Do Swing District Dems Have to Trash Their Party?

Maybe it's not necessary. Also: We talk table saws.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

While a growing number of Democrats in Congress have said Joe Biden should drop out of the presidential race, only one (as of this writing) has suggested that he immediately resign the presidency. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who was first elected in 2022 in a southwest Washington district, issued a statement Thursday saying “I doubt the President’s judgement about his health, his fitness to do the job, and whether he is the one making important decisions about our country, rather than unelected advisors," and that “The President should do what he knows is right for the country and put the national interest first.”

It wasn’t a surprise to hear this coming from Perez, who not only represents a district that leans slightly Republican, but has built her political identity in no small part on opposition to her party. She has been the subject of a number of national media profiles, the latest of which came in a long article in the New York Times Magazine titled “The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem.” It contains some things that I think are revealing, and problematic, about how the discussion around polarization and party identity usually works. So we’re going to dive into it, and before we go farther, let me warn you: We’re going to consider partisanship, blue-collar identity signaling, the complications of safety regulation, and table saw injuries. There will be a substantial digression on the latter subject; feel free to skip over it if you like. 

This profile portrays Perez as someone perturbed that those who inhabit Washington, but especially the Democratic Party, are not just distant from the lives of blue-collar people but actively hostile toward them. There are ways in which that’s true, but the question is, how do you go about fixing it? One way, one could argue, is to elect more Democrats who care about them, because while Republicans claim to care about them, the GOP makes the lives of those blue-collar people more difficult in a hundred ways. 

Which is why the election of someone like Perez (who owns an auto-repair shop with her husband) is good for her constituents and good for Democrats. But it would be even better for Democrats if she could go about advocating for her constituents without shitting all over her own party in ways that make it even harder for people like her to get elected. 

And look, I understand: If you’re in a swing district, you have to distinguish yourself and show voters that they shouldn’t associate you with whatever they don’t like about your party. But when you do it by reinforcing the very stereotypes Republicans use against Democrats, you make your own success more difficult and make it less likely that your party can win at all levels, which only undermines your ability to make positive change. 

The article begins with a story about the Consumer Product Safety Commission and its regulation of table saw safety (which we’ll get to in a moment), and relates how Perez is angry “that auto shops like hers could no longer source replacement parts from American manufacturers; that there was ‘a slow march toward everything being disposable, and not repairable.’ Worst of all, she believed that these problems were largely attributable to her fellow Democrats, who, she said, ‘don’t respect people that work for a living.’” 

You can argue that Democrats share responsibility with Republicans for the decline in manufacturing jobs that has occurred since the 1990s. But you can’t argue that it was all Democrats’ fault; the GOP was the party of free trade pretty much forever. And investing in manufacturing has been a major priority of the Biden administration, with admirable results: Biden has a better record on manufacturing jobs than any president in decades.

What about right-to-repair? I’m a big advocate for it, and you know who signed the nation’s first right-to-repair law for agricultural equipment? Jared Polis, the progressive Democratic governor of Colorado. Other liberal states like Massachusetts and Minnesota have passed right to repair laws, and progressive groups have pushed for it, as has the Biden administration. So that sure seems like an issue where Democrats are taking the lead, and Perez could use it as a way to make the case that in fact, her party really does stand on the side of ordinary people.  

Another example: at one point, Perez distinguishes herself from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also has a working-class background, because she believes AOC is “working for ideas” rather than people. “And people that work for a living are very diverse, and most of them are not socialists,” she says. True enough, but don’t AOC’s constituents “work for a living”? In fact, her district is more blue-collar than Perez’s. According to Census data, the median household income in Perez’s district is $85,000 a year, compared to $61,000 in AOC’s district. In Perez’s district, 28.6% of people over age 25 have bachelor’s degrees; in AOC’s district, it’s 27.1%. 

And while I am not saying that this is what Perez is saying, I’m sure the idea that her district is more populated by those who “work for a living” sounds right to a lot of listeners, which might have something to do with the fact that her district is 78 percent white, while AOC’s is only 22 percent white.

I got the data about their districts from this handy tool created by the Census, which is a nice thing provided by the federal government. You know what’s another nice thing provided by the government? Safety regulations. 

Let’s talk table saws

Rep. Perez has been an outspoken opponent of the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s attempt to increase table saw safety by requiring new saws to include a truly amazing piece of technology that makes it impossible to lose a finger or otherwise sustain a major saw blade injury. It has some technical names, but it’s usually just referred to as “a SawStop,” because that’s the name of the company that makes the only saws you can buy in the U.S. with this feature. The company was founded by the guy who invented the technology, and since then there have been decades of patent arguments and corporate maneuvering, the upshot of which is that the founder of SawStop still has the patent and only their saws have the feature (here’s a little background).

To simplify things, the device runs a current through the saw blade, and when it detects that something conductive (like a finger) has encountered the blade, it slams a brake into the blade, stopping it within 5 milliseconds. The result is that you can put your finger (or a hot dog) into a spinning saw blade and get nothing more than a tiny cut that can be taken care of with a band-aid. 

This video shows in super-slo-mo how a SawStop works:

I have a particular interest in this issue, since I’ve been a woodworker most of my adult life. I don’t own a SawStop saw (I’m still using my 20-year-old Jet), but a lot of people don’t buy them because they’re expensive. And they’re expensive partly because they have no competition for the thing that makes them special and potentially digit-saving. On the other hand, SawStop has been an aggressive litigator, successfully keeping competitors from bringing similar technologies to market (the German toolmaker Bosch developed a system that works differently but achieves the same end; SawStop sued them, and as a result you can’t buy those Bosch saws in the U.S.). But their patents will be expiring soon.

