 Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming. I am Jerry Franklin. I am the Communications Director of the Economic Policy Institute. And for several reasons, it is my great pleasure to introduce Dan Greenberg. First, I've known Stan for a very long time, I think, since 1989. Second, I had the privilege of working with Stan on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. I watched him talk and outtalk cajole and mailed that multi-headed monster to victory, which was a pleasure. For each and every time I talk with Stan, I walk away from the conversation thinking about whatever we've discussed in a new way. He just gives me something else to think about that I hadn't already, which really makes him extremely smart or maybe not so very. Fourth and most important, he is married to one of my absolutely most favorite people in the world, someone who I would lay down in front of a moving train for and who, coincidentally, is also a really good friend to EPI, Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa Dolora. But Stan has accomplishments in addition to his marriage to Rosa. Stan Greenberg has served as polling advisor to presidents and prime ministers, CEOs, and dozens of candidates in the US and around the world, including Al Gore, Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela, as well as national leaders in Israel, Europe, and Latin America. Stan conducts polls for the Israel Project in the US, Europe, and the Arab world, as well as the Nobel Prize winning campaign to ban landmines and for NGOs dealing with climate change, aging, women's advocacy, and political reform. He conducts the bipartisan polls for NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and the Bipartisan Policy Center. Stan and James Carville founded Democracy Corp, a leading organization providing in-depth research and strategic advice to progressive organizations, inmates, and elected officials. When emails arrive from what those in the know call Decor, they get opened right away because the recipients know that they'll be sending useful and informative within them. Stan is here to talk about his new book with James Carville. It's the middle class student. The book is a spirited and serious appeal to the country to put the middle class at the center of our national agenda. And it happens to use a number of EPI charts, which is another reason why we are happy to be speaking here today. Last week, EPI released the electronic version of the State of Working America 12th edition, our 400 plus page, 200 plus chart book. Stan used about maybe 15 charts to make his case, and I suspect that many more people will read his book than ours. But they both made the same case, that incoming wealth had been moving to the very richest among us at an increasing rate, and most Americans should care about this because it is this upper movement of income and wealth that is causing no one income families to struggle so mightily. So the next one is that Stan will talk for a bit, take questions, and then sign books. So Stan, welcome. I'm trying to decide where I'll be comfortable, so I'm excited to stand and wander. Can you hear me? Is the mic on? Yes. Okay. And I also have some slide back, but that's kind of like wallpaper for the presentation because you have the book and a chance, some may have run it already, and may have pointed to some things that are important to all of it now. In fact, J.D. from Lifetime have worked together as well as EPI. I used to read from cover to cover, believe it or not, the State of Working America each year just like I'm in my room, you know, like I'm doing what's happening to America. I'm not, you know, I'm not a Michelle. There's just a bit of work. And one of the things I did, James and I did during the course of this, was at the beginning of it, because we know where we were going, and we, you know, constantly, you know, at the heart of this was, you know, a realization that the two of us, you know, spent a lifetime, obviously radically different, we speak differently, we look differently, we have different vocabulary, you know, we have different scale of audience, but I want this book shipped more on the first day. That's how we change that. Costco, that's no more confidence in this book, than all my books, all my eight books together. So just different, well. So I recommend it. But we, you know, two of us started, I started, you know, an early missionary for my work on making Democrats and trying to figure out how the Democratic Party, you know, he claims to be working class voters, and that's been my mission when it doesn't change. The problem, the struggle, you know, continued. And James, you know, started in his book of Louisiana on taxes and allegedly forgot about Casey, he told him to hone his both skills in campaigning, but also the sense that working people and leaders who want to see working people, are ones that had the Democratic Party back to win the majority party. And we both came together, we worked together for Bill Clinton, who then under the banner of forgotten Bill class. And that was kind of, you know, like the campaign that, you know, the clear statement about how we want to change the country, we put working people in their values with the center of the country, the kind of work the DPI does. And then, you know, as you carry on, as it turns out, decade after decade, and then you look back on these charts, when you look at 1992, we didn't know that 1980, you know, when we did 92, and we were a critique of what happened under, what happened in the decade of the 80s and trickle down. But we didn't know what we know now, that it was a three decade process. Now, Bill Clinton's presidency made a big difference, and they're in a different, so a whole range of, you know, indicators. But it's almost like a lip on the scale of what we've looked at in terms of what's happened to the country, the changing character of the country, what's happened to the middle path, what's happening to the inequality, what's happened to productivity theft, as workers not matched with rising incomes, what's happened to people's families, or a wreck, an increasingly, a wreck, and driven above all by what's happened for working class, in the middle of the country. And so that, when we started this, we got together, while I enjoy the rest of them, just to say, sure, it's like your 15 best graphs that capture what's going on in the country. There's a whole chapter of Just Graphs, in which we'll just talk about it. And this book is, while it has a lot of data and a lot of poem information, it's also an exchange between James and I over the building, over how we react and do events and contemplating these terms in real life and also as we learn