#BlackVotesMatter

The right takeaways from Doug Jones’s upset win fueled by record-high Black turnout, plus: why the media should stop using the term “welfare reform” to describe the GOP’s Robin Hood in reverse agenda. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

When Senator-elect Doug Jones addressed his supporters Tuesday night in Alabama, one of his first shout-outs went to his African-American supporters. As well it should have been — with exit polls showing that 30% of the voters in Tuesday’s special election were black, even beating the record-high black turnout in the 2012 presidential election. To unpack what was behind the wave of black turnout — and what Democrats can learn from it — Rebecca joined by Michele Jawando, Vice President of Legal Progress at the Center for American Progress and host of Thinking CAP, Off-Kilter’s sister podcast. Later in the show, while Trump and his colleagues in Congress try to push tax cuts for billionaires and wealthy corporations over the finish line without a single democratic vote, they’re not even trying to hide what comes next: cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, Meals on Wheels and more — in the name of “welfare reform.” To discuss the role of language in debates around cutting these and other critical programs, Rebecca talks with Greg Kaufmann, editor in chief of TalkPoverty.org, and Kate Gallagher Robbins, Director of Family Policy at the Center for American Progress.

This week’s guests:

• Michele Jawando — Vice President of Legal Progress at the Center for American Progress and host of Thinking CAP, Off-Kilter’s sister podcast
• Greg Kaufmann — Editor-in-chief of TalkPoverty.org
• Kate Gallagher Robbins — Director of Family Policy at the Center for American Progress

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read more on what’s behind the GOP’s quest to redefine everything as welfare Paul Ryan Just Changed the Definition of ‘Welfare.’
• Check out TrumpTaxToolKit.org for everything you need to call your members of Congress about the GOP’s tax scam — and for listeners in blue states, Indivisible’s great blue state call tool at Indivisible.org

This program aired on December 15th, 2017

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Despite the headlines, the tax fight is very much still underway. Senator McCain is hospitalized and may be unable to vote due to his health. Senator Collins is feeling tremendous pressure and rumor has it that Vice President Pence is even planning to cancel an upcoming trip overseas because he realizes his tie breaking vote may be needed to get the GOP tax scam over the finish line. Meanwhile, following Doug Jones’ upset in Tuesday’s special election in Alabama, the GOP realizes their window is rapidly closing to send the tax bill to President Trump’s desk. And that’s exactly what they’ll be trying to do in just a few days from now, ignoring Alabama’s voters who made their wishes known on Tuesday. So while we don’t have the Slevinator here this week, here is your weekly reminder to keep calling your members of congress. Everything you need is at Trumptaxtoolkit.org, and for folks who live in blue states, I’ll give another plug to the great blue state call tool at Indivisible.org. It connects you with folks in red states to help maximize pushback in this critical moment.

With that we’ve got a great episode lined up this week, I talk with Michelle Jawando, Vice President of Legal Progress and host of Thinking CAP, Off Kilter’s sister podcast powered by the Center for American Progress about what drove historical black turnout in the Alabama special election this week and what Democrats can learn from the Doug Jones win. Later in the show as the GOP pivots to what it’s calling “welfare reform” with all the scare quotes in the world, a conversation about the role of language when it comes to coded terms like welfare. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

Thanks so much for joining the show, Michelle.

MICHELLE JAWANDO: It is so great to be here, thank you Rebecca, super excited to be a part of the Off Kilter family now.

VALLAS: Well listen, so just to get right down to it, Moore is a particularly odious dude on a lot of levels, I think it’s fair to say. And topping off the accusations of his having molested girls as young as 14, there were really racist statements that came to light that he had made as well as really racist stances. He said the last time America was great was during slavery and he’s actually championed elimination of all constitutional amendments after the 10th, which would include the 13th and 14th amendments which abolished slavery and promised equal protection under the law, no small thing. But what drove this historic black turnout, in your mind? Was it this kind of set of unabashed racism or was there something else at work here?

JAWANDO: You know I think when you look historically at the state of Alabama, my husband and I, as we’ve watched the returns come in we had to remark that people like Jimmie Lee Johnson and Hosea Williams and many others who were on the front lines of the real civil rights movement were kind of looking at the engagements all kinds of communities but in particular the African-American community coming out in the face of an avowed racist bigot homophobic xenophobic candidate and really saying that Alabama was going to reject that. This was not the first time that we saw someone like a Roy Moore in the state of Alabama. Whether we’re talking about George Wallace or others. I had the opportunity a few years ago to join the Faith and Politics Institute on a civil rights pilgrimage through Birmingham and Mobile and different areas that were key in the civil rights struggle and what you recognize is that we in our history have always had Roy Moore, so that he not new. He is, in some ways, as American as apple pie. What we see in this moment is again a collective, forceful pushback on his type of politics. We’ve seen that in history before, we’ve seen it over this last week and I think what is exciting is that you hope that this is the beginning of the ushering in of a new age. But I think it’s really important to kind of contextualize it that this is not the first time we’ve seen someone like a Roy Moore in the state of Alabama.

