Untold: Opus Dei - Swamp Notes: The Bethlehem Project

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

Swamp Notes: The Bethlehem Project is a new FT podcast series that tackles some of the US’s biggest political and economic issues through the lens of one city: Bethlehem Pennsylvania. The city is a politically divided area in a critical swing state, and reflects a lot of conversations happening nationally. The first episode tackles what happens when immigration enforcement comes to town, and the second episode explore what it's like growing up in Donald Trump's America.Subscribe to Swamp Notes here.Note: The FT does not use generative AI to voice its podcasts This is a repeat of episodes published on Swamp Notes, a sister podcast of Untold, on Nov. 10 and Dec. 17, 2025 respectively. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi there and happy holidays. I'm Untold producer Persis Love and over the holiday period, we wanted to share with you some of our other FT series that we think you'll like. So coming up is Swamp Notes, the Bethlehem Project. It tackles some of the US's biggest political and economic issues through the lens of one city, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The city is a politically divided area in a critical swing state and reflects a lot of the conversations happening nationally. We're going to play the first two episodes for you. If you like what you hear, subscribe to the Swamp Notes podcast for more. Thanks and enjoy.

Pennsylvania 378 south exit toward Bethlehem. I'm walking down Main Street in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and it almost kind of feels like a movie set of an American small town, you know, tree-line streets, black lamp posts, brick sidewalks. cute little restaurants and shops and coffee shops. And not far from where I'm standing in downtown is the rusting remains of the former steelworks. Bethlehem's a former steel town. And it kind of feels like the ghost of Bethlehem's past a little bit,

very symbolically looming over the town. It's also just a symbol of pride and like a symbol of those working class roots. Bethlehem is a wonderful place. because there's so many different people and walks of life. It's a historic town, but I think it's pushing towards the future. The town has successfully transitioned to other industries like tech, logistics, education, and health care. We actually passed a major hospital on the way into town, but there's still a lot of economic angst here and political division.

I like what the Republicans are doing compared to the Democrats. I don't want to pay health care for illegals. I don't think politicians should be dictating what women should do with their bodies. I really like the ideas of libertarianism, so basically do whatever you want, marry who you want. Not only is Bethlehem a case study of how politics has changed in post-industrial America. It's also a critical area in a critical swing state. several years, the Financial Times is going to be taking a close look at Bethlehem to try to understand how big political and economic issues are playing out in people's day-to-day lives.

And we're going to bring you an audio version of some of those stories right here on the Swamp Notes podcast. I'm Sonia Hudson, and this is the first episode of our special series on Bethlehem. I'm joined by the FT's U.S. news editor Derek Brower, who has been spearheading the newsrooms Bethlehem project. He's here to talk more about what we can expect from it. Hi, Derek. Hi, Sonia. So tell us a little bit about this project and what you're hoping readers and listeners will get out of it. Well, that's a good question, Sonia. We thought, I think, looking at how we covered the previous election, how American politics is covered in general, that we needed to do something from the ground up and explain how people living in Trump's America were feeling

about Trump's America. There's trillions of dollars at stake in how elections are decided. Bond markets are affected by who wins an election. Housing prices are affected. Their global economy is affected. And those elections are decided by people in battleground states and swing states in corners of states like Pennsylvania, like Bethlehem. So that's why we want to go find out how these people are feeling. And why did you pick Bethlehem in particular? We wanted to find a city in America that represented a lot of the things. themes that are prevalent in the MAGA movement. And so Bethlehem, which, by the way, will be famous to some of our listeners as this place that was

the home of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, who steel guarded the Golden Great Bridge and Empire State Building and so on. And the industrial past is such a big and important theme of a politics that Donald Trump has espoused in recent years. So that's the first thing. It also has shifted politically in ways that the country has shifted politically over the past elections. The movements in how people have voted have been towards the winning candidate. The demography is akin to that across the country with Latinos and an African-American population living alongside

majority white population. And then fundamentally, it's just a city that I think will allow us to explore some of the big themes of Donald Trump's economy. That's the crackdown on immigration, the impact of tariffs, his efforts to control inflation, and the hopes and African. but also the anxieties of younger people as they try to fathom or figure out how they're going to get new jobs, live with an AI revolution that they see unfolding in front of them, and afford housing. And the main story in our first episode today is about the crackdown on immigration that you mentioned. We'll get to that in just a second. Derek Brower, the FT's US News editor.

