You know, on the student student loan forgiveness, I looked at the data. My district only holds 3 percent of the federally issued debt. This was a regressive tax policy. If you support progressive tax strategies, you should do that consistently, not just when there’s party favors. And I had people protest our auto shop.

Just to clarify, you voted against President Biden’s student debt relief. People looked at you and said, “You’re a Democrat, how dare you?” Talk to me about how that affected you back home.

They were really aggressive on our online reviews. We take real pride in the quality of work we do. People were just bombing it who’d never been customers. But I was hearing from my community, “We don’t want the trades to be considered an afterthought. We don’t want to be second fiddle” — really challenging the idea that academic intelligence is the thing that we should be supporting. We want a level playing field for the trades, for all of the forms of intelligence. We want good jobs that don’t require a college degree. We want honors-level shop class in junior high. Those are the things that reflect our values and our priorities. And so that’s how I vote.

This is where the pushback comes in, when you’re in national office and you vote on something that affects everybody in the country. Not many people in your district ended up in a lot of college debt. But all across the United States, many, many, many young people did. You’re in national office. You don’t just vote for this little corner of Washington because your vote — as one of 435 — affects the whole country. How do you respond to that?

My job is to represent my community. And I think the way that you arrive at good policy is by having everyone show up at the table with the unique perspectives of their community and loyalty there. And that is how you end up with better policy in the end. You don’t get good legislation without having people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches at the table — not as an afterthought, but in the inception of the legislation. There are ways that that proposal could have been much more progressive. You know, things like Pell Grants or focusing on the bigger, systemic issue of why college tuition has increased 481 percent since I was born. That’s the systemic solution that I think we need to be considering and evaluating, like how are we going to provide a level playing field for everyone?

Let’s talk nationally. There’s another two years to look forward to, in which Democrats will be in the minority in both the House and the Senate. They lost the presidency. How do you think the party moves forward? People are looking at you as the face of a new kind of Democratic politics. Whether you like that or not, people say, “We should look at this gal because she seems to be saying something. She won in a Trump district. She seems to be saying something that people who voted for Donald Trump can get behind.” Where do the Democrats go?

Well, again, look, I’m not a strategist, but I think 90 percent of Americans agree about 90 percent of the issues. And they have found the 10 things we disagree about to drive a stake through the heart of our community.

Like what?

Pick anything. Anything that’s in the national ads and instead, say, it is not partisan to want to be able to fix your own car; “right to repair” laws are not partisan; wanting to own a home, not partisan. One of the things I really love about living where I live — we don’t have trash service. So every six weeks, we go to the dump and take our stuff, and so you have to see everything you bought. There is nowhere else, right? You should have to see all of the tiny little yogurt cups you bought, and have accountability, and not have an idea of the woods as a terrarium or as something that’s just a recreational asset, but as something that is living, breathing and relevant. I think we’re consuming like half the lumber per capita that we were in the ’70s. And the reality is a lot of that has been replaced by petroleum-based products. By thinking about things in this hyper-local way, by seeing the trash that you bought, you are able to arrive at a better national and global solution.

Do you think that’s what Republicans did in 2024? Because whether you support Donald Trump or you’re a critic of his, one thing that you can say he successfully did is he turned local issues national. Springfield, Ohio, was struggling with an influx of immigrants. There is no reason that somebody in Maine or Florida or Texas should have cared at all about Springfield, Ohio. That was a local issue. Donald Trump took that little local issue, made it a national issue. Some analysts say that is what helped him win. It seems counter to what you’re saying, which is that a local issue is a local issue, and we shouldn’t make it national because it won’t let us win.

People want to be heard. I had a lot of people, colleagues, saying, “How do we get people to understand that the economy’s actually great?”

This was a Democratic line.

Don’t do that. People are putting their groceries on a credit card. You go to Albertsons or whatever, your grocery store, and you feel like you’re in a game of chicken with the CEO. Nobody cares about your spreadsheets. I don’t know that any political party is doing this very well. But I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity. That is how we get our country back, how we build community again.