Tuesday night’s VP debate took place in the context of multiple overlapping crises: Iranian missiles raining down on Tel Aviv, intensifying the threat of a regional war; a catastrophic hurricane ripping through Appalachia; a massive explosion at a biolab in the Atlanta metro area; a rising tide of neo-fascist anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by the Trump campaign and rightwing media. The Real News staff and friends of the outlet recap Tuesday night’s debate and discuss what it revealed about the political crisis Americans are facing.

Studio: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome, everyone, to The Real News Network podcast. It is 11:39 PM on Tuesday, October 1st. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here, as y’all may know. And I am sitting here at The Real News studio after watching the first and only vice presidential debate before the general elections in November, next month. And I’m sitting here with some of my Real News colleagues and friends, and we thought it would be prudent for us to stay up a little late, give our impressions and analysis of what we just watched. And yeah, we’ve got a lot of other work to get to, a lot of other stories to cover, but of course we know that a lot of our audience was watching this debate as well and want to know what we think about it.

Why don’t we go around the table and introduce ourselves and give our general impressions of the vice presidential debate? How do you feel it compared to the presidential debate that we all watched here at The Real News studio last month and responded to as well? Big takeaways, things that you were expecting but didn’t see. And then, yeah, we can maybe dig into a few more specific points in the second turn around the table.

Taya Graham:

Hi, my name is Taya Graham. I’m the host of the Police Accountability Report with Stephen Janis. I am the criminal justice reporter here in Baltimore City, Maryland. And something that I took away from the debate is how assiduously they avoided the topic of race. Now, something I have to say as a Black woman is that I’ve been disappointed that at no point I have been able to celebrate the fact that we have the first Black woman running for president who actually has a chance to accomplish that incredible office. At no point have I been able to savor that.

In acknowledging the fact that we have a Black woman who also has Asian heritage approaching this office, I couldn’t help but note how much Vance am Walz avoided broaching that topic, especially when it came to the demonization of immigrants in Springfield, which they just barely were able to touch on. They couldn’t even mention the fact that one of the oldest blood libels possible of saying that immigrants were eating dogs and cats, that they were poisoning our community, bringing in STDs, bringing in AIDS, none of these things were broached. Instead, a very civil discourse was held. And I do think for the majority of the American public, this perhaps was appropriate, but I do have to say on some level, I was disappointed that the discourse stayed as civil as it did because there were many points where Walz could have dug in his heels much deeper. And I would just like to highlight a few of them.

In relation to women’s rights, Kamala Harris, who might be our first female president, in relation to abortion rights, the idea that it should be left state to state. Just in California, Ms. Lin, a woman who wanted to carry her twins to term, who went to St. Joseph’s Hospital because at 15 weeks pregnant, she was going to lose those children, was given a terrible option: To spend $40,000 in an ambulance to take her to another hospital to get the care she needed or drive five hours on a ride in which she was told by those same doctors at St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital she would die on that ride to try to save herself at that next hospital. Leaving abortion rights state to state does not protect women. The idea that we need a woman in office and a person who supports women’s rights is so strong. It is so important. It cannot be under-emphasized. And so my takeaway is actually how important race and gender is to this race and the fact that, I’m sorry to say it, but both white men on stage assiduously ignored it. I understand that is important for the majority of the American audience, but to ignore it is to ignore the necessities of the majority of Americans.

Stephen Janis:

My name is Stephen Janis. I’m the co-host of Police Accountability Report with Taya. And what was really interesting to me tonight was we had observed JD Vance when we covered the Republican National Convention, and I had always thought that the positioning of Vance was to make fascism more appealing to the American public. He was guy who was going to wash it down and make it a little less, let’s say, offensive. And I honestly think that JD Vance achieved that, and for the first time I saw him as that stalwart for the fascist movement that is MAGA for the Project 2025. He watered it. I don’t know how you all reacted when he said that Trump saved Obamacare. That was just amazing twist of… And on many other issues, he soft-pedaled it. But I still think the fever is there, he was just very, very good at being presentable in a way that made fascism seem less scary.

And that’s what I always thought he was going to be. That’s why I thought they put him in that position, because MAGA has this angry, horrible edge, and he softens it. And he did achieve that tonight. I’m not saying he won the debate. I thought it was pretty equal. And as Taya said, it was civil, so there weren’t any really true gotcha moments except for the one about Vice President Mike Pence not being here tonight because he refused to overturn the election. But in general, I thought that they have their guy now; they have the Antichrist ready to step forward when Trump… Because Trump could easily die in office or whatever, but he seems very fit for the role.