Thanks so much for your time. Thanks, Sonia. U.S. President Donald Trump has made cracking down on immigration a central part of his second term. Cities across the country are experiencing more raids from immigration and customs enforcement, or ice, as a result. We're following a massive ice raid at a Hyundai plant in Georgia. Protests erupted in the streets of Los Angeles after immigration officials conducted several raids and arrested dozens of people. Bethlehem is no exception. Back in June, an immigration raid at a construction site,

sent a chill through the city. Tonight, the Bethlehem community came out to stand in solidarity with 17 people arrested by ICE during a raid. Now, this was relatively small compared to some of the other immigration enforcement actions across the country this year. But the response in Bethlehem, which is 30% Hispanic, highlighted the intense division over how to treat people who work and contribute to society, but also came to the country illegally. The FTs, Guy Chazan, went to Bethlehem to learn more about this. He joins me now to talk about it. Hi, Guy. Hi. So let's rewind a little to June. Tell me what we know about the raid and any other immigration enforcement actions since then. Well, the men who were detained were construction workers and they were restoring a place called 510 flats, which was an apartment complex in the south side of Bethlehem that had been damaged in a fire. and they're all led away.

Some people were on the scene and actually photographed it and filmed it on their phones. But no one in Bethlehem seems to know where the men who were mainly from Venezuela and Mexico are being held

or even whether they're still in the United States. There have been further detention since then. For example, one woman I spoke to watched in horror as ICE agents led her husband away. Her husband's called Darwin Contreras as he was attending a routine appointment

at Lehigh County Courthouse, which is just in the neighboring town of Allentown, and he's been in detention ever since. And can you just back up a little bit and talk about how this raid fits in with immigration enforcement that we've seen across the country this year? Well, ICE, Immigration Customs Enforcement, has really stepped up. its activities all over the country. We saw in Los Angeles, for example, how ICE agents raided car parks next to Home Depot stores where Mexican day laborers often gather to pick up work. And this is really coming from the top of the White House. Officials like Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, have been saying how it was important for ICE to really step up its enforcement activities and really pursue

undocumented aliens and detain them and possibly deport them. So we're seeing this across the country. Really what happened in Bethlehem is no exception at all. Yeah, and like we heard earlier, there was a rally after the raid in support of the people who were arrested. You spoke to someone who helped organize that. Can you tell me about them and how they reacted to the raid when it happened? Well, yes, this is John Irons, who's a local county commissioner. I was born in Ecuador and I was adopted as an infant. And so I grew up outside of Chicago. And so, you know, the immigrant story is part of my story too.

And I went with him to the construction site where the raid happened. We're aware that ICE has been operating for a long time and detaining people, but we haven't seen these large work site raids in Bethlehem. He told me that the raid had made him really scared. You know, I know that my citizenship and my status This is just a legal decision and that it can be taken away from me. And we need to acknowledge that everyone's at risk. He felt like if they were targeting these men, then really everyone was at risk.

Everyone with an immigrant background was at risk of being arrested and possibly deported. And after the raid happened, John Irons helped organize this protest that about 500 people showed up to. And they were holding up placards. that said things like, don't bite the hands that feed you, and we speak for those you silenced. John Irons described the mood of this protest, but he also said how people generally feel in the city. Yeah, there was a lot of anger.