The CPSC took up this issue because there are about 30,000 table saw injuries per year in the United States, thousands of which involve amputations of fingers, which can be career-ending, involve huge financial cost, and produce a great deal of pain and suffering. 

And it can happen to anyone, no matter how skilled they are. There are a series of important techniques and accessories woodworkers use to reduce the possibility of injury, but even put together they can’t be 100 percent effective over the long term. In 25 years of woodworking I’ve experienced mostly minor scrapes and cuts with my tools, but I did have one table saw incident in which I lost a good portion of the pad on my thumb. And let me tell you, you do not truly understand a table saw blade’s fundamental essence until you have felt it chew into your flesh, tooth by hungry tooth. 

Given the scale of the problem, it’s absolutely appropriate that the CPSC would look at it and consider a regulation. That’s why the agency exists. It decided to examine this issue back in 2016, and in the years since there have been an enormous quantity of filings and hearings and public comments, by everyone who has an interest in the outcome. The conclusion the process has been heading toward is a requirement that all table saws come with the technology. 

As near as I can tell, woodworkers are divided on this issue, but most of them are probably opposed to the regulation; there’s a definite libertarian streak in that community. Now let’s return to the Times Magazine piece: 

The finger-saving technology has been likened to airbags in cars — a straightforward but ingenious safety solution — but many of Gluesenkamp Perez’s friends didn’t see it that way. They were worried that a government mandate would increase the cost of a new table saw by hundreds of dollars, while also giving SawStop, the company that developed the technology, an effective monopoly.

What may seem like a minor regulatory hiccup is to Gluesenkamp Perez emblematic of the disconnect between government and the governed that she has dedicated her short time in office to addressing. Too often, she believes, policymakers are not only disrespectful to people who work with their hands, but also ignorant of the reality of their day-to-day lives. “If the commission had had somebody who has worked in construction in the body, they would know that if you raise the cost of a table saw by $400, people are just going to put a circ saw on a sheet of plywood — and more people are going to lose their fingers,” she says. In April, she introduced legislation that would prohibit the commission from implementing the rule until five years after SawStop’s patent expires. (SawStop’s chief executive, Matt Howard, said that the company has promised not to enforce its patent once the rule is implemented.)

A price increase is a legitimate issue; what we don’t know is when there is more competition and every new saw has a version of the technology, just how much that price increase would be. Waiting five years after the expiration of the patents seems excessive; Bosch already sells saws with its system around the world, and other companies could probably add such systems to their saws fairly quickly, since they aren’t that complicated from an engineering perspective. But even given all that, let’s accept for the sake of argument that at least initially, the regulation would add a couple hundred dollars to the price of a saw, which is real money (depending on what kind you’re buying, a table saw will run you anywhere from $300 or so all the way up toward five figures). 

So is a regulation that saves thousands of people from life-changing injuries every year, but comes with a financial cost, obviously some kind of attack on the regular blue-collar folk Perez hangs out with? Of course not. Yes, I’m sure her friends have told her that they don’t need it because they know how to use their tools safely, which is what everyone thinks until they have an accident. 

And the idea that this regulation is being promulgated because a bunch of pointy-headed Washington folks who “are not only disrespectful to people who work with their hands, but also ignorant of the reality of their day-to-day lives”? Give me a break. This isn’t “Let’s screw those rubes,” it’s a lengthy process that has attempted to weigh financial considerations against the safety of the very people she’s talking about. You can decide that on balance the decision was the wrong one, but to just dismiss it as an act of elist contempt is ridiculous. Big government elitists impose costs on salt of the earth blue-collar folks is one way to tell this story, but Heartless corporate greedheads fight against requirement for safety accessory to protect consumers from being maimed is another, probably more accurate one. 

Keeping people safe is one of the core obligations of government, and most of the time, it comes with some kind of cost that consumers eventually foot the bill for. There’s a cost to making sure your meat isn’t infected with e. coli, and that cribs don’t strangle babies, and that your car doesn’t explode if you get in a fender-bender. 

That doesn’t mean the CPSC is always right. My position on the potential SawStop requirement is that there are strong considerations on both sides that have to be taken into account, and the regulation has to be written carefully to balance the economic impact against the safety impact and give the manufacturers time to retool — while acknowledging that every year that goes by without the rule in place will mean thousands of amputations. What I object to — indeed, what I find infuriating — is the idea that this is nothing but a bunch of Washington bureaucrats who don’t understand real work done by real men sticking their elitist big government noses where they don’t belong. 

Finally, “people are just going to put a circ saw on a sheet of plywood”? I’m sorry, but no. While it’s possible to create a janky-ass version of a table saw that way, anyone who works in construction and doesn’t want to buy a new saw with a saw brake on it is going to just…use their old table saw. Or get a track saw, or use a circular saw and a straight edge, or do any of a dozen other things that will produce far better results. Professionals, or even sane amateurs, are not going to do that. So no.

Thinking clearly about party and identity

From all evidence, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a serious legislator who cares about her constituents. I think it’s great that she is advocating for people with a wider variety of experiences, including people with blue-collar backgrounds, to run for Congress. And the fact that college-educated voters are now more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, reversing a longstanding divide in the electorate, complicates the task of any Democrat who needs voters without college degrees to win, especially one running in a largely rural district. But you can appeal to those voters without telling them that your party hates them. All that does is make it harder for other Democrats to win elections.

And it’ll even make it harder for Perez to win her own elections! If she successfully convinces her constituents that Democrats hold them in contempt, it makes it more likely that their resentment at Democrats will rub off on her, as much as she tries to distance herself from the national party. That’s no good for anybody.