Ryan Harvey:

Hey, everybody. This is Ryan Harvey. I’m not a Real News staff, but I am friend and family, and I’m here in Baltimore so I popped in for this debate. Look, I think one of my main takeaways is neither of these people is going to be the president. That’s an important thing to remember. It did feel like we were at the adult table versus the presidential debates; there was a lot more substance. Both, I think, were fairly sharp in presenting whatever their opinions or fake opinions or whatever it may be.

I think one of my big takeaways, I know that Vance, he’s the jobs guy. He’s the jobs in the economy guy who’s supposed to relate to regular people. Kamala Harris has a real weakness there, and it showed in the polls. Walz, I think, did a good job of cutting through to that. If you just watch this debate and didn’t watch the others, you would get a sense that there is a crisis. And there is a crisis. We have a political crisis. We have a bit of an economic crisis in this country. I think that was a very important thing.

And there’s a bunch of things we’ll talk about, but one thing I think is interesting is even when they were debating and sometimes even agreeing on certain bold, very different economic policies involving, for instance, industrial policy, the federal government intervening in capitalism to make sure that people are being taken care of, even when Vance, his solutions, many of them are terrible and extremely racist and xenophobic, both of them are representing something that we’ve been feeling, which is there has been a break with neoliberalism and the right and dare I say, the left, but the Democrats, but also the left are searching for actual policies that will help us get away from that. And that was interesting. Some of it, of course, was just stuff that was couched in rhetoric, but underneath of it was actually just neoliberalism. But there was still some stuff in there that I think is worth identifying, that we really are at that crisis moment where this is not working even for Americans anymore. I think that’s a big, interesting point.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s all beautifully and powerfully put. And just two main thoughts for me in response to what y’all said and that things that stood out to me as I was watching, this is the most civil debate that I can recall watching during a presidential campaign in quite some time. And I imagine once we turned off the mainstream news channels and whose coverage we were watching and we were seeing what the pundits were responding and what they were highlighting from the debate, but that civility factor definitely seemed to really stand out to people and is something that I think a lot of people genuinely crave, the incivility and the hostility and the division and the yelling and bravado of the last debate, there’s an appeal there, but it’s also very emotionally exhausting for people. And we’re already living in very exhausting times. That civility signaled a victory in a number of senses and a loss in others.

And I think the elephant in the room is just that the longer the debate went and the more aware I became of how much Vance and Walz were striving to cultivate that sense of civility and to make these gestures of civility towards one another and to really build into their message that they are bipartisan and get things done and they want to get people back to that, the more cognizant I became of how much they were both vying for that pedestal, who’s the most civil person, the more unsettled I became thinking about all the uncivil, inhumane, violent realities that are going on simultaneously that we’re covering here at The Real News Network on Police Accountability Report, on Working People just at the Port of Baltimore today with the Longshore workers on strike. And then as I’m driving home, I see the news from other staff that Iran is responding with missiles into Israel. The elephant in the room obviously is that the triumph of civility in this debate is also eerily contrasted with a lot of really horrifying realities that we need to confront.

Stephen Janis:

I wanted to ask you a question.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Please.

Stephen Janis:

Because I think What you said was really smart. But doesn’t that in a sense give you the feeling why Trump is appealing to people? Because that civility is so at odds with the violent reality that this type of civil established government, trust in institutions, they talked about experts, does that at all give you the sense of why a working class guy sitting at home with his beer would say, “Fuck this. I want Donald Trump because these two people are sitting up here while I can’t pay my rent”? Because that’s what you invoke here, and I think it’s interesting. I was just wondering what you thought about that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I think it’s a really incredible question. And I would say I definitely think so. And I’ve lived it. When you asked that question, my mind immediately went to a story I’ve told on The Real News before of sitting on the couch of my childhood home in California 12 years ago in a house that we would soon lose in the wake of the recession after I’d just gotten home from a 13-hour warehouse shift, watching cable news with my parents and just hearing them talk about, in the most civil terms, how the economy was coming back and how it was so clear that the terms of the national discourse were being to keep families like mine and realities like ours out of view so as not to corrupt this falsely maintained civility at the expense of silencing the evidence to the contrary. And I think that so many working people in this country feel deep inside of them this primal scream because they have so few outlets to let that out or they feel like it would be so unheard by the people in power.

