracy in Sweden, or something like that, where people tend to have a high standard of living and a high quality of life and general happiness, and you have a very well-functioning democracy. But even there, we're seeing threats from the right and the kind of conservative populism that's popping up, not just in the United States, but in many places throughout the world.
Jenna Spinelle
We spent a lot of time talking about people who support the One America for Working People, as you presented it. But you also talk about the people who were the most against it, and they really even denied the existence of any of the the status and equalities that we've been talking about. I wonder if you could just share more about that group. And I think to take that back to real world politics, I think is it one of the one of the discussions in kind of the democracy field that I work in is how much time do we need to spend trying to capture those people or or persuade them that something exists that they don't think does? So I wonder if you have thoughts on that. Of is it better to focus on the people who are at least part of the way along with some of these ideas versus trying to persuade the people that don't think they exist or don't think they're a problem.
Rory McVeigh
Yeah, I think there is a fairly large group that is unpersuadable. That may be the 32% that are still, you know, solidly behind the Republican Party and solidly behind Trump. And I think the economic circumstances that we face today with inflation and all of the other things, cost of healthcare, other things. They created space for people to step back a little bit and recognize that. I think when Trump was articulating this kind of conservative populist message back in 2015, there was a much larger group willing to listen to it and excited about it because it it resonated with how they felt in terms of the sense of loss of status that they felt by virtue of being the the breadwinner of the home by virtue of being a man or living in a hetero. Normative society and the benefits that we don't even think of that come from just being never having to worry about the negative treatment that comes from being LGBTQ and these other things and just the taken for grantedness of Christianity as the dominant religion in society. All of these things, I think, are important to people, a large segment of the population.
Rory McVeigh
But there's this group also that, yeah, that resonates with them, especially though if the economy seemed to be moving in the right direction, and it was much easier for them to say, yeah, Trump's going to make America great again, and he's going to bring back the way things used to be and the way that I used to be treated based on whatever status attributes I have. It's a lot easier to be excited about that when you have optimism about the economic future and somebody's telling you that the way things used to be are coming back, but I think that message is becoming increasingly hard for people to believe, and there isn't this mass exodus where there still are a lot of people who are waiting for Trump, the Republicans, to restore what they feel that they might have lost. There's also those people in the middle and who are not so far on the right that they're starting to have doubts about. You know, is this the formula for success? Have we been told the truth? Is it especially when you see things like the blatant corruption and all of the obsession with the the ballroom and the White House and the all of these other things that that seem to be just tone deaf in terms of how people are understanding their own circumstances today.
Rory McVeigh
I think if you take away that kind of optimism about the economic future that accompanied this kind of conservative rhetoric on race and religion and gender and other things, I think there are a lot of people who are at least willing to listen to to another message, and it's going to be hard to persuade the unpersuadable. But and I think that's what is interesting about the experiment that we did, because it really pits the coupling of conservative economic policy and conservative stances on status hierarchies with against progressive economic policy or and a progressive stance on status hierarchies, and so you see the people who are the most committed to the combination of those two. But there's a lot of people that are are movable, and the current climate creates an opportunity for people to make progress by maybe enlarging the coalition to some extent.
Jenna Spinelle
I think a lot as we get closer to these elections about something I heard on this show a couple of years ago. A guest said to me, most people don't think about politics and these issues nearly as deeply as you and I do. They think about, oh, my my sister or my friend voted for this person, so I guess I'll vote for them too. Or it's whatever information they happen to take in through whatever feed or algorithm they have. We could have a whole other conversation about how media plays into this, but we're running out of time to wrap things up here, Rory. If you were going to try to translate some of the the one America for working people language into campaigns whether it's for the midterms or looking ahead to 2028 what would you advise candidates to focus on and how should they be thinking about framing these issues?
Rory McVeigh
In the last chapter while I was working on this book, my graduate students kept telling me that they were getting depressed, and I kept promising them that there would be a happy ending. And in the end, one of the things that I call attention to is there is a tremendous difference by age, where really across a lot of different categories, the younger people in our sample, were much more open to. They were certainly open to the economic message, the progressive economic message, but they were also much more open to messages about overturning status hierarchies and the need to do that in order to form the coalitions that would actually bring about change. And I think we've demographic shifts have gone so far that no longer can you dismiss the younger voters as just a small group of people who don't vote anyway, so you can just forget about them.
Rory McVeigh
And so I think. You really need to speak directly to the anxieties that they have about their futures. A lot of people are concerned about whether or not they're going to what kind of life they're going to have, and it doesn't look that bright. And Trump, I think, attracted a lot of voters because he, you know, in a weird, twisted way, he gave half the population some hope that he was going to make America great again. And for a long time, people bought into that. But I think, from the progressive side, an argument can be made that America can be made greater. It can be we can make space for everybody, but we can also make shifts in in the way that economic economic the economy is structured. We can make things. We can open up new opportunities, and in order to do that, you need that coalition of people where everybody has a place, everybody's included. So I think you have to double down on that message.
Rory McVeigh
And clearly, there are different different political environments in different states. What sells in Alabama may not sell in Vermont, and these things are clearly things that politicians take into account. I think, again, even at a place like Texas, you can't shy away from some of the things that people on the left or people in the Democratic Party care about, and that's the way that they're treated by virtue of being a man or a woman, or by virtue of being black, white, or brown, these things have real consequences that sometimes are even more consequential for their lives than what the stock market is doing or what the employment rate is. They're interconnected.
Jenna Spinelle
We will link to politics and privilege as well as the rest of your work in the show notes for listeners who want to learn more. Rory McVeigh, thanks for your time today.
Rory McVeigh
Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.