VALLAS: Now it’s notable that leading up to Tuesday’s election there was already a narrative out there in the press that if Jones lost, low black turnout would be to blame. And many pundits were already lamenting and not for the first time in many cases that black voters are less engaged, less informed. This really in many ways, flipped that script on its head.

JAWANDO: Well I think what we recognize is that pundits often don’t reflect black people. They don’t know black people, they haven’t [INAUDIBLE] black people. And we have a very narrow idea of who the black community is and what they care about. Because I will tell you from my social circles and sorority sisters and different organizations on the ground, different people from historically black colleges and universities in the state of Alabama, there was engagement not just because of Doug Jones, because I think he did some things right but there were other things that he didn’t do. Early outreach, that kind of came a little bit late or wasn’t really centering outreach to the African-American community. And I think he got there but I think African-Americans in the state of Alabama were motivated not just because of Doug Jones but it was a forceful pushback in recognizing the danger and the harm of who Roy Moore is and was to their families.

I think it’s those same kind of engagement that African-American women and men saw a danger in Donald Trump and came out. I think you saw it again with the state of Virginia against Ralph Northam. Now listen, Ralph Northam wasn’t a particularly engaged candidate, people wanted to see more support for Justin Fairfax the first lieutenant governor, African American candidate there. But communities of color and I think the African American community in particular recognize that look we don’t have to be in love with a candidate, what we need is are you going to be committed to securing health care for my family, are you committed to making sure that educational equity is important? Are you looking at areas around criminal justice reform and how we re-enfranchise formerly incarcerated individuals. Are those things that you’re committed to? And I think those are things that communities heard from Doug Jones and that’s why you saw such an immense turnout.

VALLAS: So it’s impossible to have this conversation without talking about voter suppression. Particularly in a state like Alabama that has an incredibly long record of suppressing the African-American vote. Now this goes back to the Jim Crow era but Jim Crow in many ways is alive and well in the state of Alabama. There’s been extensive reporting and discussion now of all of the different barriers that particularly black voters had to surmount to get to the place of just even voting let alone at these record turnout levels. Some red tape including requirements that voters have to have a limited set of certain types of photo ID but at the same time the state was actually making it difficult the ID by closing 31 drivers license offices in counties where African-Americans are 70% or more of the population. That’s just one piece. I also feel the need to continue along this one thread just because of how horrifying it is. The state was actually ordered to reopen those 31 offices but they were opened on schedules that were such as for example in Sumter county which is majority African-American, someone could only visit the drivers license office on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month from 8 to 12 PM or 12:30 to 2:30 PM to get the kind of ID that you needed and of course this comes on top of all other kinds of red tape just to register to vote in the first place. I mean, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about how we saw this record level turnout in the face of this kind of voter suppression.

JAWANDO: Well what we’ve seen is really a trend that years ago many members of the Republican party decided that they were no longer going to actually compete for the vote of the African-American community or communities of color. That they would instead work on concertedly to suppress turnout. And because so few of us actually engage in this kind of experiment quote, “democracy” if you can take out a hundred voters in one precinct and maybe 1,000 voters in another, that that is significantly, statistically significant enough to make a difference in an election. So where we see voter suppression efforts, it’s not that they’re trying to stop all people, they know that that’s impossible right, with the abolishment of poll taxes that Roy Moore was also against. But they recognized that if I can just stop people with a voter ID, one of the strictest in the country as we saw in Alabama. Or if I can make sure that automatic voter registration or same day registration aren’t available. Or if I could eliminate the DMVs where you could even get the licenses and the identification but over representing the places that we would close are over represented in the African-American community. Then I know that I will be successful in eliminating people from actually getting to the polls.