But I think we’re all feeling that cosmic scream to some extent, and Trump gives people a megaphone to scream into. He does provide that cathartic relief for these emotions that build up in all of us and that fester. And the more that the people in power don’t hear them, I think the more that that pain can turn into anger and that anger can turn into vengeance and so many other things if gone unaddressed. Yeah, I do think that it contributes a lot to the appeal of Trump, that powers fabricated need to maintain this aura of civility at the expense of acknowledging the reality in front of all of us, which… Anyway, but we can talk more about that later.

But the last point on that is just that I think that in that regard, this was a big victory for Vance-Trump ticket because by coming out looking civil at all and by coming out really seeming like an equally reasonable choice for a well-meaning person who just has a difference of opinion, that was what Vance accomplished for people who may be still undecided but will probably want to vote for Trump, but mainly their big thing is they just don’t want to feel bad or embarrassed or shamed about it. That sheen of civility that we saw in the manicured spectacle of this debate and why I think it was such a victory for Vance, and thus for Trump, was that it provided that sheen of respectability and bipartisanship that can allow anyone who believes in what Trump and his movement are all about but doesn’t want to deal with the social consequences and pressures of that. It gave them something to point to.

Ryan Harvey:

Well, something that we were talking about before we started recording is that this debate, and really this entire election cycle… And I’m 40, so I’m the same age as JD Vance, which is wild to think about. I don’t know what it’s like in every presidential cycle, but this presidential cycle feels like it’s solely about a few swing states and about a small percentage of voters in a few swing states. All of the talking points in the messaging are pointed in that direction.

And I think to your point, and I think I agree with it, I think Vance came out as the civil face of the Trump ticket and clearly had an agenda. And maybe that’s also just what he does well in general, to try to come out as looking normal and sensible. But also, one of the Harris campaign’s biggest flaws according to the polls has been a failure to connect with people on the bread and butter jobs, economy issues. Every poll has showed that she is trailing Trump when it comes to the economy. People don’t trust her on the economy. I think if those folks were tuning into this, I would assume they would feel a little more secure hearing from somebody like Walz who not only has just a much more relatable story and a much more relatable way of speaking about these things, I think he’s more able to articulate some of the economic policies.

But he also is from a state that apparently, I didn’t know this until tonight, seems to be number one in all of the key talking points that they bring up, whether it’s healthcare, a bunch of stuff around the economy. And so it could be that Vance did come out, that the Trump campaign is going to benefit from this debate in the way you just described, but it could also even out because I think the Harris campaign could also make some traction with some of those folks. Yeah, that’s all I was going to add there.

Taya Graham:

Well, I think you made a great point, both of you, in the way that Vance did a great job in creating a veneer to protect against the violence that has been coming from former President Trump’s mouth. Remember just the other day, he was essentially evoking a version of the purge, but for law enforcement, maybe for a day, maybe for an hour in order to give people notice in our community, as if our law enforcement officers need any other, let’s say, constraints removed from their current actions, considering we have roughly 1,000 people a year killed at the hands of police. And only 1,000 that we know of because the police volunteer this information, so of course, we don’t know about the deaths that police choose not to report to the Uniform Crime Report of the FBI.

But in the relation of protecting and pushing back that violence that has been coming strongly from Trump, that’s one thing that Margot and Nora brought up. Did Joe Biden win? And JD Vance’s response was, “Well, there was censorship on Facebook.” And his response was a series of dodges protecting him from addressing what actually happened on January 6th, the death of the police officers, the violence that occurred, the destruction within the building, the fear that was created. Instead of addressing that head-on, he pivoted towards some idea of conservatives being censored on social media platforms, which of course are corporate platforms with terms of service that can choose who they want to keep on and who they don’t have to. This isn’t some sort of genuine town squares, these are corporations that can do as they choose.

He is pretending to look forward while not acknowledging that the former Vice President Pence, Trump suggested that he should be hanged for his trees. And when asked, “Would you do the same? Would you do what Trump asked? What Pence denied him would you do?” Instead, he chose to talk about Facebook. When it comes to dealing with the violence, Vance is doing his job. He’s covering for it, he’s giving his platitudes, he’s wearing his pink tie, and he’s doing his best to make Trump’s statements appear as actual policy.

