Title: How Each Party Wants to Help Non-College Educated Workers

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With a week to go before Labor Day weekend, we will ask, is there a Democratic and Republican way to help the working class, especially people without four-year college degrees? It's a fundamental issue in American politics and economics today. As many of you know, Democrats just nominated Zohran Mamdani with his affordability policies to be mayor of New York. Around the country, Republicans have been trending up in recent elections among working-class voters, especially those who didn't go to college.

What are the economic policies or economic political appeals that separate the two parties or the wings within them? What might the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election bring that's different from other recent campaigns? We'll get a take on this from close to the political center. Zach Moller is Director of the Economic Program at the center-left think tank, Third Way. His previous experience includes three years as a staffer for the Senate Budget Committee working on economic and revenue issues under Democratic Committee chairs Patty Murray and Kent Conrad. Among his works is an article in 2023 called Worlds Apart: The Non-College Economy. Zach, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Zach Moller: I'm happy to join you, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with a few stats that demonstrate the title of your article, Worlds Apart. You wrote that college graduates on average have double the yearly income and four times the retirement savings, and that non-college workers are five times more likely to be in poverty, lack health insurance, and move because of economic trouble. In addition, there are four times as many working the night shift. That was an interesting section of your article, I thought, by the way, called Commuting in the Dark. About so many Americans whose shifts begin between 7:00 PM and 7:00 AM.

My question is, do you think politicians or the media are losing sight of those big trend differences as a society, with more emphasis these days on the burden of student debt and asking whether it's worth it to go to college as much as in the past?

Zach Moller: It's certainly something that I think people think about, but they don't think about it enough. It's part of why we wrote this article and a series of other research over the past few years. It used to be the case that 1 in 4 members of Congress didn't have a college degree. Now, it's maybe 1 in 25. I'm talking to you from Washington, DC. Staff, consultants, lobbyists, pollsters, and think tanks, which I work at, we're populated by a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of degrees. We need people with degrees to recognize that that's not the majority of the economy.

The people in the economy, there's plenty of people that don't have a four-year degree, and we need to make sure that their economic situations are better. We have seen broadly-- Sorry, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Let me follow up on that stat that you gave. If only 1 out of every 25 members of Congress don't have a college degree, and yet another stat your article gives us, two-thirds of all Americans don't have college degrees, such a contrast with the tiny minority in Congress who don't. Do you think that has skewed economic policy in this country toward advantaging college-educated Americans and disadvantaging non-college ones?

Zach Moller: Maybe not on purpose, but it is something that just happens. When Democrats want to stand up and talk about forgiving student debt, that is a shift talking to people with a college degree. If Republicans are going to talk about raising tariffs, that's a shift of putting a lot of costs on working people. There's just different pieces of it that maybe it's not intentional that there's a focus on college over non-college, but it's something that they need to fix.

Brian Lehrer: One more stat for context before we get to differences between and within the parties. You write, "The political shorthand for the working class often conjures up a picture of a white male worker. Yet nearly half of working-age non-college workers are people of color. Another way to look at it, white men are only 29% of the non-college working-age population." That's an important thing to keep in mind when we talk about the politics, right?

Zach Moller: Exactly. It's not what we thought about when my grandfather was a non-college person working in manufacturing in Michigan. It's different today.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite you in on this, too. Is there a Democratic and Republican way to help the working class or non-college-educated Americans economically speaking? What about differences within the parties? Call in to argue for one or another or offer a political analysis of why non-college voters have been moving more Republican at the national level, or ask a question of our guest, Zach Moller, Director of the Economic Program at the center left think tank, Third Way, and a previous staffer for the Senate Budget Committee under Democratic Committee chairs Patty Murray and Ken Conrad. 212-433-WNYC, call or text. 212-433-9692.

Zach, would you agree with the premise that the Democrats or the left in general emphasize more of a government is the solution approach, a decent minimum wage requirement, paid family leave laws, health insurance programs like Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans to help pay for things like those? While the Republicans or the right in general emphasize less government, lower taxes, and deregulation to encourage economic growth, so the private sector pulls people up. Also, pulling back on the green energy transition to "drill, baby, drill," as President Trump puts it.

How much would you say that shorthand is accurate, or maybe kind of accurate, but also leaves things out?

Zach Moller: I think it's the latter. That is the traditional way we talk about it or think about it, that Democrats are for a little bit more government, and Republicans are for a little bit less. I think most of the fights here are over one particular lever that policymakers can pull. They're fighting a lot about how to get more money in more people's pockets. You can do that by broadly finding ways to raise wages, increasing take-home pay with specific types of tax cuts. Maybe you can increase work benefits, like retirement or retirement healthcare, paid leave, or you could just straight up give people more money. That's only like one out of the three levers I think about for policymakers to pull here.

You could also try to get people more training so that they can have higher-paying jobs because there's plenty of good middle-class jobs, and we can train folks to do them. Then, on the complete flip side of the household budgetary ledger, we can do a lot more to lower the costs of a middle-class life for people. I think that is more of the newer focus we're seeing here in Washington.