And so I think in spite of what we’ve seen really again draconian laws to keep formerly incarcerated individuals off the ballot, prevent people from having the right voter identification and making their way to the ballot box. You saw a turnout where African-Americans were actually over represented in their turn out. African American women voting 98% for Doug Jones, African-American men 93% for Doug Jones. In spite of the voter suppression that were so attendant in the state. And it’s not just Alabama. We see this in North Carolina, we see this in the state of Wisconsin. We see this in the state of Mississippi. And we also quite frankly we see states like New York that don’t have things like automatic voter registration or same day registration. So while it might not be the same type of voter suppression we see this kind of slow recognition of let me do something to open up the franchise to more people. I think it’s something that our country has to reckon with. and I think part of the backlash, Rebecca, that we should really anticipate is that because the turnout was so great in Alabama, it would not surprise me if we see more federal opportunity for voter suppression introduced by this congress. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see Alabama legislators doubling down to make it really difficult for African-Americans to make it into the polls once again because every time you see concerted turnout you see them quickly a retraction of rights and access and I think we all have to be on guard about what’s coming next after this election.

VALLAS: You mention black women who voted 98% for Doug Jones.

JAWANDO: And I’m still not even sure about that 2%. I keep on telling people I want a recount on that.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: That’s right, maybe 2% were misread but that’s OK, we’ll never know because the state of Alabama decided not to make copies of the ballots right so we’re going to have to leave it there with 98%. But 98% or maybe 100%, we’re not sure of black women voted for Doug Jones in contrast to two-thirds of white women who voted for Moore. And this prompted a lot of folks to say in response to Tuesday’s election that black women saved democracy and in many cases, yet again. Now I have to say in looking at this huge chasm between black women and white women and how they voted on Tuesday, it’s really hard not to be reminded of Hillary Clinton’s observations in the 2016 election about the phenomenon of white women feeling pressured to vote with their husbands and their male relatives in mind versus black women and also I should say single ladies voting their own interests and even with all women in mind and this isn’t just Hillary, this is also something that’s backed up by electoral research. I mean is that something that you think is at work here and as a black woman yourself I would really love to hear you opine a little bit on how this plays out in households across this country.

JAWANDO: You know when I would say first my initial reaction was I was not that surprised. I often tell some of my white sister friends that you need to call instead of sending a message, I need you to just call your cousins and I need you to have a conversation that’s honest and is centered how the oppression of black women and black people and black men doesn’t just affect us but it affects everyone in this society and having a really honest conversation about what someone like a Roy Moore would mean to the Muslim community, what it would mean for African-Americans, you know Roy Moore had a long history in the state of Alabama. Alabama was sued around issues of equity in education and Roy Moore boldly defended it and said “Listen, we don’t need people coming in and causing problems in our state.” I mean this is who this man has always been. And yet I think in this moment where you see collectively moments of womanhood, whether it’s the ‘Me Too’ fight or the Women’s March, there is this desire to feel like your white sisters are standing with black women or marginalized women in the same way. And then electorally that doesn’t happen. And so the question that we ask is why? Well I think some of it is centered in whiteness and the ways that white privilege perform outside of even gender. So while some of us use and see the connection of our gender as a connecting factor, I think many more white women identify themselves as white first and women second. And I think that that is a reckoning that has to take place, that has to both be acknowledged that your, our womanhood and our sisterhood stops for many white women at the point where they have to make a decision between what’s in the best interest for white people versus what’s in the best interest for all women and actually being inclusive with our even definition of who women are in this community, in our society. I feel often that when we’re having these conversations about who turns out and who engages, it only is part of the conversation. The other part of the conversation is the way that race plays out in all of these elections. And that the only people who can really change it are other white allies and really thinking about what that means. White women allies who are willing to have hard, difficult conversations with their family members and say you have to do this. You have to stand with this, this is not good for us. And that’s hard, it’s a difficult conversation, it’s going to make family members uncomfortable but that’s when real freedom for all of us with come to be.

VALLAS: Now black women are wildly being thanked for the outcome of Tuesday’s election. I’ll quote Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, the DNC, he said, “We won in Alabama and Virginia because #BlackWomen led us to vitory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic party and we can’t take that for granted, period.” So nice words coming from Perez and from really frankly a lot of folks out there who are perhaps for the first time or the first time in a long time recognizing the role that black voters and that black women voters in particular play for Democrats in terms of outcomes of elections like this. But many on the flip side are expressing what I would argue is incredibly justified anger in response to some of those thanks, saying thanks for thanking us but thanking us just isn’t enough and it’s not going to cut it here. What more do we need to be seeing the way of action aside from just shows of gratitude after election turnout situations like this?