Stephen Janis:

One thing that we talked about in the last debate podcast we did was whether or not the policies and the ability to discuss policies was getting through to voters. And there was an interesting debate about tariffs and where they actually agreed, although they didn’t agree on experts. And you’re a person who knows a lot about this subject matter. And I was wondering if you thought that part of the debate would resonate with people, they understand what’s going on, if it’s a topic that should be more front and center in this presidential election. Just curious about what you think about that.

Ryan Harvey:

Yeah, definitely. I honestly thought that that was going to be talked about a lot more, trade policy and tariffs and all of this. This is a very big deal.

Look, Trump put huge tariffs on China during his presidency that ended up really hitting the agricultural sector and farmers. China slapped retaliatory tariffs. Very strategic. They put tariffs on bourbon. They seemed to target tariffs, soybeans. They targeted tariffs on red states. And after all was said and done, folks in those states, farmers still supported Trump because he gave them federal money. He put money in their pockets.

Tariffs are not a crazy idea. This is a really shameful thing that the Democrats have fallen into. When I came of age, I was politicized by the 1999 Seattle protests, one of the demands of the labor movement was tariffs. We want to have the right to use tariffs. Free trade takes away your right to use tariffs. It doesn’t mean that tariffs are the answer; tariffs are a defensive measure. But neoliberalism is so deeply ingrained in our politics that tariffs have become this bad word, like, oh, that’s a barbaric thing to do. It’s ancient or whatever. No, it was what we did before neoliberalism became the dominant ideology and the dominant economic paradigm.

The Biden administration has kept all of Trump’s tariffs on China and increased them, actually. But what they’ve done that’s different from Trump, Trump put tariffs on, and then he made all these weird false promises. I don’t say weird because it’s a Harris campaign talking point, I just said that organically, but weird… I’m talking about Foxconn in Wisconsin where he was like, “This is going to be the eighth wonder of the world. There’s going to be 16,000 jobs.” And it was just some shady businessmen he made some weird agreement with. None of that stuff happened. The jobs didn’t materialize. The place is empty.

What the Biden administration did, and this is… Before October 7th, I was pleasantly surprised that the Biden administration was a lot more progressive than I thought they were going to be on election day. The things like the Inflation Reduction Act, not a perfect policy, obviously. Full of problems, lot of places to fight on that, but we have industrial policy for the first time in a very long time in this country. We have to recognize that that is a gateway to much better policy. And there’s been other industrial policies as well. Those are offensive. Those are proactive policies. I thought Vance was going to come on the attack more about those things, and I think there were missed opportunities.

I do worry that framing tariffs as just as extra tax on people is missing the fact that there’s a lot of… Tariffs are immediate, that immediate relief. When Trump threatened John Deere with 200% terrorists if they ship jobs to Mexico, I was like, “Damn. Democrats should be saying that, progressives should be. That’s our stuff.” Punish corporations for seeking lower wages to exploit people. I want Mexican workers to have good jobs too. That’s not why John Deere is going to Mexico. We know that. We should be supporting independent unions in Mexico to fight for their rights and their wages at work, but also we should be penalizing corporations for seeking exploitation. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and there’s so much more that I want us to dig into, but we don’t have time to really get into all the nuts and bolts here. And again, we just wanted this to be a reaction podcast, give some of our impressions, our analyses. Of course Real News remains a 501(c)(3). We are not here to tell anybody how to vote, we are here to just try to provide the perspective and context that we have as people who cover this stuff day in, day out.

And in that vein, wanted to just ask if we could go back around the table one more time and just underline… I know that we had a bunch of bullet points, highlights, takeaways, dynamics that we saw in this debate that maybe we didn’t see in the last, or there are ways that we think that this could or could not have consequences for the next month before we actually head to election day. But I wanted to just have us go around one more time and pull out one more quick takeaway that you wanted to put on the record, and then we’ll close out.

Taya Graham:

Well, I attended the Republican National Convention with my colleague, Steven Janis, and I can say this: I spoke to delegates. I spoke to a delegate from Georgia, Ricardo Bravo, who is a Latino gentleman. Both of his parents are immigrants. He worked at a historic Black university. I spoke to Terry from Tennessee. I spoke to people who were Republican delegates from Hawaii and American Samoa. I spoke to Republican delegates from every possible walk of life. And one thing I have to say is that they were not sure of the policies. There was no certainty around the policies. And that is what I saw again tonight. I actually saw Walz outline policies, $125,000 for housing, $50,000 for small business owners, tax credits here for children, et cetera. I saw numbers and policies. That is not what I was given from Vance.