There was a lot of fear, and this was kind of the moment we're talking about this change in our federal government and what's happening with the expansion of the ice budget and sort of rise of fascism, and so people were ready to be activated on this. And it's obvious that people are very exercised by these ICE enforcement actions. And really, it's led to waves of protests not only in big cities like Los Angeles,

but also in small communities like Bethlehem. Well, what do immigration officials have to say about the raid and some of the other arrests that they've made in Bethlehem since then? Well, Homeland Security basically said that these inspections, as they call them workplace inspections, are critical for targeting illegal employment practices. And they're saying that such practices actually undermine American workers and destabilized labor markets.

And one spokesman for the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, has also sort of hit back at criticism of the arrest of Darwin Contreras, saying that he was actually a criminal with convictions. and he was arrested during a court hearing for driving under the influence. Well, Guy, what about people in the community that were in support of the raid? What did they tell you? They basically said that the people who were arrested in that June raid had broken the law.

And, you know, what country is going to just turn and look the other way when people enter the country illegally? there was also a sense of trying to create a kind of deterrent effect as well, I think. We're not going to just sort of turn a blind eye to this illegal immigration, to these undocumented aliens. They are going to be held accountable for breaking the law. So that was the argument that the supporters of this policy were pushing that I spoke to in Bethlehem. I feel like this conversation that we've been having around the responses to the raid has been very black and white. Did you talk to anyone in Bethlehem whose opinion falls more in the middle? Yes, I mean, for example, the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, Tony Ionelli,

he was very, very nuanced on it. He said he was okay with some measures to crack down on immigration. Do I think that, quote, unquote, very bad people who have committed very bad crimes, do I think removing them from illegally being here? You know, I think that's okay. But IronEle also said that there really should be a pathway for people who have been in the country for a long time and haven't committed any crimes, a pathway for them to achieve citizenship. There are a lot of good, hardworking people that are, number one, would contribute, but number two, are doing lots of jobs that many people are not lining up to do. And I mean hardworking jobs with a dedication like I've never seen.

and that that would actually solve a lot of problems and also be good for the economy. So we've heard takes from across the spectrum throughout this conversation. But do we have any data on how many people fall into these different camps? Well, I think polls show how divided the country is on this. A New York Times-Cena poll in September found that 51% of people thought Trump's actions on immigration had gone too far. But 47% said they had been just right or not gone far enough. So there is sort of rising concern about the way this policy is being implemented. But there are still plenty of people who agree with it.

Yeah, it's interesting because in some ways, like the imagery, or at least the imagery that the Republican Party has put out about the border of all of these people coming across. If you're living in Pennsylvania, that's almost 2,000 miles away from you. But it probably feels really different when that immigration enforcement actually comes to your community. Absolutely. And, you know, Bethlehem is 30% Hispanic. And from my conversations with people, it became clear that really a lot of the Hispanic people who live in Bethlehem have been there for decades and are really very, very well entrenched in the community and respected members of that community. I kept hearing the word hardworking, skilled workers. Something that I feel like we keep coming back to is this idea of contributing economically

and whether these immigrants have contributed economically been hardworking, as you mentioned. How big of an impact on the economy has Trump's deportation drive had? Well, I think it's increasingly important. And, you know, over the summer we saw a lot of agricultural workers being arrested. and people in the hospitality industry, these are sectors of the economy that have long experienced labor shortages. And you heard farmers,

you heard people who own restaurants complaining about the fact that the policies of the Trump administration were actually undermining their business because they were not going to be able to replace the foreign workers that were now being rounded up and in some cases deported. And there was a really interesting paper

put out earlier this year by researchers from the centrist Brookings Institution and the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. And it predicts that a drop in net migration will, quote, put significant downward pressure on growth in the labor force and employment, unquote. And monthly payroll employment growth could be near zero or negative in the next few years. And in fact, the last non-farm payroll report we got shows there has been very little change in employment since April. So there is a kind of economic argument in all of this as well. And that is something that is potentially quite dangerous for the Republican Party and for the Trump White House. If they pursue these policies too aggressively, they could lead to strains on the economy, which will put off

traditional Republican constituencies. What does all this tell you about the approach that each political party has taken on immigration. And maybe also what approach they should take to appeal to voters in a critical area like Bethlehem. Well, I think the overall impression I had from this was that Bethlehem as a swing city, Pennsylvania as a swing state,