JAWANDO: You know I would say words are nice but action is better. I think that there has been a loud resounding call from black men and black women in the party, in the Democratic party in particular saying listen if you are serious about our engagement then your consultants should be more reflective. If you were serious about engagement then you need to both recruit, train and support candidates when they run for office and not say that they are not viable. If you are serious about this you will use your resources that you have and share and [INAUDIBLE] and grow and help develop communities of color and in particular the African-American community. If you really want to say that this is a moment where you want us to have that support. I think black women in particular, their voices often find are invisible when it comes to party politics. We say that they want our votes but they don’t want our voices. And it is something that we’ve seen over and over and over again.

And so I think that this has an opportunity, this moment is an opportunity for things to be different but I think what we’ve also done is we’ve said you know what we’re not going to work in the constraints and the systems that currently exist, we’re going to create our own future. We’re going to create our own organizations and that’s exactly what we’ve done, with organizations like Higher Heights that is devoted to training and elect black women. Organizations like Collective PAC that spend resources on African-Amerian candidates, men and women and giving them polling support and training and press support. Why? Because for years that has not been in place. And so I think black people have always found a way to kind of create our own system when the broader system don’t work for us. That is the very nature of I think our black identity, creating something out of very little or even nothing. And so I think it’s something that we’re not surprised that we have to do but what would obviously be nice not to always have to be in a position to do so. I think the other piece about this moment is if we really take a step back and we say we want to invest, then we also need to say well who is our leadership now and how are they investing?

Because it’s very easy to say, yes this is really good in this moment but when we do an analysis of who are in positions of leadership at our organization? Who are in positions of leadership in our senate office and our house offices? Who are in positions of leadership in the legislature? Whether it’s staff or the actual elected officials. Start in your communities where you are right now. Make a difference right now. Say oh, we don’t have any resumes of black women or black men? We’ve got to change that, we’ve got to do better. And I think just some honest recognition of we can do things right now to change the dynamic means a whole lot more than just words and sayings.

VALLAS: In the last minute I have with you Michelle, it also feels imperative in this conversation to be learning lessons about what worked in this election, what got us this outcome, what generated this turnout, and so as I ask the question what should Democrats be learning from Tuesday’s election as we look ahead to 2018, as we look ahead to 2020, echoing in my brain at a volume I can’t even measure is what feels like a never ending debate from the 2016 election about whether we need to be seeking votes from the white working class or whether we need to be courting our base, including communities of color as though that’s some kind of choice that has to be made. Is that truly a choice, does this election push us in one direction or the other, bring us home with some thoughts on that last point.

JAWANDO: You know I think our collective success as progressives in large measure will come on the backs of Africans-Americans, marginalized communities, Hispanic Americans who are saying our freedom and where you stand with us on the issues that matter to our communities, once you make it central to your vision, to your values, we’ll all find a greater sense of collective opportunity. I think we are really, Rebecca, in a moment where we have had difficulty in the past if you think historically, put it in context, the movements whether you’re talking about the suffrage movement or the civil rights movement or the early stages of the LGBT Stonewall movement, but this moment also feels really unique in history, and there’s a type of assault where white nationalism has taken root at 1600 Pennsylvania. Have we had racist presidents in the White House before? Yes, we can look at how many of our founding fathers had slaves. That’s not a question. The question is are the apparatuses of government all working against communities of color? And when you think about DACA, when you think about the revitalization of private prisons and everything that Jeff Sessions is doing at the Department of Justice, when you see the wholesale attack on voting rights and access, it feels like every system of the government is working against you. In the way where you feel so threatened and vulnerable that you often find yourself and I often find myself telling my children yes we’re safe in a way that I didn’t have to do under Barack Obama, in a way that I didn’t have to do under George W. Bush. This is a unique moment and so I think the same old coalitions and party works and engagement strategies of black women, of black people, won’t work. This is an all out full scale assault on who we are as communities and unless you have an equal engagement apparatus in place, unless you’re willing to say this is a policy that is unacceptable by all and any means and we do not accept this, unless we’re really ready to say that this is a moment that you will have to choose when history is written on what side you stood. And did you stand with black people, did you stand with Muslim people, did you stand with Hispanic Americans? Have you stood with undocumented communities who are feeling the threat everyday? Where will you stand when history is written? I think that that is really the fight that we’re in and the type of urgency that we have to have in this moment.

VALLAS: Michelle Jawando is the Vice President of Legal Progress at the Center for American Progress. She’s also one of the hosts of Thinking Cap, Off Kilter’s sister podcast over at CAP. Michelle, thank you so much for joining the show and we’ll have to have you back sometimes soon, hopefully for more of a good news conversation.

JAWANDO: That’s right, thanks so much for having me, this was great.