and develop, if we're reacting to events, but also react to these charts as in different hotels and I'm spreading these charts, if I'm printing them out and spreading across the bed and looking at all at once and trying to get a sense of the country. But just the symbolism of the fact that you get that line, which is, in 1988, everybody rises together. I mean, it's nothing, you know, I'm more powerful than that. Everybody rises together in the post-World War II period. We're all defined, we all, I don't know who we, I won't be the rage, but James and I, and we look back on our family with our parents, we're defined by that experience and it's a presumption. Why do you rise? Will I rise together? How work is paid off? Kids get education and they rise in the next generation. And then the story begins in, from 1981, in which, you know, and I just go charge you on marriage and this is marriage rates that has to, the bottom line is essentially the median income, what's happened to marriage rates with the median income versus those at the top. Because at the top, now we have more money, they also have more stability of marriage and a whole range of things. That I don't know, that I take in place and I just, on the bottom line, this is life expectancy. If you go, you know, from 1972 to 2001 and look at the bottom half of the earnings distribution, you know, that shift is almost no gain, it's a minimal gain in the life expectancy for those people at the bottom, you know, half, that's the very top. There's a massive gain in life expectancy, so that the totality of what's going on infusing the country with the well-being of those at the top is advancing normalcy while those in the middle are widely behind. We had almost no gap in life expectancy since we looked into the bottom half. Well, if you look at where they were, you know, in 1972 there was barely a gap in the bottom half, but there was like an enormous gap. But how you go back, you know, to address these, you know, problem is the challenge. The, I don't expect that I won't go through this again, a lot of time, you know, the understanding how people experienced the crisis, the financial crisis, and the great recession, and then the lack of recovery during that period. And we've had a good fortune of being funded from Democracy Code, where we've been doing since one year into the financial crisis, every year, we've been doing in-depth interviews with people, as well as focus groups and major surveys and message tests. And we began to discover, and this is the real divide in the country and the very, very experienced and understood the crisis. So real people, as they saw the crisis, they knew in their countries that before the financial crisis, they thought they were deep problems. There was decline in the class income, there were also American jobs, the country, and themselves and the country went deeper into debt. They also thought the country was increasingly corrupt. That was the power of the Wall Street and Washington were intertwined in ways that made sure the government reinforced the problems of middle-class decline rather than solve them. And they had quite a deep analysis of the long-term problems facing the country. The economic elites, the progenitor states, the Congress, normal people, look at the financial crisis and say, we'll have to have a recovery from the crisis, and we'll even prove, we've got to, is it a pressure, we'll have to lift up this economy, we'll have recovery moving faster, we'll have to spend in a way that would get up to a different plateau, makes total good economic sense. Except for these, though, is what they think is that by talking about the recovery and throwing money at the problem, and doing it through the same political system that doesn't look out for ordinary people, I mean, look at the bullets, the bullets for them to find economic policy out of rations in the Russian. The blood out of the Russian, the big banks, the blood out of the auto industry, which is way unpopular, and it's still not that popular except in Ohio and Michigan, which may be all the betters. You know, in the Carolina. But for them, it defined the way the system worked. You know, rally, take care of the people who are the most irresponsible, do nothing about foreclosures, do nothing about the major problems facing the country. And the further we got down, you know, away from the crisis, until the elites began feeling better about the recovery, the recording jobs, and all those other jobs, there was a positive growth rate compared to, it's very compared to what we were. What's wrong with these people? Well, how about they get that, when we did the focus groups, there's two things that we could not break through on. Spending, and the short term spending, why, you know, short term spending, because they do think that some people that do that are gonna decide where the spending goes. And they just, and they watched the health care bill, which is very, you know, which I think is a great, it's extremely important, one of the most important things, progressives have done it also. We take ownership of it as a chapter, we look on, you know, what we do on health care. But what they watched with health care was all the stakeholders, all the special interests, you know, getting a lot of table, each getting a piece of the reaction, they watched the special deals, you know, combatant, cutting the silent, you know, the passive, the value is like, just health care is like, part of the same political system that screws the middle class. And so that was, you know, that was, you know, very fine. We would, in focus groups, we would show video of the president going on to be very good and saying, you've created 200,000 jobs, or chief, you know, the head of the council of economic advisors, and last up on that, chief economic advisor, talking about the number of jobs created, the 4.6 million jobs, or 200,000 jobs, but particularly 200,000, when they were talking positively about that, I mean, they thought that the monthly job numbers would look good. Okay. Everyone's attacked the moderators in the first instance, okay? Because when you get out there and say, we created 200,000 jobs, what they said, what people thought was, they paid minimum wage, there's a few, you know, there's a few, you know, a thousand people trying to get a very, you know, every job that you know, that's out there, they'll have, you know, benefit. And as the data of the real data began coming in, you began to see that the new jobs, in fact, created post the crisis, 12% less than I've built, showed the jobs that people were after they were employed paid 20% less than the jobs that they had before. We never lost 3% of their wealth from before. And if