I think it's one of those things where swing voters or independents are really put off by what the Trump administration is doing in terms of immigration. They might have wanted, the new government to exert greater control over the southern border. But I don't think they envisage these kind of policies, the sort of snatching people in workplaces and at courthouses and so on. And I think among sort of real classic swing voters, there is a sort of revulsion from that.

I don't know yet whether it's enough to make them change their minds about the Republican Party and sort of swing them more towards the Democrats. I think it's still a bit early. to tell, but it's generally, it could be one of those issues that does emerge as a sort of important factor in the midterm elections next year if the Democrats really harness that in order to win support and win over those wavering voters. Guy, you mentioned earlier that a lot of people in the community were shocked by this raid. You know, now that it's happened and there's been some time for people to sit with this, where do you think Bethlehem goes from here? Well, it's interesting. There was a very, very robust response in a group of residents created something called the Lehigh Valley Emergency Response Network.

We don't set out thinking that we're going to necessarily prevent every ICE arrest in the Lehigh Valley. I mean, I think that would be unrealistic. And the idea is that they want to, as the local... pastor John Stratton put it to me, they want to be able to sort of monitor ICE actions because ICE is acting in places which it never did before, such as courthouses. We are documenting any human rights violations that we are bearing witness to the violence of ice and the cruelty of ice. And also provide resources to people who are seeing loved ones and relatives and friends get arrested and deported, providing advice to them, maybe some legal

support as well. Guy Chazan covers U.S. politics and the economy for the F.T. Thanks, Guy. Thank you. All right, we're walking up to Liberty High School in Besselham. It's one of the city's two high schools. Recently, my colleague Ian Hodgson and I went back to high school. It's these sort of like beautiful beige bricks. I mean, it's really ornate, like Corinthian columns out front. It was kind of ridiculously nice for a public school building. But inside, in a lot of ways, it looks like a classic American high school.

Hordes of students streaming through the hallways, a kind of cacophony of people talking to their friends, joking around. Being there really reminded me of my time in high school. You're on the precipice of this massive change in your life, becoming an adult and going out into the world. But a lot has also changed since I was a teenager in the early 2010s. The U.S. is more polarized. There's a lot of economic anxiety. And teens are far more plugged into social media than ever before. That's why Ian and I came to Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to get a sense of what it's like growing up in Donald Trump's America.

We spoke to four students in a conference room off the principal's office, and they had a lot to say. I don't know many girls that are particularly right-wing. It's more of less open conversations and more of, like, very, very tense times, I feel. And then all of a sudden, like, my feed was kind of full with more right-leaning things. Post-college, like, finding a job, like, just from what I see on social media a lot, it just seems so difficult. In Pennsylvania, young voters are shifting to the right. 18 to 29-year-olds there had the biggest swing towards U.S. President Donald Trump in the last election. I'm Sonia Hudson, and this is Swamp Notes, the Bethlehem Project, the series where we look at the biggest U.S. political and economic issues through the lens of one city.

Ian Hodgson is here with me now to talk more about our trip. He's a data reporter for the F.T. Hey, Ian. Hi, how's it going? Good. So these four students that we spoke to came from different backgrounds and had a variety of political leanings. But there were a few common threads that we heard from them, which I mentioned earlier. Let's talk first about political polarization and social media because I think we really heard how intertwined they are. Who does that bring to mind for you? One of them who stood out was Brady Carvajal, who's a 17-year-old senior. Hey, how are you? My name's Ian. Brady, nice to meet you. And he gets a lot of his information from conservative podcasts. I actually discovered him through my brother.