But one thing that I saw again and again is that there was a lack of certainty, and that lack of certainty becomes misinformation. And one thing we do know for sure is that misinformation is literally deadly. Right now, it is literally deadly. Misinformation can lead to lives cost, can lead to deaths, can lead to bomb threats at hospitals, at schools. We know how important it is to get the right information out there.

What I saw was Vance in his pink tie doing a wonderful job of giving a pink glow and some sort of logic to some of the unusual statements that former President Trump made. And I saw Walz coming with numbers. And although I do think he could have been clearer and I do think he could have been stronger, the one thing he did offer us was some certainty, was some specificity. That is something Vance didn’t offer us.

And unfortunately, that is my concern from this night. Unless you are a high information consumer, this debate isn’t going to move you. The people I spoke to at the RNC, many of them didn’t know the policies of the administration that they wanted to vote for, but they did know they felt in their leader. They did know they had faith in them. They did know that they believed him on a deep, emotional, visceral level they had faith in former President Trump. And that kind of faith is unshakable. And faith is something I think we can all honestly say cannot be reasoned with. Faith is rooted deeply. Logic cannot broach it. My deep concern is that this debate won’t move the needle at all.

Stephen Janis:

I think one of the things that we haven’t discussed tonight that was very interesting to me were the questions about Israel, Iran, Lebanon, how quickly both the Democrat and Republican nominee punted or didn’t give us, really, any plan whatsoever about how to approach this problem nor really mention Gaza in any way, shape, or form in a substantive way. I think Walz said something about the humanitarian crisis, but not general concern about what’s going on in Gaza and Israel’s continuing war there that is atrocious. And so I think all of us should be concerned about that because it really looks like we’re on the verge of that conflict spreading for a variety of reasons. And I think it’s something that I think the moderators should have nailed them to the wall a bit more because that policy going in is going to be extremely important to all of us, to the world, to the people of Gaza. And there is no policy at this point I could glean from either candidate. They really bounce it around quickly. And I think it’s something that needs to be followed up on.

Ryan Harvey:

Well, two closing thoughts. One, just a nitpick thing, that the statistics about fentanyl, just to bring up, it’s just such a funny statistic that the Trump campaign has created, that record numbers of fentanyl coming in under Biden administration. Those numbers are based on seizures of fentanyl. Those numbers and the people who analyze this don’t know what the actual situation is, but what we do know is more fentanyl’s being seized under the Biden administration than was seized under the Trump administration. That could mean that less was being seized or that more is coming in. But also, when Trump was president, there were record numbers of fentanyl coming in because fentanyl is a new drug. There’s a lot less heroin and there’s a lot more fentanyl. In four years, there’ll be some other freak drug and fentanyl will be down and that’ll be up. But what we do know is fentanyl overdose deaths skyrocketed from the moment Trump took office, never dipped his entire time in office, and started to trail off immediately when Biden took office, and in 2023 dropped for the first time in 10 years. For me, I’ve lost a lot of friends from heroin. I lost my childhood best friend probably from fentanyl a few years ago, so that is something that hits me pretty personally. It’s a made up statistic. I wish that Walz had come out a little more prepared for that.

But in general, I’ve been hear in The Real News before talking about my work and the Uncommitted Campaign. I’m amongst those who are very, very angry at the Biden administration for its handling and its blatant support for Israel’s aggression. And we’re seeing just tonight where that’s leading us now, the next phase of it. And yeah, it’s shocking that that wasn’t more talked about. The immediacy of it is unthinkable, but also the 20-year span of what’s going to happen in the region and in the world, how that’s going to impact policy and people and geopolitics is crazy to me.

Politico reported tonight that six Israeli and American intelligence and military people on anonymity told them that the US was pushing Israel to invade Lebanon, said that they were going to be against it for PR but that they were actually pushing it. It’s just so crazy to me and that this caused conflict in the Pentagon and at the State Department. I can imagine that military thinkers are like, “What are you doing? This is so bad for US geopolitical project.” I don’t understand it. But to me, and again, I’m 40, I already mentioned that, but there’s a lot of people younger than me who vote who are so angry who do not want to vote for Kamala Harris. And that is such a big issue for them to think about. Michigan, that’s a huge thing. I don’t understand what their plan is for that. But for me, that was the elephant in the room that was sitting there is… Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

And Walz didn’t address it at all, but do you think people are actually going to allow Trump to become president over their anger still?

