While the headlines suggest gridlock and dysfunction, Cutts offers a more nuanced—and surprisingly hopeful—view: much of the real work is happening out of sight, where relationships, preparation, and bipartisan problem-solving still shape outcomes.

The conversation explores how CEOs are recalibrating their approach to government, why the next political shift is already influencing boardroom strategy, and how emerging policy battles—from AI to crypto—are moving faster than the institutions built to regulate them.

Key Takeaways

• The real action in Washington is off-camera
  Committee work, relationship-building, and early positioning are driving outcomes long before issues reach the headlines.

• Government is now a core business risk
  CEOs are paying closer attention to Washington than ever before, as policy decisions increasingly impact bottom lines in real time.

• 2026 is already shaping strategy today
  Companies are preparing now for a potential shift in House control—and the policy and oversight changes that could follow.

• New policy battles are outpacing the system
  AI and crypto are forcing bipartisan alignment in unexpected ways, even as Congress struggles to keep up with the speed of innovation.

Why This Conversation Matters

This episode pulls back the curtain on how influence really works in Washington today. It’s not just about ideology—it’s about timing, preparation, and understanding where decisions are made before they become public.

For anyone working at the intersection of business, policy, or communications, this conversation is a reminder: if you’re only following the headlines, you’re already behind.

Kathryn spent nearly a decade in government, moving from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the Department of Commerce, where she served as chief of staff for the CHIPS R&D office at NIST. She helped stand up the $50 billion CHIPS for America program — essentially from scratch. Earlier this year she moved to DLA Piper, where she now helps tech companies navigate the government landscape she used to sit inside.

This conversation covers a lot of ground. We talked about the origin story of the Chips and Science Act — passed bipartisan under Biden, now being implemented differently under Trump — and what Kathryn is watching to gauge whether the U.S. is actually getting this right. (She says we won’t know for a decade or two. But she knows exactly what signals to track right now.)

We also got into something I find genuinely fascinating: the role of relationship-building in Washington. Before you can change a policy, before you can land a government contract, before your innovation can make it out of the garage and into a lab — you build the relationships. That’s what Kathryn does every day for her clients, and she explains why it’s the foundation of everything else.

A few things I’m still thinking about from this conversation:

Her point that AI and semiconductors are “inexplicably tied” — but that AI won’t solve the physical-world challenges of building fabs, navigating permitting, or standing up domestic production. That nuance matters a lot right now.

Her career advice: “Wear your honors lightly.” Don’t aim to be the smartest person in the room. Aim to be the one who keeps learning. I’m going to borrow that one.

And her lightning round answer on Washington: “It is both a marathon and a sprint every day.” That about sums it up.

This episode drops today — wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it.

— Lisa

The best conversations I have — whether on The Friday Reporter or The Deciders — tend to happen in the space between what’s being reported and what’s actually going on. This week gave me two of them.

THE FRIDAY REPORTER

Holly Otterbein at Axios is covering a presidential race that most political media hasn’t started paying attention to yet. The 2028 Democratic pre-primary is already underway — candidates are in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina right now — and Holly is one of the only reporters in the field. While she’s there, she’s also watching something subtler: AI and campaigns are already entangled in ways that most coverage has barely touched. When a voter asks a chatbot who to vote for, campaigns want to influence that answer. It’s SEO for LLMs. Nobody’s writing that story yet, either. Holly is.

She also had one of the most clear-eyed takes I’ve heard on Kamala Harris: she’s the most underestimated 2028 candidate in the field, and a lot of DC Democrats are deliberately looking the other way. The early polling among Black Democratic voters tells a different story.

THE DECIDERS

Patrick Dorton joins Brody Mullins and me on The Deciders Tuesday — and he arrived with a story I hadn’t heard before. In the 1990s, Dorton deliberately leaked the contents of a private Senate Democratic caucus meeting to The Washington Post. The purpose: expose senators quietly criticizing President Clinton behind closed doors and protect his boss, Senator Tom Harkin. “The White House certainly was appreciative,” he told us. Dianne Feinstein was not.

Dorton is the Founder and CEO of Rational360, and his career — Clinton White House, chief spokesman for Arthur Andersen during the Enron collapse, two decades of navigating corporate clients through Washington — is a masterclass in how influence actually gets applied. His message for anyone operating in D.C. right now: conservative media is no longer a niche strategy. Those reporters have the cell phone numbers of the president and vice president. If you’re not thinking about that lever, you’re already behind.

Two conversations. Two shows. One thread: the people who get ahead are the ones paying attention to the story before everyone else notices.