So I started probably four or five years back listening to Ben Shapiro. Democrats are going to continue to label the American people racist and sexist and all the rest. And the Matt Walsh Show. This country was founded on the principle that human rights come from their creation. not from the government, and I really connected with them. He also likes Charlie Kirk, who is the founder of Turning Point USA. Here he is with a drag queen during Pride Month, which is goodness gracious coming up. Kirk was shot dead in Utah in September.

Kirk was really an unwrap for a young generation of conservatives and young men in particular. Charlie Kirk was also a really divisive figure politically, and Brady definitely talked about seeing some of that larger political division coming into play in his classrooms, among his classmates, and hurting relationships. The lines have been a little easier to draw now. It's not as more people aren't as moderate. Now more people are choosing sides. There is such a clear difference when you're talking to people in their opinions. You can definitely just tell who started to lean more right, who started to lean more left. And gender is definitely a big thing I notice. And he says things can get really tense when he and his classmates start talking about

politics. Especially in these last three years, when you're trying to talk about especially political issues, it's more of less open conversations and more of like very, very tense times, I feel. How do you feel about that change? It's definitely for the worst. I mean, it's so much harder to have just an open conversation where two parties can bring two ideas and come out with one unified idea. Now it's, I feel it's more like it's either my idea or it's your idea. And there's no other way. It's just been, it's become harder to agree, and that just raises the tension for the worst. So, yeah, there's two really important themes that I think Brady brought up with us that I want to talk about. One of them is social media, and then the other is the political

division among the students, kind of along gender lines. Let's start first with social media. Something that really struck me about talking to these students is that a lot of them were really aware of the ways in which social media was deepening political divisions. Right. And one of the more politically moderate students that we met really shined an interesting light on how this can look in practice. Nick Shankill, I'm a senior and I'm 18. I'm part of the student government. Yeah, sports are the biggest things. I play left tackle in football and I'm going to college to play offensive tackle.

Up until recently, Nick's parents really shaped his political opinions. He told us that his dad is more politically moderate and his mom is more liberal. She's really active in the Bethlehem community. She's definitely impacted the way I view of you the world. But I think as I've gotten older and I've become kind of my own, started to form my own opinions. I think that I've definitely gone from being very left to starting to kind of become more, more centrist, more moderate. I mean, still with the social aspects, still very left. But again, with like some of the fiscal policies and stuff like that of I've started to kind of, lean more to the right and kind of agree with my dad a little bit more on that.

And one of the things that impacted his change in political decisions the most was social media, specifically Twitter or now X. What kind of happens is like I'll scroll and I'll see something interesting. And even if I don't like it or anything, if I just click on it, just the way the algorithm works, more and more stuff like that will kind of pop up on my feed. And it just so happened that I would be scrolling through it and I'd see some right leaning thing and I click on that. And then all of a sudden, like my feed was kind of full with more right.

leaning things. So I think what you can hear Nick saying here is that he's very aware of the exact way in which the algorithm has changed his political views. You know, he's a young man. He is being fed right-wing content. And so you can see how this kind of contributes to this gender divide that we're seeing. And when we asked Nick and the others how they handled that, they definitely talked about things like fact-checking, but I didn't really hear. any desire to move away from these social media sites that they know are creating more polarization. Right. And I mean, like, one of the things, too, that we talked about is like there's no division between, you know, being on your phone, seeking entertainment and then seeking politics.