VALLAS: Take care. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. While Trump and his colleagues in Congress try to push their tax cuts for billionaires and wealthy corporations over the finish line without a single Democratic vote they’re not even trying to hide what comes next. Cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition assistance, meals on wheels and more and all in the name of so called “welfare reform”, I’m putting huge air quotes around phrase and that’s because language matters tremendously when it comes to these types of debates. To unpack the role of language in the fight around cutting these programs to pay for wealthy corporations and millionaires to see huge tax cuts they don’t need, I’m so pleased to be joined by two of my colleagues, Greg Kaufmann, he’s the Editor in Chief of TalkPoverty.org and Kate Gallagher Robbins, she’s the Director of family policy at the Center for American Progress but is here today wearing a somewhat different hat as a Ph.D in political science, Kate and Greg thanks so much for joining the show.

[AT THE SAME TIME]

KATE GALLGHER ROBBINS: Thanks for having us on.

GREG KAUFMANN: Thanks for having us on. Jinx!

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well so listen, folks are very familiar with what’s going on here. It’s been hard to miss all of the quotes coming out of Republican’s mouths, most recently this week Paul Ryan gave a whole speech about all of these programs that he wants to cut and he’s calling it ‘welfare reform’. Those are the words we’re hearing come out of his mouth, out of Trump’s mouth, out of all of these Republican’s mouths. So Kate, I’d love to go to you first to just give us a little bit of what we know about the role of language in these kinds of language and particularly the role of the word “welfare”, what kind of connotation that word carries.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: Yeah I mean I think this kind of debate is a kind of debate where language and images matter a lot. I mean you see this a lot in the studies of political communications, political advertising. What kinds of messages are we communicating to people? And for folks who have looked at this throughout their careers, one of the things that they find is that when you say the word welfare, even just without any context, without any associated photographs, people still have racial connotations. And it activiates in people’s minds sort of racially charged ways to think about things. So just merely using that word sort of sets a tone and a baseline and makes people think about things in a certain way and brings different values to the table. So it’s a really non-neutral term in the non-catchiest catch phrase there is.

VALLAS: And this isn’t theoretical, this also isn’t your opinion.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: No, no.

VALLAS: What you’re actually describing is something that has been studied to death because this isn’t the first time we’ve heard Republicans use the word welfare or welfare reform to describe trying to cut programs that help families make ends meet and afford the basics. I’m obviously thinking about what we know happened in the ’80s leading up to the 90s where then-President Ronald Reagan introduced a significant and to this day somewhat legendary figure into his playbook around trying to cut popular programs and that was the welfare queen.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: No, that’s absolutely right and it’s definitely not just an opinion. There’s tomes and tomes of political science work on this. And even I think this is an area where you see really, really strong work on experiments, not to nerd out too much but that’s sort of the gold standard of proving when something makes a difference. Proving that there’s an effect on something. And you’ve seen a lot of really smart folks, Vince Hutchings, Nick Valentino, who’ve done experiments to look at how are people reacting to language, reacting to advertisements, all of these kinds of things and they’re consistently finding people very sort of racialized reactions to the word “welfare”, “welfare reform” and I think strongly associated with as you say kind of Reagan laying the ground work on this. But of course as we all know Reagan is not the last politician to be invoking this sort of racialized notion when it comes to welfare.

VALLAS: Greg, I know you wanted to get in there as well.

KAUFMANN: No, and I was just remembering, you know I’m a little older than you guys, I remember that Reagan –

VALLAS: You always have to bring that in, you never let us forget that you’re older than we are. Got it Greg, understood.

[LAUGHTER]

KAUFMANN: They were tough times, my mom was a Headstart teacher, we didn’t know if she would have her job but more than that it wasn’t just the welfare queen. He also talked about young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. So all of this racial charged language and so fast forward today, you know, Paul Ryan will talk about a culture of dependency or the safety net shouldn’t be a hammock or Mitt Romney talking about takers. All of this stuff, they don’t have to go any further than that, it’s just embedded in our culture, in the way the public thinks. And they don’t talk at all of course about what the programs really are or how they really work. For example I know all three of us know but very few Americans know that all of these programs they’re talking about quote unquote, “reforming”, that the poverty rate would be twice as high as it is without these programs. And that recently we would have had poverty rates approaching 30%. So they don’t go into the reality, they just play on this coded language for, to gain support for their hatchet job to programs that people rely on.

VALLAS: Staying with the media for a minute here right, Kate you were describing some of the studies that have been done over the years about what images are evoked in people’s minds when they see certain words and actually just this week there was a report released by Color of Change and Family Story that looked at media coverage of poverty and really looking at it to see what kinds of images were used and what kinds of language was used. And what they found was that black people are massively overrepresented in the images that media uses when they’re discussing and when they’re reporting on poverty. And that white people are massively underrepresented when what we know is that most poor people in this country are white just by the numbers. And yet that’s the way that the media continues to tell this story.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: No, I think that’s right and I think that there are for many people and journalists and photo editors, they don’t even realize that they have these biases working in the back of their brains. They’re just oh we’re working on a story about poverty. Oh we’re working on a story about welfare. What’s a relevant image that goes with that? And I think it just honestly shows you how strong those associations are that these people just go to these images this erroneous images as you’re laying out and it continues this vicious cycle of reinforcing this false narrative of what welfare means I think as frankly is really important for folks, especially folks who are setting the table for the agenda like media folks to be really thoughtful about what language they’re using and of course what images they’re using.

VALLAS: I mean Greg you were starting to talk about the untold story here. And that’s a huge part of why I wanted you to be part of this conversation because that’s a lot of what TalkPoverty.org does is to try to tell the real stories of poverty and often the untold stories of poverty. You mentioned that if not for programs like Social Security, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, like nutrition assistance, poverty in this country would be nearly twice as high as it is today. But there’s a huge untold story about who actually turns to these programs, right? So it isn’t just about the racial dog whistling that comes with a term like welfare, that’s a huge part of what needs to be front and center here as people are thinking about what language they use and particularly reporters covering what looks like is probably going to be the next phase of this continued fight into 2018. But there’s a piece of it also that’s about the myths that continue to appear in media coverage and therefore continue to be stuck in peoples minds about who it is who gets helped by programs like nutrition assistance, most people are thinking about the homeless man sitting on the grate or the quote family trapped in a cycle of poverty but that’s not really the reality, is it Greg?

KAUFMANN: Right, and of course you’ve written about this yourself, Rebecca I mean and you know this number and I hope I’m going to get it right, like 70% of Americans will turn to a means tested program during their working years and that’s not something that’s pointed out to people.

VALLAS: 70% right, so not really and us and them kind of number.

KAUFMANN: It’s not and so that’s exactly what I was going to say, there’s this whole creation of people who are struggling economically as a them, rather than as an us and it’s just, it goes back to this notion of having a real conversation about poverty versus all of the rhetoric conservatives put out there. Nothing gets me like Paul Ryan because he leads this charge and he’s such a charlatan. He talks about needed to end this culture of dependency while he votes time and again against raising the minimum wage. Like I feel like there should be a rule you cannot participate in this conversation as long as you are trying to maintain a system where people who work full time remain in poverty. How do you have any credibility?

VALLAS: Well I’m going to propose that that become the Kaufmann rule, right? Because in the health care fight we had the Kimmel test, now we’ve got the Kaufmann rule or the Kaufmann test which I think you are articulated really nicely because the real problem in this country which frankly the Republican party doesn’t want anyone paying attention to is that we have a poverty level minimum wage. It stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour for the past almost nine years and that’s a huge part of why people who are working harder than ever but whose wages aren’t enough end up needing to turn to programs like nutrition assistane, like Medicaid to be able to keep food on the table and health insurance.

KAUFMANN: And I’m glad you, they always go first to nutrition assistance, SNAP, food stamps, call it what you will. They seem to go to that first and you hear them say I think in recent weeks they’ve been talking again, “it’s not meant to be a lifestyle. It creates dependence.” Imagine if Paul Ryan said you know it’s not meant to be a lifestyle this $1.40 per person per meal benefit. It is so absurd on the face of it. I have three children, please tell me how we can live on a $1.40 per person per meal. Like they cannot bring any reality into their conversation because it complete refutes their case. So I’m getting all hot, I’m getting all boiled here.

VALLAS: We should be! I mean people should be anger because frankly the Republican party is yet again lying to the American people about what they’re trying to do and they’re using intentionally coded language to try to smear popular programs. It’s not an accident.