you were right now in Ohio, and talk to people about how the economy's going, they're still living with this unbelievable wreckage of people having, you know, they've moved in with parents or kids have moved in with them, they've moved back in with a X because they're as awake as they could afford it, change jobs, they'll try to change jobs because they can't afford the gas. They have an overhang of debt, you know, from, they're still living in the middle of this thing. Plus they see these long-term problems. And so when the biggest problem the President Obama had was trying to convince people about this election, that we should judge him based on his performance on Hang-Lung Repetition. And there's a long period here, a painful, at least two-year period. The 2010 election was disastrous in part because the President kept going up and saying, he says, you know, we, you know, he's using the metaphor that they drove the car to the ditch. You know, they, you know, we now, we're trying to bring it out of the ditch. They're just, they're above, you know, if the shovels don't turn on top of this, making it hard, we finally got it up to a level, you know, that we're starting to move this car up, you know, the hell in that direction. God, do they hate that? I mean, they're in the ditch. And they don't, I mean, they're in the middle of it, thank you. And also, they don't think you're dealing with the long-term problems. They don't think you're dealing with the serious stuff. You are dealing with the pace of recovery. And I even got nervous that the Democrat would mention that the, you know, except for the President's speech, that they were mainly making the case, give me more time. I understand them, but they might not be able to do it. But there's nothing on the table that addresses the long-term problems. The only thing on the table, you know, and I see the jobs there are, I know the jobs, there was a good thing, and if you had probably supported it and all that. But the answer was nothing. I mean, in terms of the scale of the problem we're talking about, and that's what they're looking for. So, you know, there are, there are bits that are in many short-term, they try to do in good schools, you know, in a hurry across the country. But if you say you have a five-year or ten-year, you know, two-true in-dollar infrastructure plan, that's for that, overwhelmingly. And they want you to do long-term stuff. You know, if it doesn't look like it's going through the political process, if it's merely throwing money on that, you know, it's just trying to stem that. But by the way, we did it, you know, it was inconsistent with, I think, a much, you know, bigger sense that people have, you know, where the country is going. So, we talk through the outcome and understand how people look at the economy and are looking for long-term solutions in this. But the bigger inclusion that we drew for ourselves, which we haven't advanced, was once we got through the data that we recently brought us happening to the country and the pain of that. And appreciation for how much they understand the long-term problem of how much they're demanding leaders that face up to the problems. Our single conclusion, James, you know, kind of subjective, simple conclusion, is that we're going to have nothing else. We're going to have nothing but a tiny little bit of us. That's the only thing that's important. Because other people are talking about the deficit system, you know, the way the country is weighed down by deficit, and other people who think there are other problems that are central to the country. You cannot look at the country, you cannot read this book without saying, there's nothing that matters here, other than how is there a future in the middle class? That's gotta be the central problem. You go back to, you go back and on each year, and it has to do with what campaigns do. You know, campaigns define what the fight's about. And when they're successful in defining what the fight's about, they'll also impact, you know, the work that's felt out of the election, and the way that it advantages them, usually, but also creates the mandate when the election's done. So in 1992, we ran on its economy system. We had Bill Clinton when he did his first Judd sessions that stated union address. You know, we went and said, I'm not going to talk about the state of the union. I mean, I'm going to talk about only one thing, my economic plans. So if you run an economy, I'm going to put out my economic plan, that's what we're going to focus on in the past, I don't know if they could probably have a very beneficial effect for that decade. The question is, can we have an election? That's about the future of the middle class. What's happened, you know, in this, I'll put this up because we, this is the jobs matter, the muscle jobs matter. No, we have it in the book. We also test it in groups that people throw tomatoes at. We tested the, you know, we tested the president when he started this campaign. Well, I don't have, you know, with that chart. Okay. I can't tell you how well the rating was. Actually, it was almost the point of the breaking point with the Obama government when we released the memo, saying, no, how voters reacted to the ad in this chart. Because if you think this is, you know, Congress, and you know, I mean, you don't get, you don't understand what's happening to the jobs and the restructuring, you know, the economy. And, you know, and this is just some of the dire middle reactions to what happens when the president talks about progress, you know, and how they're on the progress. The voters just, you know, are gone. You know, we, and when we do, like now, open-ended tests, instead of what's happening in you, what's happening in you, how are things with you? Not about the economy. It's just everything virtually, it's something about health, but everything about the money and affordability, having enough money to pay for things. People in grocery stores become like this. Consume with the choices that I have to make to get through a shopping at a grocery store, because people are changing their behavior in grocery stores, kind of deal with this ongoing, which is not changing. Income's are still falling, right now. August dropped, well, 0.8% fewer terms. I mean, income is going down right now. And that's the challenge of making it out, we're in a provincial election, when you have this kind of, you know, you know, of, you know, of pain. And I recognize that when people look at the problems, I just put this here, that we asked this last month in a poll on whether economic problems are best, you know, jobs are the top, the government and deficits, you know, almost as big. You know, that's one of the, I argue