Senator Elizabeth Warren | How Democrats Win Back Workers | At Our Table

Democrats win back working-class America when we blank. When we make clear that we understand what is broken, that we have the vision to fix it, and we have the courage to take on anybody who gets in our way. It's that courage part. Yep. There's some people in public life who don't just talk about systems, they understand them. They've studied them and they've spent their careers trying to change them. Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of those people. Before the Senate, before the national spotlight, she was a teacher, a mother, and a woman who saw firsthand what happens when the system fails working families. That experience didn't just shape her story, it shaped her mission. From creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to taking on Wall Street, big tech, and corporate power, she's been one of the most consistent voices in this country, sounding the alarm about an economy that too often works for the wealthy and well-connected and leaves everybody else behind. And in this moment, where questions about affordability, democracy, and who the government actually works for are front and center, her voice carries even more weight. Senator Warren, I am so glad to have you at our table. Oh, thank you. I'm so glad to be at this table. Well, you know, at our table, we have a few what we call rapid-fire appetizer questions. Okay, I'm ready. Quickly, Ben Affleck or Matt Damon? Oh my gosh, they're both Boston, Cambridge. They're my guys. Yeah, but you gotta pick one. Oh, damn. Oh, damn. Oh, man, this is like saying, which one of your kids do you like best? I know, I know. Celtics courtside or the behind home plate at the Red Sox game? Celtics courtside. Dunkin' Donuts or Krispy Kreme Donuts? Oh, come on. Duncan, are you kidding me? Have you not seen me show up at one event after another, arm-loaded with Duncan, Duncan, Duncan, all the way, all the way. Domestic policy, FDR, LBJ, New Deal versus Great Society. I probably still gotta go with New Deal to get us started, but also how much I think today we undervalue the importance of the civil rights laws that got passed in the mid-'60s. And on this particular day that you and I are together, basically, LBJ's the one who finally got the repeal of the Jim Crow laws. And now I'm down on the floor of the Senate, not an hour before I come to talk to you, trying to fight back against the Republicans who are trying to put Jim Crow 2.0 into law. So LBJ would be spinning in his grave. He would be. He would be. I want you to fill in the blank for this sentence. Democrats win back working-class America when we blank. When we make clear that we understand what is broken, that we have the vision to fix it, and we have the courage to take on anybody who gets in our way. It's that courage part. Yep. It's the courage part. Yep. There are plenty of people with a good heart. Yeah. Not enough. But it's the courage part, Jamie. You know, there's a quote from Dr. King that I love from a letter from a Birmingham jail, and I tell everybody, if you've never read it, you have to. Because one, it's just a masterpiece to think that this man wrote this while he was in jail on newspaper and toilet paper, right? Without Google, without chat GPT, without any of this stuff. But in that, he said, we will repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good. That's right. The appalling silence. And that's exactly right. You know, it's such a moment as we're starting into these 2026 election. And people call me, you know, would you help me in my race? And I try to help a lot of people. I genuinely do. And you've done so much for state parties as well. And happy to do it. Happy to do it. But at the end of the day, the thing that gets me up is I have complete confidence both that your values are right. We're going to know who you're going to fight for. You're not there to take a bunch of corporate PAC money. You're not there to say the right things in public and then turn around and double deal out the back door. But the part I keep looking for is the courage. The willingness to stand up and fight back. That's what we need more of. And so important. Now, you grew up in Oklahoma. I did. And you said that you grew up on the ragged edge of the middle class. How does that experience still show up in the work that you do every day? You know, it probably shows up in this way. My mother hadn't worked. I have three older brothers. They all ended up serving in the military. Kind of standard middle class. My dad worked as a salesman. He had a heart attack. Lost his job. Was out of work for a long time. We nearly lost. We lost our car. Was repossessed. Lost our house. And my mother, I still remember the day that she's pacing in the bedroom and she's crying. And she's saying, we will not lose this house. We will not lose this house. And she's scared to death. She's in her 40s, 50s, early 50s, and never worked outside the home. Pulls on her best dress. You know this dress, the weddings and funeral dress. Zips it up, puts on her lipstick, and puts on her high heels and walks to the Sears and gets a minimum wage job answering phones. And here's the key to this story. I always think of that story as a story about my mother's courage, even when she was afraid. But it was also a story about what a minimum wage job would do for you when I was a Because on that minimum wage job, she paid our mortgage. She put groceries on the table. And she had the money left over to pay the bills. We didn't live high. Not three of us still at home on a minimum wage job. We didn't live high, but we made it. We were at the ragged edge of the middle class. And today, a full-time minimum wage job in America will not pay for a two-bedroom apartment in any city in America. Think about that. It won't support a mama and a baby. It won't pay for childcare. It sure as heck won't pay for childcare. And