Chris Beem
All right, that was really interesting. Lots to chew on there. One thing that I think is core to this book is that when people feel threatened, when they're when they feel like their economic concerns, their status concerns are either ignored or threatened, they become less concerned with the objectives or concerns of other people, right? When you are in, literally feel yourself under threat. You really focus in on you and yours, and that's pretty well established in psychology. And so I do think that it's he's right to say, or they're right to say, that if you are going to talk about these issues of fairness, equality, big tents in terms of outcomes and hopes for the future, then you have to first make sure that you've addressed people's concerns about economics sufficiently.
Chris Beem
And I think that is we can argue about this, but I think that's part of why Trump has been successful, and at least in getting elected, and why Democrats have been less successful-that they haven't done a good enough-that Trump was very focused on improving people's economic lifestyle, whether he was able to succeed at that or whether or not it was just sheer dumb luck-that's another question, but I think people were convinced about that, and whether or not Democrats were focusing too much on these kind of the phrase of the day is woo issues, as opposed to having people feel like supporting Democrats was going to impact them successfully. Let me just say, I do think those arguments were there. I just don't think Democrats were very good at making. So, have at it.
Candis Watts Smith
I think that when people are threatened, they are less likely to care about the conditions of others. I also think that they are more easily manipulated. The argument that a retelling of history that says that Trump focused on economic issues is, in my view, revisionist, and that is because we could say. Something similar to many other points in our history, where there were multiracial political groups or working groups, and then someone comes along and says, "We got to get rid of bad hombres and build a wall, and we can grab women women by their genitalia. We can make sure that people from s hole countries aren't here. Proud boys, you guys should stand back and stand by. So, the kind of idea that these economic there is a claim to I'm going to fix your economic problems, but that the policies were through the suggesting that people of color, immigrants, women, East Coast liberal elites, not elites, just East Coast values or whatever, are the things that are taking your, making your town smaller, making your factory jobs go away, making your lives worse.
Candis Watts Smith
So yeah, we could say that Trump made an economic claim, but it was all wrapped up in, or maybe the other way around, in issues about culture. So I, I think it's important for us to be critical of how we remember that part of history and who said what and who were doing what. The things is that at Trump's first election was there was an incumbent and the incumbent was the Democrats, and it's hard to say we would keep SNAP, we would keep Medicaid, we would make sure that you don't have to do dumb work requirements because we already know that you're working. We would make sure that your student loans, like you, weren't crushed under the debt of that, even though you're a school teacher.
Chris Beem
And if we're talking about with the hardcore MAGA Trumpers, you're talking about 30, maybe 35, maybe it's less than that now. Maybe percent of Americans, and for them, all of this is a package, and it's a package they are fully bought into. But for that's not a majority. In order for Trump to get a majority, they had to say, I don't like that he tweets. I don't like that he's mean. I don't like his language. I don't like going after Greenland or whatever. But boy, the economy was really doing well in 2016 after the after the pandemic, and I want that back again.
Chris Beem
And so all that all I'm saying is that that is the flip side of their argument that they're saying if we deal with the economy, we might be able to get people to be more open to this these progressive policy ideas. For Trump, it was I really like his economy, and so I'm going to let slide some of these other issues that I really don't like, but because the economy is doing so well, I'm willing to just look away or ignore it.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, and look where that got us.
Chris Beem
And look where that got you. Yeah, I completely agree.
Chris Beem
Anyway, so here's my other point that I wanted to just raise and see what you thought of it, and that is this whole is the DSA. This is their moment, and this is where the the chattering class is going, both positively and and this is why the Democrats are going to lose because they bought into this, this, this strategy, and I'm looking around, and there are here again, there are a lot of variables, right? In any election, there are all kinds of differences that you can't account for in this kind of binary, right? Progressive centrist.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, I really, I'm really enjoying watching what's going on around the country. First of all, the fact that we know about what's going on in Michigan and Wisconsin, I think historically is relatively new. And like, why I live in North Carolina, why is the Michigan primary a major point in the news for me is because we've had a nationalization of the parties, right?
Candis Watts Smith
And Jacob Grumbach, who we had on a little some time ago, who wrote a book called "Laboratories Against Democracy, talks about this nationalization of the two major parties, which. Means that there's kind of a top-down control of what the parties are supposed to look like and what candidates are supposed to look like and what they're allowed to say and what they're not allowed to say and what policies. And what that means is that in a federal system where we're supposed to have some light blues and dark reds and light reds and purples and whatever emphasis and so on and so forth, is that's not what we're getting, and I think this kind of moment here, where these DSA candidates are in some cases winning, in some places not, we're massively polarized, and so people just vote for their party.
Candis Watts Smith
What will be interesting, I think, the other thing about Trump and what he did was also bring out people who hadn't felt represented before, and to be clear, a lot of those people were people who did care about economic issues and also racial and gender and immigrant issues too. And so it will be really interesting to see if we also find, much to the dismay of traditional Democrats, that the DSA brings out people who are also interested in economic issues and racial and gender and immigrant issues as well that hadn't felt represented by established Democrats in some states and maybe they felt just great in other states and those are the Democrats that will show up. So it's a really interesting time, and it'll be interesting to see if actually what Rory and his team finds that the the Democratic tent gets the support for an economic policy gets bigger on the Democratic side when you are cognizant of the many ways that race, gender, immigration, sexuality, religion also matters for people, and we'll see how it plays out in the Republican Party when they're not actually talking about economic issues anyway.
Chris Beem
So good start to the year, guys! It's going to be fun, and it'll be interesting to see. Well, there'll certainly be plenty to talk about. So, in any case, for Democracy Works, I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening.