Housing is Top Bipartisan Issue Rep. Jimmy Gomez

Congressman, it's so good to see you here at the DNC. Happy to be here. It's exciting. What would you say the vice president has to accomplish in her speech tonight? I think she has to lay out a vision of how she's going to help the American people. Right now, there's a top concern about fighting inflation, as well as making just living more affordable. I'm a parent of a toddler, two years old. We've seen grocery prices increase. She needs to talk about that. She needs to talk about how she's going to make housing more affordable and her plan to do so, and also give people hope that, especially young people, if you work hard, you save your money, you're going to have an opportunity to buy a house in this country. That's what it's really about—laying out that vision in a compelling way. I think she can do that. How would she need to govern differently than President Biden? Biden's policies were really popular, hands down. Reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month, also the cap of out-of-pocket costs for Medicare. You pull those, they're sky high, very popular. But he wasn't out there enough really selling what he was doing. She needs to be able to—any kind of accomplishment that she achieves, she needs to be out there selling it, not only every few months, but every single month across the country, and especially to the people that are, I would say, disenchanted, that things can be accomplished. Sometimes things are, they just don't feel it right away. We need to spell it out and give them a picture of how it's going to change their lives. One of the things I've observed is that the discussion on foreign policy issues has been a bit thin at this convention. Would you agree? Why might that be? Foreign policy is always, when it comes to an area in a time when the economy is the main number one concern, that's what people focus on. Focus on the issues that people care about—food, housing, how are you going to get by, how are you going to raise your children, how are you going to thrive in this country? I think that's where she's focused. She's focused on the concerns that the people want to talk about. How do you see bipartisanship fitting into that picture? Housing is no longer a blue state or a blue city issue. It's spread across the country. I talked to a Republican in Ohio, number one issue, housing. Nebraska, number one issue, housing. Florida, number one issue, housing. That's the main issue that people are talking about—affordability, and how do you make it easy for people to get by. Most people in this get their wealth from owning a home. They're connected, and people need to feel like they have a stake in the American dream. The best way to do that is getting them an opportunity to buy something.