so I think of this as we were able to hang on. We didn't lose that house. We were able to finally get it under control. Finally, my daddy gets back to work. My mama keeps answering the phones at Sears. I'm able, ultimately, to go off to college. I wanted to be a public school teacher. I got to be special needs kids, 46 years old. That was mine. Because those opportunities were open. We had a America that was far from perfect. But it was also an America where there was just more opportunity. You had more chances. And especially, because this is the America I'm talking about, post-LBJ, it's right where you raise this. After the civil rights laws get passed, you actually can watch that we keep doing better as a country. And there's a black-white wealth gap. But when civil rights laws get passed, white folks keep doing about the same, getting better year by year as the country gets richer. And black families start closing the gap. You actually watch it start to move. More black home ownership, because that becomes possible. Better jobs, better educational opportunities. And then the Republicans take over. Then the Reagan years. And the Reagan years hit us. And two things happen. The gap opens right back up. Today, black home ownership in America is at the same place it was back when the Jim Crow laws were in effect. But the second thing that starts to happen is that the country keeps getting richer, but everybody, black and white, middle-class, working folks, families like my family, wages flat now. And so, the real gap becomes between the rich and everybody else. Nathaniel Well, you telling those stories just remind me a lot about how I grew up, because we actually lost our home. And my grandparents lost it to fraud. My grandfather lost his job right at the same time. And we had to stay with aunts and uncles. I slept on the floor. They slept on couches. And I made a commitment to then do something about that for them. And fast forward, I was lucky enough to buy my grandparents a house right before my grandfather passed away, which is one of the greatest achievements I've ever done in my life. But so many folks are struggling right now. And you have built a career warning about wealth inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class. And right now, we see a handful of wealthy donors who funded Trump's campaign almost entirely. And they're overwhelming the body politic. Can we fix that? What can we do to fix that? Terri We can. I want to just start there. Yes, we can fix that. Because we still have the numbers. We got the people. We got the votes. This is what people want. You know, what Trump is doing right now, let's just remind everybody, is very unpopular. I don't mean a little unpopular. It's very unpopular. Donald Trump ran for office. And sure, there was a lot of hateful stuff in how he ran. Hateful stuff about immigration, hateful stuff about race. But also remember, he made two big promises that attracted a lot of Americans and a lot of votes. One was he promised he would lower costs on day one. Remember that? And the second thing is he would be the president of peace. He would not start wars anywhere else. That's what America first meant to him. So where do we end up? So here we are at day, what, 420. And the cost of groceries is up. The cost of gasoline is up. The cost of electricity is up. The cost to build a home is up. The cost of healthcare, up, up, up. So all of that, and not just randomly, it's not up because of gravity. It's up because of tariff policy. It's up because of energy policy. It's up because of chaos. It's up because of shutting down the cops on the beat that keep people from getting cheated. So all bad. And then what does Donald Trump do? He starts a war halfway around the world, spending more than a billion dollars a day to bomb Iran while American citizens can't afford to pay for healthcare. So what he's doing is enormously unpopular. And you know what? There's going to be a reckoning in November. I hope so. We get a reckoning in November, and then it's going to be on the Democrats. And I really want to say this, not just on Republicans. Democrats come back in, first thing we got to do is roll back in Donald Trump. But the second thing we've got to do is that we've got to have the courage to stand up and make real change, to say we are willing to tax the richest Americans and the biggest corporations. And then we're going to take that money and we're going to reinvest it in our kids in universal childcare. We're going to reinvest it in people who are trying to get an education after high school. We're going to reinvest it in helping build more housing and bringing down the cost of that housing. We're going to reinvest it so that more families like my family have a chance to be able to have their place in the middle class. Well, and you've pushed the Democratic Party on these issues for over a decade. Yep. You sit in those Senate Democratic caucus weekly meetings. Do you think your word that you use earlier, the courage is in that caucus right now to do the things that you say that we really need to do? Not as much as we need. But, and I'm going to make two buts here. The first one is, more than there was when I first came. And that's progress. That is progress. I am not as lonely as I used to be. And the second part is, we got some new candidates. Oh, and you just supported one. Oh, Julianna Stratton is fabulous. And she's got courage. Yeah. She is ready to come in and get to work. She is in this fight. That's what gives me real hope here. We got some Democrats on the House side and on the Senate side, who aren't just better than their Republican counterparts, which they are, but they are also the people who have both the right values and the courage to deliver on them. Are you scared that some of these Democratic primary contests that are very contentious right now, and you got some over on the Senate side, and you've