that people, you know, people who look at Greece, they look at Europe, they look at, you know, they look at California, they think that we're talking about it. They think when you have debt, that's when you're going to be in the country long term, that it's going to lead to not keeping your commitments on pensions, in this case, social security, that means that they're going to have war-offs, but they think the consulance of debt, well, then it's through a personal failure, but they also have both countries and states that in fact respond to having big debts with, you know, actions that they, it's not, they don't, they don't think they're, you know, they're going to the, you know, entitlement reform that's where they address it. I mean, they really don't address it, there's raised taxes on the wealthy, they don't get rid of, you know, special interest breaks for all of them, you know, they're for a progressive solution to their problem, but they think it's a problem. And if you don't recognize it in some way, you know, you don't have to deal with it. And then you get income wealth and equality. I'm not going to dwell on that data, but I'll put this up here because we will repeat, because this is the president from the convention, in which we tested, and we tested it very well, but just so you should give a sense that the president has moved to this place in what we're talking about. So recovery from the crisis has already been the first and most urgent order of business, but it's not enough. Economies won't be sure to help me to be reversed that much longer and more profound erosion of middle-class jobs and middle-class income, but makes our economy weak, so fewer and fewer people can afford to buy the goods and services our businesses sell. Businesses don't have customers if folks are having such a hard time. What drives this environment is an economy when there's an ever-wide new gap between the few folks who have been struggling around and growing a number of people and no matter how hard they work and barely make ends meet. But that's from the convention. So that the president is going to affirm of saying the problem is, we're going to recover that time, but let's serious this. And if you look at what he says in the speech about the building forum, he says, don't work for me because of what I do in recovery. So most of it is what we're going to do to bring back America as a country of middle-class income, and people aspire to be the middle-class income thrive. So that the president's move to a position where you address him the right problem. Okay, for middle-class, still good with the very, very, very, for my, for my argument. Just for those who are active in the convention and show, they give paper to the whole hall of middle class first and so we view this as kind of a personal success in getting the country focused on the main problem. The limited clays with a lot of policy, you know, because if you get back to the future, for us, the future of politics and the future of policy is middle-class. And the beauty of clear that when you exchange your message in a context in your class and it's focused on the future, it's focused on long term, it's the best political outcome, our message dominates theirs. And then in the past, the Republican, I'm pretty amazing, the Republican convention saying, all right, what this election is about is your disappointment with the last four years. They didn't deliver the jobs that were on the hope that they promised. We have how many months of, you know, for unemployment by eight percent, you know, it's okay to fire. So it's a vote based on performance of the last four years. The president, and the whole last day, was about the future, you know, who's gonna, under which of these candidates is the future gonna be better? Which one is gonna make the right choices for the middle class going forward? So it's a future, if you've watched, it's post-settled out, Obama moved in with a bigger lead, and the Romney had been moved into this interposition of, we're gonna now talk about the future rather than just the past. If you look at the ads right now, in Washington, DC earlier, and with Virginia, the Romney ad is an economic ad of what he's gonna do in the future. But they didn't make a chance, because like the way I've tested it, so they moved into, you know, that debate. So what we said is first we need a politics, a centers in the middle class, that is our best place to wage this battle, to have an election with the best results. But we also said it's the best politics in order to get the best policy. So if you focus on the middle class and I use this health care as a factor, if you have, if you think the main problem of the country is the federal deficit, and since we have rising health care costs, and since a high level of government continuing to pay in more and more of their health care, that it makes sense to take action to reduce the amount that the federal government spends on health care. And it's okay to move that on procedures, which is what, you know, by all of the premiums, by all of the changes that they propose and make here, all of that is about locking in the spending levels at inflation, or essentially at inflation, at close to inflation, for general inflation, not health care inflation. And so it's a systematic, you know, when we were cut in health care spending with the federal government, addressing the government, that is shifting those costs, the seniors may be with them, but in a competitive market, as they structurally will be, you know, cost a good earn, but who are we with them? So they shift, they're going to shift those costs. If you think the main problems that's happening in the middle class, that's the main problem that's in the country. Then it's unthinkable, it's absurd. You have to address health care costs. Well, that's the problem, is rising health care costs. And that's, you know, there's many, it's a national crisis, it's health care costs. And that affects the middle class, you know, what they make, their income also affects the, you know, the ability to sustain federal health care programs, which are central to middle class life and retirement. And we go, in the book, we essentially say, we try progressives, because I have lots of clients who wanted single payers or who want to make effort on. And I said, this is what, 15% of the economy, you know, and we know the rate of inflation until this year, the rate of inflation for, you know, health care and how much a killer that is for people. Okay. This is going to weigh a lot, 2014, and it's going to weigh a lot after that. There's no more important progressive project than making the health care reform work. Because that's it, there we go then. And there are things within it, there are things that did not happen in the bill because of special interest lobbying, what it would be the first thing to do to address, go back, put in, you know, get back the public option into it, we're going through with the politics of it. We're running with people who are involved in the writing of it. We all got marked out that with an effect of cost that would get put back in, you know, with, you know, the internet and public options are the most important but they're, you know, but they're, you know, others. Actually not even the most important terms of cost, you know, if you're looking for service to remember it was probably the biggest thing with, you know, effect of, you know, cost. But we've got failure and this was a real challenge and I challenged all our union funds on this. Insolvent-based health care has failed. We have one of the graphs out here on high school graduates and the percentage of them that get jobs with health care. It's 20% get jobs with health care. How can we carry on? If you're saying maybe they're working with them, you know, carry on with a system in which people, the overwhelming majority don't get jobs with health care. So we have to make the health insurance. My, my view is we'll have to make the most of the individual mandate and I would move away from employer-based health care to an individual base but that will require much more money in the system. It requires a higher minimum wage because employers will shift for those who provide it. You know, we don't trust, we don't trust in the wages, you know, people's wages to compensate for the fact that they are now covering the health insurance themselves. So we dedicate the foliage of transaction backs to pay for the substance. It was a much bigger substance being paid off than it had been. Most people are getting their health out and changing. That states compete amongst themselves to, you know, to get costs down and universality. But that's the hardest thing. And we've been alluding to the end of the health care chapter. We're out there. And because we gotta be, if it's, we gotta say what has to happen here. We're failing and employer-based health care is failing. And so we have an evolving system. So, you know, let's make it, you know, let's, you know, let's make it work. Um, let me, um, let me talk about it. We, um, um, we just put out, I was in good copy of these graphs. We just put out a copy of pointers for economists. We're talking about the economy and the kind of economy and dealing with the long-term problem, the structure of problems and what kinds of investment are we going to make in this period. But it's all grounded in the framework of, you know, of, you know, of this book. This book was, you know, it came out. It was amazingly published within like two and a half months. I finished showing the writing. And so the pretty up-to-date, you know, the data and the slides up, you know, updates some of the tests that we have on the, you know, messages with a, you know, position to do well because the program has changed. And with that, we're in a position to do well in this election, I think, as the president has moved. How do you study where it was? Criterion wins people, the department will move in order. We're not 60% of the country if they turn around track economically. Look at whatever real real improvements are. We have a number of track monthly, you know, first economic metrics. But they're still going down. Okay, so the thing that makes the election hard is people are in pain. You know, they won't hope. They won't think things will be better. I think that making a decision around me doesn't get them, you know, better. But that still lags, you know, at this, you know, decision, like what's happening over the, you know, economy. And had the president run on, you know, let us finish the job of moving the election and no bigger agenda for long term, I think, I think, well, we would have won. I think we're in a position to win. The issue is, and our challenge is, can we make it big enough in the middle class and the policy option, big enough that they can re-adjust the problem? Because it's not clear to me that we have on this table. Other than that, you know, policies that can advance but they're not really addressing any quality which kind of income and the corruption of the democratic process. There would be things that, you know, need to be addressed and the more we push it to that, the better chance we actually have of doing it come January 1, or the long term. So thank you, and I'm happy to answer questions. Thank you very much. We're gonna move into a little further conversation to get into some of the issues of the book. There's one question before I take questions from the audience and I'd like to ask you because it's a major feature of the book where you and James talk about education and your own educational experiences and kind of how your family's valued it. But there is one line where I think it was yours, where you said, you know, the class of education continued to go up and the value of education continues to decline at some point. Soon we may be facing the point where it's no longer worth it for people to get college degrees. For example, so can you just talk a little bit more about what you think that does to the middle class effort and really how people view the American dream? It was James who said that. Sorry. Well, sometimes the other, you know, you can usually tell when it's, you know, when I got wrong, this guy went for it. But I was told that, and he said that, and was struck by that. I'm actually struck by how amazingly non-national and non-capable people are about the education stuff. Because I'll describe this for the sure of the people where things are a wreck. And there are, you know, a significant number of them, particularly women, significant number of them are off getting training or in community colleges or trying to find something. And looking for something to give them advice on what's to read or what doesn't make sense to do. I mean, I do this in Europe. I pull the word of party in Britain. In Israel and other places. But I do groups in Britain now. And there, we have higher unemployment rising now. People are totally inert. There's not this sense of, you know, this can be better, there's structural forces, there's a larger kind of political change that will affect it. And so they're more politicized. But here, people are very into personal strategies, you know. And I think they will react to an economic, debate on education. There's actually almost nothing, and our tests, you know, this month, we tested the different agonist messages, the present, the educational ones as a start. Both