KAUFMANN: And can I add just one more thing? I feel like the public pictures and conservatives represent that there are people out there getting all of these forms of assistance. Like we know that 1 out of 4 families that qualify for housing assistance actually receive it. And their average income is $12,500, like I think people feel like everybody’s just getting this great free housing. Same with cash assistance is the worst, virtually non-existent in many states but people feel like everybody’s getting this cash assistance and it’s because that’s the picture that’s painted by conservatives and accomplice media, really.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: And you know what I think is actually, as you guys are talking before about some of the programs that are often kind of grouped in this set of programs. You know one program we’ve talked amongst ourselves as having a renaissance in recent months is Medicaid and I think you actually can really, there hasn’t been times to do the studies on it yet so this is my hypothesis. But I think you’d really see a different relationship for Medicaid in people’s opinions now because the media honestly covered it in a very, very different way under this discussion I think for a long time Medicaid was thought of as only a program that was for poor single mothers and children of color. And that was never true, first of all. It was a program that so many Americans rely on, nearly 2/3rds of nursing home patients are paid for with Medicaid, contributes to their care.

VALLAS: People with disabilities who can live in the community independently because of Medicaid.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: I just and I think you’ve seen as the media frankly mostly through the work of activists who really set the stage for what Medicaid really means for people’s lives as the media have covered those stories, you’ve seen people’s views and understandings of Medicaid shift in a way and I think it’s so powerful the way the stories are told and when you tell them in the way that’s actually true to life, people realize how critical and important these programs are and how much they’re going to need them.

VALLAS: I think that’s such an important point because in a lot of ways Republicans thought, and frankly not just Republicans, I think the American people expect it, I know all of us who work on these issues, we all expected that post election the Affordable Care Act was going to be history. That Medicaid, a whole bunch of programs were all going to be end up being decimated if not annihilated because of the new political climate. But that isn’t what we’ve seen happen this year, a huge part of that and actually a huge part of what has made Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act not successful has been their attempt to end Medicaid as we know it and they frankly expected that they were going to be able to ram through massive devastating cuts to Medicaid without anyone really caring or mounting a successful pushback effort and yet we saw Medicaid become just as much of a third rail as Social Security and Medicare. So I guess to me that’s what’s behind this very intentional decision by Republicans like Paul Ryan who frankly are very smart and very strategic. You heard me stay that here first. To use language like “welfare reform” as they try to dress up a very unpopular agenda that they realize is unpopular as they head into an election year.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: Oh yeah, I mean they know dang well what they’re doing. Let’s make no bones about it, it’s not like they’ve come across this word and they thought oh well this sounds nice we’ll just use this. I mean they know very well what they’re doing and I think you see it, you saw I mean it’s a different phrase but you saw it in Trump’s discussion around inner cities. Like that is another word that people have very strong connotations on and is a dog whistle for certain, for meaning a certain type of racialized composition of folks and so on and so forth. And you know it’s not accident that they’re trying to put forward these very negative stereotypes and I mean yeah, it’s here they go again, right?

KAUFMANN: I think the Medicaid example is a great example of what we need to do now obviously is that people became educated about what Medicaid really does as you guys were saying and we’re going to need to do that with housing, with nutrition assistance, with all the things they’re coming after now. That’s obviously a big part of what Talk Poverty tries to do, lift up stories of people’s real experiences with these programs and the real research, that’s a big part of what I know the Hands Off campaign is doing to try to make these things more real because there’s just too much misinformation out there.

VALLAS: I also, I think it’s important as well as we kind of have this conversation to be very explicit about another part of this strategy. It’s not just about language, it’s not just about language like welfare reform which as we’ve discussed is coded and intentionally so. But it’s also about the nature of their proposals and we’ve talked a lot about this on the show over the years. That’s the goal of proposals like drug testing applicants for assistance. That’s the goal of proposals and that’s where I want to go with this question like work requirements. These proposals are not coming out of thin air. They are intentionally crafted to stigmatize the people that Republicans want us to view as different from quote, “us”, to stigmatize the “them” in this. And work requirements is what we are hearing is going to be at the heart of what they’re trying to do in the name of so call welfare reform next year. Greg is this a playbook move that’s all about pitting the deserving against the undeserving?

KAUFMANN: It absolutely is a playbook move. The drug testing that you mentioned, it’s so interesting in Florida they threw it out for constitutional reason but the pilot program showed that the people that were drug tested had a lower incidence than the general public for drug use. So it’s so undeserved.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: It doesn’t even achieve they’re like semi purporting for it to achieve. I mean the goal is to reduce people’s participation in the program.

KAUFMANN: Right, exactly.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: But they’re saying well it’s about you know making sure people aren’t using but these folks aren’t even using drugs in the first place.

VALLAS: And actually at lower rates than wealthy people.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: Right, yeah.

KAUFMANN: That’s exactly right.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: So it’s just really outrageous and I think work requirements are the same.