had one in Texas, you got one in Maine. Are you scared that that's going to get the party off of focus, or do you think it's something that we need to have as a party? So I'll just tell you my own view on this, is I don't mind the contest. What I mind is the tilted playing field. And I mind the influence of big money. I think that in primaries, as Democrats, just my point of view here, we should say, you want to be in a Democratic primary, then you don't take outside PAC money, dark money, none of that stuff. You do it straight up. You do it by how many nickels, dimes, and quarters that you can raise from people on the ground. You do it by getting volunteers in the front door. You do it by building out a real campaign with people. And then, man, fight over whatever issue you want to fight over. Because at the end of the day, the energy, the fact that people are in there, the fact that this is being run as a true grassroots organization, I have confidence that what comes out of that is what is righteous. I believe in that. And I think that's something, as Democrats, we can fix ourselves. And look, I get it. We get into the general election, can't disarm unilaterally. You can't just say, oh, we're not going to try to raise that money. And the Republicans are already going to outspend us, you know, buckets to teaspoons. But in our own primaries, we should have the banging heads on the issues, but it ought to be on a level playing field. I love the nuance there. And I think you're right on that. Now, you work with Senator Tim Scott. I want to talk a little bit about policy. You work with my home state, one of my home state senators, Tim Scott, on a bipartisan housing bill. What in that bill will actually make a difference for families that are trying to afford a home? Oh, God, I love this bill. And let me tell you why. We have a housing crisis all over America. And it is in big cities and little towns. It's in rural areas, urban areas. We don't have enough housing for first-time home buyers. We don't have enough housing for apartment renters. We don't have enough housing for seniors or people with disabilities or people who have no homes at all. We need more housing. Housing prices are high. It's a plain old Econ 101 supply and demand. Most people, experts in this field say we need about 5 million more houses, homes, apartments, more housing units. So, Tim Scott and I, man, we could have a long list of things we disagree about. Things we disagree about, but if he wants more housing in South Carolina, I want more housing in Massachusetts. We need more housing everywhere in America. So, we found that place where we agree. And here's how we decided to do this bill. We said to everybody on the banking committee, it was 25 people, said, come to us with your ideas, and we had our own, on what you could do to increase housing supply. And just put your brain to that for a minute. Could be cutting red tape. Could be the government would say, if you're building more housing, we'll help you out with some of the costs of that. We'll make financing easier. Or you get out there, if you're a small town or even a big city, and you help a bunch of housing units go in, we'll help pay for an elementary school. We'll help pay for the new roads you've got. We'll do something really sexy. We'll help pay for the new sewage treatment plant you need. That kind of stuff that you need in housing. That would be a way to increase supply. Here's another way you could increase supply. We changed the rules to make it easier to build manufactured housing and take away some of the restrictions so that you can get more manufactured housing, which is less expensive to build. So it's all supply, supply, supply. By the time we got through, we had more than 40 provisions in this bill. Now, I don't want to oversell. Not every provision works everywhere, but that's not the point. What you need in Boston may not be what you need in Charleston. And what you need in Phoenix may not be what you need in Boise. So the idea is it's a wide range, all that push in the same direction. And then we get it all passed together and say, start picking up the best pieces that work best for you. It has passed the Senate now, 89 to 10. That's hard to get 89 votes in the Senate. You bet. Yes. You bet. And it has, Donald Trump has agreed he will sign it as written. Wow. We're done. No more negotiations. We're just waiting right now for the House to go ahead and pass it on through. Isn't that pretty amazing? That's pretty amazing. Okay. There's another piece to it I got to tell you about. So we write this bill, it's got all of this supply, supply, supply, but we got another problem in housing. And that is, it's kind of on the front edge, it's private equity is coming in and buying up homes. You've seen it where you are. That's exactly right. Atlanta, one out of every four home sales last year went to a private equity investor who's just looking to make money. And try being a first-time home buyer and competing against a Wall Street billionaire who can pay all cash and is buying houses literally by the dozens. That's a problem for buyers. It's also a problem ultimately for renters because once they buy up enough, they push the rent up and you're going to be a renter forever because you're never going to be able to save up enough money to buy. So private equity is moving in now. They've moved into Atlanta, they've moved into Charleston. They're moving in a lot of places. Las Vegas. Yep. Moving into Las Vegas. So what this bill also does is it bars private equity and it says no more. You can buy up apartment buildings. I might've put more restraints, but you got to negotiate here. You can buy up apartment buildings, you can buy up condo outfits, you can even buy up mobile home parks. But single family homes and duplexes, this is it. No more private equity buying it up. This will be the first time we have fenced off private equity from