Ryan Harvey:

To be honest, I think there are a lot of people who that’s not even the question that they’re thinking about. The question they’re thinking about is there have to be political consequences for this. And the political consequences are going to be that I can’t vote for somebody who did this.

Stephen Janis:

They’re going to vote for Trump?

Ryan Harvey:

No, they won’t vote for Trump. I think they won’t vote. But as we all know, when people don’t vote, it tends to help the Republican Party and not the Democratic Party. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and to just throw one more thing into the sauce there to bring in the labor component as well, as I mentioned, I was just coming from the ILA picket line at the Port of Baltimore this morning, which in and of itself is a really remarkable thing and a really critical component in this election right now. And this is the first time in nearly 50 years that these ILA workers at ports from Maine to Texas, around 45,000 of them are on strike.

And to be clear, the ILA is not the ILWU, the more radical, international long shore workers and warehouse workers union on the west coast whom we’ve interviewed a number of times at The Real News Network. But the very fact that the ILA is on strike right now is a really remarkable thing and is giving people, in some ways, a window into what it would have looked like if the railroad workers had gone on strike two years ago. And it’s really bringing up those memories. And it is, in fact, a talking point in the political media right now. It is a very intense calculation being made in the Biden-Harris White House right now about what to do because ramming through a contract two years ago and preemptively breaking the railroad workers strike and effectively siding with the rail carriers just two months before the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio was not a good luck. And so right Now, Biden at least this week has expressed his refusal to get involved in this dispute, expressing support for collective bargaining. But that’s not going to last all the way through November. And people are going to be feeling this more if this goes beyond a week, I think.

And so I think that that is also another component to really bring in here not just in terms of what is the strike going to mean for the election? Which is how a lot of news channels that are talking about it at all are talking about it, but I wanted to also bring in here the fact that Steven, you asked the question, would people still allow their anger to lead them to vote for Trump? I think that the answer is still yes for a lot of working class folks for a number of reasons. I hope and pray that all the talking and writing and interviewing that I and others have been doing in this world since 2016 has taught us about the Trump era is that-

Stephen Janis:

Well, Max, let me ask you a question really quickly. Does, from your perspective, interviewing all these working class people, does Walz help at all in terms of being a working class dude or at least playing one on TV? Does that help with this Trump contingent of working class voters?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, depends. Some, yes. In the key swing states, probably not, to be honest. And that’s-

Stephen Janis:

No, that’s honest. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s I guess the point I was circuitously trying to get to by bringing in the ILA strike. Like the Teamsters, the ILA has endorsed Harris, but they represent a ton of conservative members, just like the Teamsters do. The Teamsters infamously have refused to endorse either candidate, which is really, in this climate, effectively an endorsement of Trump. It’s a very symbolic non-endorsement. There are a shit ton of working class people who are going to vote for Trump still, even union members, including a whole lot of non-union members who, if they are going to vote at all, they are still going to vote for Trump because for a lot of people, it still hasn’t gotten… Maybe it’s gotten a little bit better, but it hasn’t gotten nearly good enough or it’s gotten worse in some areas of their lives while other parts of their lives have gotten a little less bad.

I think that is also the messy human reality that we cover but that I think people in the labor reporting world and the pro-labor world, people who support worker struggles can misread the past four years. We have seen historic surges in unionization activity, in strikes and industrial actions, historic support for unions, so on and so forth. But what have we also seen? We’ve seen the wealth of the super rich increase by trillions. And we have seen a greater exacerbation of global inequality than anything we’ve ever seen before. We have seen working people still being squeezed and still feeling like no one’s really taking their concerns seriously.

And the railroad strike is a perfect example of that. It was never just about sick days, it was never just about give us a little more money, it’s about these rich fuckers on Wall Street and in these executive boardrooms are ruining everything, and it’s endangering us, you, our communities. It’s like we’re still talking on that surface level about the labor scene and the attitudes and situations of working people in this country, but we’re not actually being honest with ourselves about what has happened.