the critique of their cards, their 20% card. Because people, this is the only strategy they got. You know, so they're not, I think at other levels, you know, whether we're going to full college and more expensive colleges to community college, people think this is the only way. It's the only thing we got. And so everybody's still investing in it. And so we have an obligation to get the cost under control and affordability. And our language on it, politics is not that great. I mean, the president talks about how much the program changes and made a difference. And it's true, but it's really hard when it's being overwhelmed by the inflation of, you know, college costs to say, you know, it's been better. If you want to identify, you know, the two groups that are most problematic in this election, it's young people, in terms of level of support and willingness to vote, and working class, I suppose. I don't know, the two groups that right now are performing significantly worse than 2008. But education is a piece of it, but they want it to happen. So it's, well, it kind of is like, I expect disengagement in some ways more than, you know, going around. And there's no increase in number of people calling themselves Republicans. You know, like this foreign entity, but it doesn't even come, it doesn't, it's like, you know, there's so many issues which they are, you know, disqualifying. But it doesn't necessarily do its votes for us. And there's certainly a lot of confidence that we have a strategy and no other plan or, you know, they really want to know what's the plan. And if education, and if you list the pieces that they wanted to plan, education is the number one. Okay, we got a question from the audience, yes, sir? Yes. Yes, thank you. Whenever I go to real quick politics, believe it or not, I always suppose, I'm always struck by the fact that there's one sort of that is different from all the others. I mean, there are two groups that's right. Which always shows, or usually always shows, running with a small lead. And all the others show Obama will believe, and it's the same thing in the Senate races, by the way. The public can always come down very rascally than the Democratic candidate in all of those other races. So what is it about what's Rasmussen doing? Is it something that's the way, is he constructing his questions to get a particular response? What is it? I know one of the explanations, but there's probably others. And we do know that after the last election, there was an evaluation of the polls and Rasmussen was consistently two points. There's a moving average of all the polls. It's consistently two points more than the moving average. So it's a, some polls have fluctuations. They go above and below. If they're both methodology, that's not a biased methodology, they're like a small sample. It'll just fluctuate a lot on both sides of this moving average. Rasmussen is always on the same side. The biggest thing is that it is a auto dial in a poll. And so it's, which means legally, there can be no sufferings. And right now our polls, our national polls are one-third sufferings. And so it's more expensive to do it, but their methodology doesn't allow them to do it legally. And so there's no compensation for it. I suspect the other piece is race. And that's, probably Gallup is also consistently off because they refuse to make a judgment about what proportion of the electorate will be minority in this election. Now, no pollster would do that, because we know, we have exobolves, we have the census that does a sort of right after the elections. We know what the racial composition of the 2008 electorate is. We know the population trends. We know that the minority portion has never gone down. Now it's growing. It's all, so it's, so we have kept it the same. So it was 20, you know, 6% in the last election 2008. We've kept it that because we thought the African American vote would not be as high as it was, but we may be wrong. There are others that have the 28% because of the Hispanic, you know, rather than it may be that African American voters protect Obama, and so it'll be 26 to 28, okay? So Gallup has it at 24. If you look at, they say, I'll set a quota, so they'll allow just the sample to come in. Their number is actually 24. So they're making, and Gallup is making an assumption that the minority portion will be lower in this election that it was in 2008. And no one else believes that. I mean, I do a lot of bipartisan posts for MPR and for, you know, the early times. And, you know, we have to agree on what the racial projection is. And we have the same, we have the same racial projection. So that's why Gallup is systematically more favorable to the, to Obama. You're saying Rasmussen does an autodial? Yes. So they're fair by themselves. And so what is the consequence of doing an autodial in terms of the results that they get? Do they get less completed data? So it just was. So yeah, it's actually better than you would think. Really, you know, the things you can do if you, you know, they actually don't want to do quotas that would, you know, ensure, you know, a minority that would ensure things that would give you a more representative. It's, there are lots of problems, you know, in terms of seniors, seniors lost their word to do a lot of quotas with it. They have to have stuff, they're weird. And you should not believe any of their state posts. By the way, you know, maybe some of the other things just look at comparing the polls that have cell phones and the average lead for Obama for non-cell, 2.9, the average lead with cell is 4.1. So, you know, Obama's probably, you know. Could you just talk a little bit about cell phones and representative samples and why they're important? Well, just, you know, I've been with young people, and me. I don't know why I've been that, you know, I don't answer my, you know, house phone rather. I don't know, the, two things. One, you have to, that's where people are. And so you have to reach them. There's just gotten more and more people that are either, you know, 50-50 on cell or cell phone only. I mean, the cell phone only may be pushing toward 20%. I mean, it's moving, unbelievable way. Now, on the other hand, it's also saved us because the optimization load is higher with cell phone because we, it's not as cluttered. You know, it's, you know, a cell phone. Because we can do it, because we're not, you know, it's a human, it's a human, a lot isn't allowed you to do auto stuff. The result is you don't, you know, you don't get all the, you know, all the charitable appeals and lots of, you know, lots of things. So it's important. Now, we're also, you know, we used to pull, like Sunday, start Sunday, that's when most people are