an industry. We've said that homes should be for human beings, not for corporations. That's a big step. It is. This is a big deal. Well, Senator, you've been amazing on housing, on childcare, on student debt. And it makes me reflect on, I think the last time I saw you live and in person was probably at the convention in 2024. And we were on the stage, you had just given your speech and you got a standing ovation. You came back backstage and you were emotional. What were you thinking about then? Why was that moment such a big moment for you? I felt like there were so many people in that huge arena that we had fought side by side. We'd had some losses, but we'd also had some wins. And we knew what it meant to be in the fight, in the righteous fights. It's just that shared moment, knowing what had been, but knowing we were all marked forever and we'd be right back in these fights. I think we have that footage. I'm going to send it to you because it was such a magical moment. And I just, I feel closer to you in that moment because we see you in like this armor, like you go out and you're ready to fight. And I know your heart's in that fight every time, but to see that heart on full display, it was a very wonderful moment for me. It was a heart to heart moment that I felt with everybody in that room. It was something. Well, Senator, I know we're going to wrap this down, but part of the tradition, I don't know if your staff told you this, this is the dessert part of At Our Table. Okay. I'm ready. I'm ready. Dessert. I'm ready for dessert. We give out a special award called the Sit Your Ass Down Award. And we give it to whomever just needs to collect themselves, get themselves together because they're doing something that is not right. So who is your recipient of this week's Sit Your Ass Down Award? This week, Kevin Hassett. Kevin Hassett. Tell us who Kevin Hassett is. So he is President Trump's economic advisor. You know that's who I would keep my eye on, right? Are you surprised by this, Jamie? You are not. But let me tell you what that man said. He got up in public yesterday and he's asked about the economic impact of this war halfway around the world. This war that Donald Trump chooses to fight, not because there's an imminent threat to the United States, can't explain why he chooses to fight it, chooses to fight it, knowing it's going to drive up the cost of gasoline, knowing it's going to drive up the cost of food because we can't get fertilizer to our farmers, knowing it's going to drive up the cost of every dang thing you buy that gets delivered, that gets moved by truck because cost of diesel and gasoline is going to go up, knowing all of this. And so the question he is asked is, so what's going to be the economic impact of this war? And good old Kevin says, oh, it's not going to be a big deal, except for consumers who pay higher prices. But that is the last thing we're worried about. Honey, you need to sit down, close your mouth, and do a little learning here about what matters in America. I mean, those consumers are the American people. Yeah, yeah. And those consumers are who you are supposed to be working for. Now, you may think that's a joke. You may fluff that off because your boss, Donald Trump, fluffs that off. But the reality is we are still a democracy and we're going to make our voices heard here. Well, Kevin, sit your ass down. You're good. Well, Senator, you've spent your career fighting for people who often feel like the system has forgotten them. As we say back home, the least of these in our society. The least of these, my brethren. Yes. And in this moment when folks are frustrated and they're skeptical and they're losing faith in politicians and the political systems, they're still folks who have faith in you. And so I want to thank you for being at our table. And I want to just give you any closing thoughts that you have for our listeners and viewers at home as they start and they look down the road at 2026. We got a lot of fights on our hands. But I'm optimistic here because I believe in us. I believe in the power we've got together. It's going to be hard. And listen, those damn guys on the other side, they want us to feel depressed and they want us to feel like, oh, we're powerless. There's nothing we can do. They want us to cover our heads with a blanket and just cower. Man, we're not giving them the satisfaction. They have bitten off a whole lot more than they can chew. They have tangled with the American people one time too many. Donald Trump has lied to the American people one time too many. And I truly believe in the power of what we can and we will do together. We've got courageous people who are stepping up and I'm going to do everything I can to help them. Thank you, Senator, for all that you're doing and all that I know you will continue to do. We're going to do it. Thank you for being at our table. Together, it's good to be at your table. I like being at your table. If you enjoyed today's show, please be sure to like, subscribe and share. Follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pixel Plus or anywhere you find your podcasts. For bonus content and analysis, join our community on Substack at jamieharrison.substack.com. At our table with Jamie Harrison is a production of Vision Blue Media. Our founding executive producers are Jason Hyder and Jamie Harrison. Our producer is Kyle Kelly. Our content consultants are Ernie Grigg and Clay Middleton. Our digital communications are led by Lauren Brown. Our social media strategist is Nia Asanza. Inez Smolanski provides production legal. Title sequence by Tom Hunt. Our theme song Blonde Gone is written by Dewey and published by Alibi Music Library. This episode was recorded at the DNC studio in Washington, DC and engineered by Johnny Wood and Scott Brown. Very special thanks to Senator Warren and her team. I'm Jamie Harrison and I look forward to another conversation at our table.