Home » Elections » Ideas We Should Steal Festival 2024: When Will We Start Listening to Working Class Voters?
Join us at the Ideas We Should Steal Festival 2024
The perfect antidote to post-election blues.
One day. 30 speakers. 30 ideas for a better Philadelphia. Did you secure your seats yet for the event of the year? It’s just under two weeks away!Here’s a sneak peak at just a few of the solutions our many speakers will address:
- Actor/activist Debra Winger on ridding our politics of dark money
- San Francisco YIMBY crusader Sonja Trauss on solving our housing crisis by…building more housing
- Cleveland’s Devin Cotten on guaranteeing every working person a $50,000 income
- New York’s Kathryn Wylde on how to mobilize the private sector in service of the common good
- New Yorker writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the future of politics in cities
- Garrett Langley on using police car cameras to catch crime suspects — including would-be assassins — in cities
- Austin’s Piper Stege Nelson on raising $10 million in one day for local nonprofits
- Charlotte’s Mark Etheridge on strategically keeping rents affordable for all
- Laurin Leonard on helping returning citizens by rethinking the criminal background check
- Housing expert Bruce Katz on a roadmap for ensuring every American family has stable housing
- Former mayors Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and Kasim Reed of Atlanta on how to really run a city
Books by our Ideas We Should Steal Festival speakers
Many of our brilliant speakers for the 7th annual festival — including Batya Ungar-Sargon — have books we’ll be selling at the event. But you can get started early by picking them up before you go.
Batya Ungar-Sargon on working class voters
When Will We Start Listening to Working Class Voters?
Author Batya Ungar-Sargon and former PA Congressman Patrick Murphy will talk about the underappreciated voters who may have decided the 2024 election at our festival on November 15
When Will We Start Listening to Working Class Voters?
Author Batya Ungar-Sargon and former PA Congressman Patrick Murphy will talk about the underappreciated voters who may have decided the 2024 election at our festival on November 15
In reporting for her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon traveled the country seeking out and talking with members of America’s working class who are fighting to survive. They were cleaning ladies and health aides, truck drivers and Amazon delivery people, fast food workers, builders and others — so called “voters who shower after work.”
What she concluded was what this week’s election may have borne out: That working class voters, long a guaranteed voting bloc for Democrats, feel left behind. That no one in power is speaking to or for them. That what they want is not all that complicated: Respect and a way to achieve the American dream through hard work.
“There is a divide in America,” Ungar-Sargon said at the National Conservatism Conference in July. “It’s not between left and right. It’s between the polarized elites and an incredibly, unified working class.”
How did that play out in the November election? Ungar-Sargon will share what she’s learned through her extensive reporting among working class Americans at The Citizen’s 7th annual Ideas We Should Steal Festival presented by Comcast NBCUniversal, on November 15, in Center City.
Ungar-Sargon will be joined by former PA Congressman and Undersecretary of the Army Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who grew up in Northeast Philly the son of a police officer and a legal secretary. Murphy himself worked as a Vet Stadium security guard in high school, and then went on after law school to serve in the Army, with deployments to both Bosnia and Afghanistan. He was a champion of America’s workers when in Congress.
See Ungar-Sargon talk about her research below, and then secure your spot for the Festival.
MORE IDEAS WE SHOULD STEAL 2024
Batya Ungar Sargon, left, and Patrick Murphy, right.