I mean, it's in the same feed of, you know, you see a cap video followed up by a video explaining how the tariffs are going to lead to more inflation. So these political issues are in some way, sort of ram down the throats of the students who are growing up in this digital landscape. Yeah, and I think that's why it feels overwhelming, like you just can't escape it. Yeah. Let's talk about another aspect of this, which is the political division along gender lines. So that split was really seen in last year's election. Time Siena poll conducted in six battleground states, including Pennsylvania, found that young men, age 18 to 29, preferred Trump over Democratic candidate

Kamala Harris by 13 percentage points, while young women favored Harris over Trump by a 38 percentage point. And that's the largest gap by any age group. Wow, that is a really, really massive gap. Yeah, and another example of this is Paulina Dorman. She's a junior. She's 16 years old. Politically, she says she's pretty liberal, but she said she's really seen this gender divide at her school. I don't know many girls that are particularly right-wing or, would say that they would have, if they had the chance to vote, that they would have voted for

Trump or something like that. And, you know, Palina told us that she is mostly friends with other girls. And so her social group doesn't usually disagree a lot when they talk about politics. A lot of my friends and I have similar views. I guess people tend to stick with the people they agree with. And we found this a lot that students have sort of siloed themselves into social groups where politically they're fairly homogenous. And where political differences do come up, students shy away from those conversations or feel like it's getting tense very quickly.

Ian, something I found so interesting about this topic when we brought it up is that when we asked people why this gender bifurcation is happening, they all kind of said the same thing regardless of where they fell politically. Women are much more focused on things such as abortion rights, which seem to be a very important part of the left. Maybe not disrespect, but more like a sense of women are inferior to men. They really want to feed their ego and they go for shutting the woman out. They believe that women are inferior.

The LGBTQ stuff, certain groups of young teenage boys, they'll see that and laugh about it and joke about it. Because there's a big problem with the left is like sexual identity, trans, gender, stuff like that. And I think women are just more prone to be, More emotional almost maybe. I mean, it illustrates a few trends. I mean, one of them is a Democratic Party that's not been particularly good at speaking to the anxieties of young men. We also talked about the issue of abortion that is very divided along gender lines,

young men leaning towards a more Christian conservative view of being anti-abortion, young women being more pro-choice, being really disturbed by the overturn of Rovers Wade. We also talked about the economic side of this gender divide. One student told us about how everyone in Bethlehem has at least one relative who worked a blue-collar job and seeing immigration as a threat to those, you know, once stable, steady forms of employment. Whereas in Bethlehem, the rising industries are healthcare, education, fields that have been historically predominantly women held, whereas manufacturing, trade, fields that have predominantly male held have been on the decline.

Okay, so abortion is a major dividing issue along gender lines, and there's also kind of a sense that traditionally male-dominated blue-collar fields in Bethlehem are on the decline, and female-dominated industries like nursing are growing. Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about that very subject, how economics plays into the anxieties of young people in a city that's undergone a major economic transformation. And we're back. Young people in Bethlehem aren't just nervous about political dynamics today and the way they're dividing men and women. They're also worried about

what the state of the economy means for their future. So Bethlehem's in an interesting position. It used to be this industrial powerhouse. It's the home of Bethlehem's steel. I mean, the legacy is impossible to miss. Yeah. And when we went to the steel mill itself, I mean, the just sheer scale of it is so overwhelming. And it really got me thinking about how big industrial plants like this used to be a massive part of the U.S. economy. But the connection to the U.S. economy was a little too on the nose when we went there. Is that a bald eagle?

There's a bald eagle flying overhead. This could not get more America, the shuttered steel mill and the bald eagle. As cool as that moment was, like, it's definitely a symbol of like America's past, right? I mean, this closed steel mill and this local economy that's really pivoted to other industries like, you know, tech logistics, especially like healthcare and education. Yeah, and, you know, back in the day, if you were a young person growing up in Bethlehem, you could pursue a job at the steel mill. And, you know, it would be a reliable job and it would be probably a union job as well. But now, a lot of people we talk to express a lot of uncertainty about what was even viable for a career path that would keep them financially stable. One of the people this makes me think of is Giata Watts, one of the students that we talk to at Liberty High.