Brian Lehrer: In the 2024 presidential election, the exit polls indicated around 55% of college-educated voters chose Kamala Harris. That same number, 55% of non-college-educated voters, chose Donald Trump. It was different by race, but as has been discussed a lot, Latino men split practically 50-50. That's new. There was some movement among Black voters, especially men, toward Trump, some movement, all generally attributed to economic concerns. That continued a trend of working-class voters moving from the Democrats who they used to vote for more reliably, and more toward Republicans.

I know there are other factors like social issues and white racial grievance, but for you as an economic policy expert affiliated roughly with the Democratic Party, what do you see as the biggest economic reasons for that trend?

Zach Moller: Yes, that's a good question. I think it used to feel a lot easier to earn a middle-class life when you were someone who didn't have a college degree. I think Democrats for a long time, over-indexed on suggesting people go to college, but were recognizing that if you were already 30 years old or already 40 years old, you're probably not going back to college. I think there's been a little bit of drift there, but we have to recognize that we got to do more. If we're going to make the middle class more affordable and attainable for people without a college degree, you just have to work harder at it. You got to do things that you wouldn't necessarily always do.

Democrats have traditionally pursued things like more unionization to fight for higher wages. You mentioned increase in the minimum wage. Those are absolutely good things, but it is not going to be sufficient to make the future middle class have more people without a college degree.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote in 2023 about the Biden administration focusing on non-college America with large-scale initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act to boost research and production of computer chips in this country, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. You also cited making entrepreneurship easier and reversing punitive regulations, like non-compete agreements for workers who leave their companies or get laid off. I'll add the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which had a lot of incentives for job creation in the green energy sector. As you know, there was a lot that Biden couldn't get through Congress for his more ambitious Build Back Better version of that bill.

He was going to be the new FDR, many people said at the time, in case we forget, but much of it failed in the Senate. More subsidies for childcare and eldercare, more protections for union organizing, higher corporate taxes to help pay for some of these programs, which would have benefited, they believe, working-class or non-college workers the most. Anything you would add to the Biden legacy of success or failure in this regard?

Zach Moller: Honestly, there is one thing I'd like to add that's in the failure column is at the end of the Biden administration, we had high and growing inflation. We thought that that wasn't going to be as bad of a political situation as it ended up being, but if you are not feeling your wages going up enough, then inflation really, really hurt you. I think that's why we're seeing more and more policymakers here in Washington talk about lowering costs for things, finding ways to make sure that college, or healthcare, or childcare become cheaper, because if we don't do those things, then everyone's going to feel uncomfortable about their economic situation.

Brian Lehrer: Do you personally think if the more expansive Build Back Better Bill had been passed, working-class or non-college Americans would feel better about the Democratic Party right now, which is at historic lows in approval rating polls?

Zach Moller: I don't know the answer to that. That's a hypothetical. What I do know is that we have to focus on it now. We have to focus on affordability now. Otherwise, things aren't going to get better.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Max in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Max.

Max: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I guess I just wanted to call to say that I've been feeling this real frustration. I'm hearing it from a lot of other folks, and I'm definitely in a crowd of overeducated technocrats, but I just feel like the conversation we get into so many layers of complexity without having a real, incredible advocate at the federal level in the form of a Democratic Party that actually just prioritizes universal health care, accessible housing, affordable housing, and food, and all the rest of it is window dressing, like healthcare, housing, food. What kind of job you have, how educated you are, starts to matter a lot less if the basic safety of your family isn't always under threat.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think, Zach? Start with affordable housing and affordable healthcare, and don't overthink it before you go further than that, if I'm characterizing you right, Max?

Max: I'd say that's fair.

Zach Moller: Thanks, Max. Look, I think these are the things that every policymaker needs to be tackling. We need to make sure that food prices are lower. Unfortunately, we have a lot of tariffs that are increasing the costs of imported food today. We want to make housing more affordable. There's a big movement to build more housing so that things can start to be more affordable in that context. Healthcare is absolutely the number one priority for so many working people and so many Americans.

We're at a point where, currently, there are some subsidies for the Affordable Care Act exchange insurance. That's expiring, and we don't have a path necessarily to get that insurance to be more affordable right now because of political differences in getting it done. Maybe that's something that can get taken care of at the end of the year on a bipartisan basis, but it's going to be tough.

Brian Lehrer: About the wings of the Democratic Party, I know your think tank, Third Way, calls itself center left and is often critical of the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani wing, the party on economics. Still relating to Max's call, in polls, many of their core programs are popular. Various forms of universal health insurance, universal childcare, higher taxes on the wealthy, more free college tuition, things like those. Do you, in Third Way, think they're misguided economically or just that the Republicans beat them on other things like culture war issues, neutralizing the advantage the more progressive or Democratic socialist proposals might give them, other things being equal?