Yeah, we’ve had, as I said, surges in union activity. A lot of those union drives are stalling. A lot of them don’t have a first contract. A lot of the people who we were cheering on two years ago had been fired and moved on. It’s not as if it all just kept going like, as we said for years here at The Real News, what happens next depends on what we all do. And a lot of people haven’t kept up with it or workers have faced a lot of backlash or people are dealing with other economic pressures. They have to get a second job because of this inflation.

And so I guess that’s more of a plea to people out there watching and listening is that, yeah, there are going to still be a lot of people who vote for Trump. This race is really fucking close. Trump could very well still win. We all acknowledge that. Just learn from history. Please don’t forget what seems so shocking in 2016 but seems like it’s been so easily forgotten just a few years later, that it ain’t over until it’s over. And a lot of these dynamics can change in a quick amount of time. And we don’t have to spend two years talking about the white working class and trying to figure out how could working class people possibly support Trump? Listen to them. Jesus Christ, we’ve been talking about this for eight years now. I hope we’ve learned something from it.

Ryan Harvey:

No, and honestly, sorry, I know we’re closing up, but to the question you asked and as maybe a closing thought, that is something that did shine through in this debate, which was good in terms of from the Democrat side. Project 2025 is not going to win you this election. Calling Donald Trump a threat to democracy is not going to win this election. There are people in my family who voted for Trump and weren’t going to vote for Trump after January 6th and are voting for Trump and who are saying, “I wish there were better options.”

If you’re not talking about the money in people’s pocket and the cost of groceries, not just talking about it, but putting forward a solution to that problem, people will vote for… They know who Trump is. They’re not stupid. There’s people who are like, “This guy is a freaking bigot, and I’m going to vote for him because I’m worried about my family. I’m worried about where I’m going to be at in a year.” That’s real. That’s a reality that’s out there. And I feel like tonight at least we saw that focused on a little more. We saw less talk about this more, I don’t know, just the rhetorical idea of Trump and his values. But that’s not the issue. That’s not why people are voting for Trump because they agree with everything he says, they’re voting for him because they think maybe he’ll do something that’ll help me.

Taya Graham:

I understand why so many people see Trump as a disruptor. However, it does seem somewhat unusual to see someone who is a multimillionaire, if not a billionaire who came from money, is of money, still has money, draws money to him as someone who’s going to be a savior and somehow disrupt a system that made him incredibly wealthy beyond all of our dreams. But what one has to acknowledge is a fundamental difference between the Republican Party now and the Democrat party right this moment. The Democrats now at least can be shamed into doing the right thing when there is a voter like you who’s part of the non-commit vote, who I would assume is anti-Zionist, who I would assume wants an end to the war on Gaza, who I would assume has a lot of other strong beliefs that the Democratic Party, there are members, social justice Democrats, social justice warriors out there who are actually currently in Congress are aligned with, they just need a little bit more support.

But one thing we do know for certain, those who support Trump, the dark money that supports him, the Koch brothers, the over 200 members beyond the Heritage Foundation that helped create Project 2025. And for those out there don’t think Project 2025 is a reality, if you don’t believe that, wait two years with a Trump presidency, and I assure you, you will see it come to fruition. For those folks out there who hope that they can at least have any influence over the government that is up next, the Democrats can be pushed, can be nudged, can be shamed, but a Trump-Vance presidency will be controlled by tech money. The same folks who want our National Weather Association to shut down so some tech bros can open up an app and make all that money, who want you to have a subscription before you can find out or watch three ads before you can find out if a hurricane’s going to hit your town, those are the same folks who are not going to listen to you and are only going to listen to moneyed interests. It’s simply do you want the folks who will listen to money or do you want the folks who will have at least a chance of listening to you?

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. I think on that, we’re going to have to wrap it up. There’s so many other things to say, so many other points to discuss, but we got to get some rest. And we got a lot more important coverage on this election coming your way. Stay tuned for a great on-the-ground report that Stephen and Taya actually did focusing on canvassing efforts and different grassroots mobilizing efforts from Trump supporters and Harris supporters here in Baltimore and across the state line over in Pennsylvania. Stay tuned for that. Let us know what you thought of this conversation. Please send in your questions, comments, suggestions, and for folks you’d like us to have on and topics you’d like us to discuss. But for now, please go to therealnews.com/donate and support our work so we can keep bringing you more important coverage and conversations just like this. But for now, everyone go get some sleep. This is Maximilian Alvarez signing off from The Real News Network studio in Baltimore.

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