She's a senior, and as she's kind of preparing to head out into the world, she brought up a lot of different things that she's anxious about. I'm kind of worried for the way that the world is going, what my life's going to look like when I'm in my 20s and how I'm going to be able to navigate that. What kind of things do you worry about? Jobs. I worry about. I worry about the climate. I worry about if the Earth is even going to be like, A factor, I worry about like if the system we have in place now is even going to like continue to stand and if it's going to be done in like the right way. It's just all kind of like scary sometimes because then I don't know, when you interact with things on your feet and everything's just popping up, it's like wow. Yeah, so there's a lot there. I mean, she's talking about the job

market, about climate change, about democratic backsliding. And as you might be able to guess from what she said, Jetta identifies as politically left. And this current administration, has felt really dystopian for her. Yeah, and she talked a lot about watching all of this happen through her social media feeds, which, like we mentioned earlier, has a huge impact on how these students interact with the world. Let's talk a little bit about the job market, which is something that Giata also brought up. I was actually just with a friend last night, and we're just talking about how, like, post-college, like, finding a job. Just from what I see on social media a lot, it just seems so difficult.

There was actually a report from the St. Louis Fed in August that put some numbers behind those fears that Giaata has. It found that recent college grads had a much bigger increase in unemployment since 2019 than non-college educated workers their age, as well as older college grads. Like, it just seems incredibly hard to be able to find something that, like, not only you like, but that will just support you, like, in the way you need. And then, like, it sounds corny, but, like, with AI, like, that's obviously a lot. a big deal, too, as to, like, if you're even going to need people to do things anymore. Giazza told us that she doesn't know what she wants to do for a career yet. She was thinking about maybe biology, maybe marketing, event planning, but she's not totally sure yet. The other thing that Giazza mentioned that I think we should talk about is affordability. I mean, there is

this sense, and there's some data to back this up, that being in the U.S. has just become less and less affordable over the last several decades. I just want to rattle off some numbers really quickly that I pulled together from the Atlanta Fed before we started talking. The median home price in the U.S. right now is about $400,000. And in order for that to be considered affordable, you need to earn over $120,000. And that is significantly more than the median household income in the U.S., which is just $83,000. One thing even on the affordability stats, though, like one of the things that really stood out to me is, according to a Harvard poll, less than half of young people expect to

be economically secure in the future, less than half expect to own a home or even have a family. Wow. That definitely puts a lot of pressure on you when you're 17 years old, like Giata, trying to figure out what you're going to do with your life. I want to tie everything together that we've been talking about political divisions, social media, economics, the job market, higher education. How do you see these issues impacting the politics of young people going forward?

I think we're at a really interesting pivot point. I mean, the sort of economic dislocation of younger adults, you know, at least for young men, led to this swing to the right leading up to the 2024 election. But as Trump's first year, as president has evolved, we're not seeing much more. movement on affordability, on the cost of education, on the things that really were on the minds of the young people that we talked to. And you can see that in the polling data that young people who swung towards Trump, young Republican voters, are now starting to swing back. Yeah, and I think we saw that swing to the left in some ways in the results of the most recent elections in November of this year. You know, Democrats won the governorship in Virginia and in New Jersey. We saw a very

liberal candidate when the mayorship in New York City, his campaign was really boosted by the energy of young people. So we'll see. It's early data and we'll probably get a lot more information in the midterms next year. Yeah. And we'll be looking at what young folks like Polina, like Brady, are thinking about over the next few years as they age up and become a larger and larger share of the electorate. I want my friends to be knowledgeable so that when we are of age to vote, that we're not bringing down Pennsylvania. Like, it's a swing state. We have to take it. We have to be, hold it with importance because it's our decision, ultimately. So I want us to be educated about it. Ian Hodgson is a data reporter for the F.T. Thanks for going to Bethlehem with me.

Oh, thanks for going with me. It was a fun trip. It was. This was Swamp Notes, the Bethlehem Project, the series where we explore the biggest U.S. economic and political issues through the lens of one city. Our show was edited by Mark Filipino, and it was mixed by Breen Turner. I'm your host, Sonia Hudson. The FTs acting co-head of audio is Tofer Forehs. We'll see you again soon for another trip to Bethlehem.