at home. You know, so you start Sunday and you like to call over to the next day. Now, you start yourself on Saturday morning and go through the weekend on cell because people are more willing to do a cell phone interview. Not at work, but rather do it. You know, so it's changing. Why didn't we call? But it actually pulls you probably a little better now. A little more representative, if you know the cost of the cells. It's not in the end of the opinion as to why, as you said, I mean, clearly, they probably know this information as well. Why would they not opt to do something? I understand. I mean, near times of the thing, you know, if there's a make-adjusted, so they, you know, so they sort of put, like, you know, have a formula which he puts, he wakes it up so that it, you know, he corrects the problem. For the purposes. And then, you know, they check which times pass the standard and so it does not have the check that it meets the standard. I understand why it's in the average. You know, I tried, I tried this way, but it's so clearly biased and structured to be fine. That it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be the average that it shouldn't be published. I mean, those are monitoring the public polls. We have an average which we leave out the rest of this. Thank you. All right. Come back, Mr. Harrison. Oh, thank you. I'm happy to have you here, sir. We're a part of a coalition called Faith Hypology. Not Faith Hypology, but Faithful, but. I know there's a bar mix in here. Yeah. And one of the things that we talk about a lot is the coalition of Christian and Muslim. And a lot of things that we talk about are like, and when I hear this, I can't ask, well, where are the people like this? And I mean, because if the party's in the class, we're going to hold one, so I have to, and I notice that politicians, and I like to talk with them about it. It's a big part of it, by the way, not that I'm on commission or anything, but it's also a big part of the book. Help! We do address it, but everyone is a chapter in which we talk about who's middle class in terms of, I'm sorry, definitely. You know, you can't get done with a chapter about saying, everybody's in. Anybody who wants to work in college, nobody wants to work, you know, who's in on middle class. Because we start with, and we also, in the end, we believe it's not defined by income or by self-identity, it's defined by values. And that aspiration is the way we define it. But we do do the exercise. First of all, let's go about income. We end up with probably 25 to 125, and it's probably the range that we include, you know, you know, you know, you know, income rate. Obama is under, you know, under two, you know, two 50. You know, we go to this, and we say, we've read an article in New York Times about the servant, the workers, and working in the food industry, and the hotel industry in New York. And one of them has health benefits, and they get, you know, just barely on a minimum wage, you know, with no benefits, multiple jobs, clearly unfollowing the poverty level. You know, we say, why aren't they middle class? You know, I mean, you know, on our stage, it's fine with us. And we have an inclusive view of it. We always say middle class, and people aspire to be middle class. And so it's people who believe in hard work and who believe in education, you know, should, you know, move up each generation. It's kind of the central, you know, piece of it. I'll go a further than the bit, because we did a study in which we had the president saying in his method, we had to do a message, some phrases that said, you know, I'm sad about the Ryan budget and what it does, particularly what it does, it's the most vulnerable. Just to put something in the face, the most vulnerable, you know, to it. And we included in the critique, we had all the, you know, we had cuts, 20% cut in education, the Medicare, 6,000 transfer of costs to seniors. And we added raises taxes under working poor, pushing two million children into poverty. I was like, got the highest? I was critiqued because of the Ryan budget. Now, I've been trying to make the case, and then we showed that moved. When moved, we're unmarried, we're the one, you know, we're the changing country, the majority of country, majority of both are minority, you know? A majority of families are unmarried. Okay, we're unmarried with a country that's increasingly unmarried. Unmarried women could be a quarter of the record. Okay, they are heavily democratic in their voting. Turnouts to be an issue. But they are one quarter of the elector. Could probably close to half of the vote of Democrats. I mean, is, you know. So I'm not even going to like a critical piece of it. They were really, they were really hard. They were much less incumbent, much more vulnerable, you know, into what's happened as a economy. They all had security of having a second person, you know, spending, you know, money frequently left give. And all really, really hit hard by this crisis. In fact, the bill that came out initially on the first job losses were male. But it turned out, if you break out women separately, married unmarried, that married women didn't, you know, it was late into the process before they began facing, you know, the fact of the recession. But unmarried women, like at the very beginning and just as bad as men. So they were hit hard, they were big Obama supporters, hit hard by this economy. Very struggling to come back. They were late, you know, coming back on vote. So what it felt was when the president says, you know, I care about how this affects them as vulnerable, unmarried women are like, well, their vote shifted at 10 points in this exercise. You know, they, you know, they know they're vulnerable. And I think for you, what Obama has done up to 47 million, I think sets up an algorithm about to push back and say, let's remember here, our coalition here is, you know, wants to be recognized and how much they're on the edge. And so recognizing the poor, recognizing the vulnerable, I think should be part of what we do. Mr. Pollack, I want to answer the question. Yeah. Paul, okay, we're kind of on physical issues here at EPI. And one thing that I was interested in was, because I do a lot of budget stuff, was kind of your point that on the one hand, voters really do respond to this notion that we're going to spend, you know, two trillion or something, they've got over five years and you know, this very large public investment. And on the other hand, they really don't like spending, which of course is contradictory. I, one of the difficulties that I kind of have is, again, making that connection, trying to take like budget issues and try to make them, I guess, applicable for kind of the