KAUFMANN: Same thing.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: I mean Rebecca recently co-authored a piece with some of other colleagues on this talking about how work requirements, work requirements don’t create a single job. If you take away someone’s health care, take away someone’s food assistance, that’s not going to help them get a job. That’s not going to help them interview or create the networks they need. People, we need to focus as a country on creating jobs and investing in people so they can get those jobs. Not punishing people.

KAUFMANN: Right and it’s again there’s nothing reality based about the conversation. So you look at nutrition assistance and most of the people receiving it are senior, children, people with disabilities, people who we don’t expect to work and the majority of the people who we would expect to work are working. So they don’t tell you that because it doesn’t work in their playbook of stigmatization, which they do in order to gut the programs.

VALLAS: It also takes us back to the minimum wage, right because so back to the Kaufmann test which I now plan to apply regularly in my daily life. A couple of numbers here that I think Trump and Paul Ryan and others would be interested in if they were serious about actually helping people achieve what they call quote, unquote “self-sufficiency”. Which is a whole conversation that we could have here. But if you were to raise the minimum wage just to $12, not even to the $15 that is now sort of the new norm in terms of what progressives are pushing for. If you were to raise the minimum wage just to $12 by 2020 you would see savings in the SNAP program, nutrition assistance of $53 billion over ten years because more people would be able to afford to live and to eat on their wages. And so if they were serious about actually trying to help people reach that place where they don’t need to turn to these programs they would be seriously thinking about the role that wages play in this.

KAUFMANN: That’s right and by the way just to note that’s more than House conservatives, more than the cuts they asked for in SNAP in the last farm bill. So raising the wage would have achieved more in cuts than what they were trying to do legislatively. It is so absurd. The more you talk about this issue the more absurd it is, it just is stunning to me no matter how many times we talk about it and hopefully we won’t have to talk about it a lot more because we’ll just beat them.

VALLAS: Greg is angry, he’s banging his fist on the table. I’m going to give one other number here and a shout out to our colleague Rachel West who’s the one responsible for it. She also is responsible for the SNAP number.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: She’s a very responsible woman.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: She is indeed and also one of the listeners of this show every week so she’s going to get to hear this. But if because the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in almost nine year a minimum wage worker in 2016 had to clock an extra 244 hours just to make the same money in real terms that she earned in 2009, the last time that it was raised. That’s the reality of this wage staying at poverty level and losing value year after year. There’s one other shot that I feel like we need to get in here and there’s probably way more than one but our time is waning unfortunately to Paul Ryan and other which is that we knew that they always wanted to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations by cutting programs like Social Security, Medicare, nutrition assistance and so forth. But we also knew they they were trying to manufacture a situation where they could say oh my God, look at the deficit we just can’t afford these programs. That’s why we need to cut these programs. We can’t afford them. I have to say and I had a little bit of this conversation with Congressman McGovern last week. I’m still amazed that they are so brazenly as they literally try to send a tax bill to the president’s desk that jacks the deficit up by $1.5 trillion, maybe more, we’ll see the new bill in the next several hours. They’re still using deficit language, deficit hawk language as the stated reason for why they need to be cutting these programs.

KAUFMANN: I mean we knew that was coming though, right, as stunning as it is we absolutely knew that was what they were going to do. Oh look the deficit is way too much now we’ve got to cut these things. Oh yeah sure, we just raised the deficit but let’s not talk about that. It’s like it is stunning, I did know this was the next step. I think you guys did too. We just knew this was how it was going to go.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: I think in this debate what I’m hopeful for is I actually think that they rest of the American people also know this is the next step now. Like it’s so brazen, it’s so outrageously out there. You see this with the deep, deep unpopularity of this tax bill and people’s huge efforts to save the ACA, to save Medicaid. I don’t think, they may be able to get some of this stuff through but I don’t think Americans are fooled at all about what’s going on.

VALLAS: And that’s going to be the name of the game is people can’t be fooled by language like welfare reform and frankly the media and this is for you journos who listen to this show, the media needs to step and actually cover what’s happening here in language that’s accurate as opposed to adopting coded terms that Republicans are using in their talking points. This isn’t welfare reform, we barely have welfare in this country at all anymore. It’s about cutting program that when they are actually named and when it’s out there in the sunlight the American people say no, do not touch these things, hands off these things. So Greg Kaufmann, the Editor-in-Chief of TalkPoverty.org, Kate Gallagher Robbins, Director of family policy at the Center for American Progress. Thank you so much for joining the show, lots to watch in the weeks and months ahead.

KAUFMANN: Thanks Rebecca.

GALLAGHER ROBBINS: Thanks, Rebecca.

[…]

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.