Zach Moller: I think one of the biggest things here is we live in a time of higher interest rates and a tight economy where inflation can rear its head. With that, it's really, really difficult to roll out large universal programs without sparking inflation, and it's difficult to find all the taxes to pay for it. Universal programs may be very popular. A lot of higher universal taxes aren't necessarily as popular. There's a challenge in balancing both pieces of that. Now, we should absolutely find ways to raise taxes on the rich and high-income earners. We can definitely do that, but we have a large and growing national debt that also needs to be dealt with.

There's just a lot of complicated things to then promise a whole bunch more large-scale programs on top of it at this juncture. That doesn't mean that we can't be aggressive on the things that are less costly. There's a variety of things in the housing space to try to build more housing in more places that can be done without a lot of government subsidy, figuring out the other places on the supply side of the economy that we can just have more people doing those types of jobs that will actually help lower the cost for healthcare, lower the cost for housing, lowering the cost for childcare, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: That's your piece of the debate within the Democratic Party or larger Democratic world as it extends to your think tank. Let's talk about the Republicans for a minute and the wings of that party, and the way things are changing. How different do you see MAGA Republicans like maybe Josh Hawley, maybe Steve Bannon, being today from the more traditional, let's say, Reagan Republicans on how to help the working class or non-college-educated Americans. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill seems to have a lot of old-fashioned Reaganomics in it, including holding taxes on the wealthy down and cutting back on safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid.

Some Republicans like those I mentioned also talk a populist game about being hurt by corporate power and supporting unions, for example. I'm curious how you see the changing economic politics of the Republican Party in the working class or non-college context.

Zach Moller: That's a great question, too. Look, to oversimplify, the Republicans have traditionally thought that if you get economic growth and growing prosperity, then more people are going to be working. That's going to be better for wages. President Trump's argument has been a little bit different. He's been trying to use more tariffs to force growth into some particular jobs like manufacturing, or cutting specific taxes on types of income, like no tax on tips. A lot of the Trump agenda is being instituted in a little bit more of an authoritarian way. He's just doing it. Those tariffs were not voted on in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. President Trump has asserted them, and there's questions about constitutionality.

I'll let a lawyer get into that, but that's a big difference between what the Republicans were able to pass, which I hear you, has a lot more of the traditional Republican-sounding stuff in there, and then what Trump is doing on his own.

Brian Lehrer: Where do you think tariffs enter the conversation? They are scrambling so much economically. I think we're just starting to see the effects. I know I saw one report, which sounds like just common sense, but the increase in prices that are being passed along to consumers so far are having a more severe impact on the lives and the lifestyles of people who are poor, or what we would call working class, than on other Americans. How do you think the tariff policies might scramble either the economics or the politics?

Zach Moller: On the economics, President Trump's argument is that those tariffs are going to help spur more manufacturing in the United States or more resource extraction in the, in the raw materials that then go into making steel, making chips, aluminum, all the other things that are needed for industrial production, but that's going to take a long, long time. In the short term, we are all paying higher costs. Even a lot of manufacturers today that are inside the United States are paying higher costs on their imports. Things that they were importing to then go into building a washing machine, or a car, or anything like that.

I don't think these tariffs are going to ultimately be successful because there's a lot of economic pain that we are all feeling right now through higher costs on literally anything we are buying. That is a huge challenge for saying that these tariffs are going to help working-class and middle-class Americans.

Brian Lehrer: What do you make politically of Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York, running centrally on affordability? So far, he's got a dominant lead in the general election polls. If he wins, how applicable are some of his affordability agenda items, in your opinion, to other races in places that are in blue New York for next year's midterms?

Zach Moller: Focusing on affordability is really important. I think that's the thing that Democrats weren't doing a good enough job on in the 2024 election. Mamdani is focusing on that. I see the value there, but New York City is not New Jersey, is not Michigan, is not Virginia. There's just a lot of different ways to have an affordability agenda. We're focusing at Third Way to do more to lower the costs of things by trying to build more of them, get more of them, have more people working in childcare, those sorts of things. That's the way we were focusing on it. New York City is New York City. The focus on affordability is key and important. There's definitely going to be an interparty fight on how you go about it.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Although I think you have to say, just as a matter of political analysis, but tell me if you disagree, that Mamdani has succeeded in setting the economic agenda in this race, because people will debate whether these things are good or bad, but people are talking about what? Free buses, universal childcare, rent regulations. I would challenge, maybe even you, to name the central economic proposals coming from Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams, or Curtis Sliwa. He's really setting an economic agenda.

Zach Moller: He's the frontrunner. Of course, what he says is going to be very, very salient. I'm no expert in New York City, so I can't speak to what the other candidates are doing, but it's going to be just a part of the conversation nationally now is how do you make everything more affordable? That's one of the things that we're leaning into here in Washington, DC, in our work at Third Way.

Brian Lehrer: Zach Moller is Director of the Economic Program at the center-left think tank, Third Way. His previous experience includes three years as a staffer for the Senate Budget Committee, working on economic and revenue issues under Democratic Committee chairs Patty Murray and Kent Conrad. Among his works was an article in 2023 that we've been drawing from some for this conversation called Worlds Apart: The Non-College Economy. Thanks for joining us for this. We really appreciate it.

Zach Moller: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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