middle class. And I know that the Obama campaign had kind of tried to do this with the life of Julia in photographic, I'm not sure if you saw that or not, but it shows kind of at each stage in someone's life, you know, how budget decisions actually impact them. So I'm wondering what you thought about that and what, you know, some of the ideas you have about taking the budget debates and actually making them relevant to the middle class. Okay, in the book, there's a chart, this is actually updated there, which it provides over the list of economic problems you want to come through the face. So we have this basic chart here, but you see that we're saying, what's the problems to advance? We have high government spending and budget upsets and high taxes and government regulation, like the top two together. And one third, you know, the responses they can get you with taxes, but there's one third of the responses, but there's no doubt, you know, just, when people are looking at the long-term problems raised in the country, debt and spending in debt is like serious for them. So you've got to, we'll have to have that, you're recognizing it, and I will talk about it. And then we have, you know, lack of jobs and the dispute evenly between, you know, between lack of new industries, the great jobs and China and trade practices, you know, impacting jobs. And then we have the planned middle class incomes and then we have the corruption, you know, last year. So there was kind of a measure of the scale of it, but, you know, people don't think you're serious. If you don't have debt as part of what you're doing, you know, they think you're not serious about the long-term problems. And so they're probably the least for a while, look like they're serious, because at least they want to cut spending. You know, like you said, there's one problem you're going to address, not enough, you know. So we are struggling with how to do this. And those, you know, in the book I, you know, paid for the way out, you know, after I lost this, I didn't have a back and forth with a partially fictitious and not totally, I was championing them because each one defiled it, but that's not because we didn't argue that, you know, on austerity, that we're still going to argue about it. But you know, we've got a, you know, the metrics I track right now on, this is on spending on austerity that we asked this month, in which we're, you know, we're asking, if drastic cuts in government spending will weaken the economy and cost jobs, mean more payouts and lost tax revenue that makes the deficit worse. Now we know it's true, we're watching Britain, that's exactly what's happening. Or, no matter the way that we're still prosperity and market confidence, is dramatically reduced government spending and long-term deficit. It was two to one, this is like, nah, this is a political, we just, you know. And we don't have to be gunned to win this, you know, win this, you know, I don't know. However, what we have found is that, and it's an experimental exercise, that when we make the argument that the crudely argument that it's actually like a, you know, worse and that we'll have to have this money and we'll be able to burst an investment. It actually, even though it doesn't scroll, when we cast a rein on whether we're winning the overall economic argument and the political debate, it has a significant impact. In fact, more impact than any other message. So that while we are losing, when we listen to us, we have to make the argument on why, you know, contraction of economy by drastic, you know, cuts, you know, hurts. The strong, much rather, you know, the strongest message that we tested, I think I have it here in the, that says that while we were addressing Denver, the most important thing now is investing, building our American strong financial advantages and growing the economy in the low class. You know, our perched economy says it will prove stronger, grow and share prosperity when we start with the middle. But it's, the starting point is that, you know, we will address it, you know, why we will address it better, but we acknowledge it's important. And I think of the only message we tested, you know, it says that we actually will do better in reaching the deficit by going for growth. And so it was one of the most impactful messages we had so that there is a way of doing it and we'd have to address it. And I think that would be explicit, I don't know if it comes to be subtle, don't work. But you do have to say, you know, you get it, you recognize it's important. And you have to say at the end of your message that this message of getting growth will, in fact, bring down the deficit faster. And so it looks like it's part of your burden, but what you're really making the case for. And that one message, I'm not sure if it says it, why we, it needs to be in progress with the sounds like you're doing your investments in this long term. So, you know, we should be investing in our infrastructure to modernize the country, we should invest in our energy, that's gonna make us energy in the building, great job. So it looks like you're, you know, you're, you're, you're rapid, you're, you know, you're doing large investment is not geared to throw money at it, but it's an investment in things that, you know, that, you know, that will make the country stronger. And so we can, you know, we have found that we can advance the argument if we get in that context. I'm doing it anyway on Britain because we're in the middle of that, you know, debate against, it's moving in our favor, but you still have the plurality in Britain who say, despite the contraction, well, it may be painful in the short term, well, by the way, so they don't make things better in the long term. There's no plurality that says that, but when we started the poll, we had like two thirds, you know, saying it would be a dramatic drop and people thinking it would pay the long term in Britain where you've lived with it. You know, but this is, this is the central debate. Okay, let's do the camera and then talk about the other one. Hi, I'm Dr. Carroll. I'm Poplin. I'm a primary care physician. As of April, I've been, I've been turning. As of April, I became a senior and I'm originally from Massachusetts. So I have three questions. We'll see how many we get. Oh, okay, I'll get those first. Give me a question, I'll ask. Elizabeth Warren, if what you say is true, Elizabeth Warren should be running away with this from Massachusetts. I mean, she will be. I know the latest poll, but it was a struggle. And who knows if it will, if it will stay in her position about big banks and all that is unequivocal. Second thing, Medicare and Social Security, seniors were big, for seniors, it's,