🎧 The Friday Reporter with Holly Otterbein → [link]

🎧 The Deciders with Patrick Dorton → [Preview link — drops Tuesday, May 5]

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In this conversation, Holly breaks down the fault lines fracturing the Democratic Party right now: it’s not just progressive versus moderate anymore. It’s generational, regional, ideological, and increasingly shaped by the Israel-Gaza divide. She explains why Kamala Harris is more of a 2028 factor than Washington insiders want to admit, why Gavin Newsom may be the only Democrat who truly understands the attention economy, and why the Maine Senate primary is a perfect case study in everything the party is wrestling with at once.

Holly also goes deep on a story she wants to keep digging into: AI in campaigns. Democrats, she says, are behind — and the race to shape what chatbots say about candidates may be the new search engine optimization. Plus, the quiet pivot among 2028 hopefuls on AI data centers: yesterday’s economic win is becoming today’s political liability.

And on the craft of political journalism itself — how do you stay independent when you’re embedded in the vortex of a campaign? Holly shares the advice that’s stuck with her since she started covering presidential races.

Subscribe to Axios 2028 — Holly’s Sunday newsletter — by searching “Axios 2028,” and follow her on X at @HollyOtterbein.

For more than twenty years, I’ve been attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Every year I come home and tell my husband to remind me how exhausting it is. Every year he does. Every year I go back — because it’s where I get to see my favorite journalists and communications executives in one place, and that still means something to me.

This year I skipped the dinner itself and attended the Substack First Amendment event instead. The room was full of writers and creatives collaborating in real time — until news came through about the incident at the dinner and then the event went into lockdown. We all turned to each other and our phones, waiting to hear that our colleagues were okay. So incredibly grateful that they were.

It was a reminder that we work close to power and close to risk. That hotel has its own history with both.

On The Friday Reporter

Madison Mills, Axios — Episode published April 25

Most of the AI coverage you see is written from one of two zip codes: Silicon Valley or lower Manhattan. Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but the story she keeps finding doesn’t live in either of those places.

It lives in the small-town bank making a loan to a local trucking company. In the construction firm that took on debt during the buildout boom. In the regional lender whose balance sheet looks perfectly ordinary — until you trace the chain of who borrowed from whom, and for what.

Madison came to the AI beat from the Wall Street beat, which means she knows how to follow the money, and she knows the gap between what investors say publicly and what they actually believe. We talked about what finance executives are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk — conversations she describes as “a very scary picture” — and why the risks most people are worried about may be the ones easiest to see. The hidden ones are harder to find. And they’re closer to home.

We also got into the jobs debate, entry-level hiring, and the question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable? The answer matters to a lot more people than the labs themselves.

🎤 Listen to the episode → [link]

Coming Tuesday on The Deciders

Hester Peirce, SEC Commissioner — Episode drops April 29

Here’s a number worth sitting with: only a small percentage of Americans have real access to the kinds of investments where wealth is actually built. Private markets — the funds, the deals, the opportunities that generate the highest returns — have historically been reserved for people who already have money. Everyone else is on the outside of the rope line looking in.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce thinks that’s wrong. And she’s been one of the most persistent voices inside the agency for changing it.

When Brody Mullins and I sat down with Commissioner Peirce for The Deciders, the conversation kept returning to a version of the same question: who gets to participate? She’s been outspoken about the accredited investor rules that keep most Americans out of private markets, arguing that ordinary people — and she’s used the word “resentment” to describe what she hears from retail investors who can’t get in — are smart, thoughtful, and capable of making their own decisions about where to put their money.

“The expectation should be that they will bear the consequences of bad decisions that they make,” she told The Deciders. That accountability argument cuts both ways. If people are going to bear the downside, they deserve a shot at the upside too.

It’s worth listening to this conversation right after the Madison Mills episode of The Friday Reporter. Madison mapped out how ordinary Americans are already quietly exposed to the risks of the AI economy — through their banks, their employers, their communities — without having meaningfully participated in the gains. Commissioner Peirce is trying to change the architecture that creates that imbalance.

The conversation also covers her work on the SEC’s Crypto Taskforce, where digital assets represent one of the clearest opportunities to expand who gets access to what. And she tells a story about her grandfather’s deeply held opinion about watermelon that somehow became her framework for thinking about financial privacy — which turns out to be a good illustration of exactly how she approaches her work: taking something that sounds complicated and regulatory, and finding the human truth inside it.

🎤 The Deciders with Hester Peirce drops Tuesday, April 29 → Preview [link]

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That’s the lens she’s bringing to the AI story. And the picture it reveals is one most of the tech coverage is missing entirely.

We talked about the hidden financial exposure in the AI buildout — the small-town bank loans to truckers and construction companies that don’t look like AI bets on paper, but absolutely are. We got into what Wall Street sources are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk, and why she describes those conversations as “a very scary picture.” And we dug into the trillion-dollar question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable?

We also ended up in a really honest conversation about the jobs debate — why she’s skeptical when public companies attribute layoffs to AI, what’s actually happening with entry-level hiring, and why some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters she’s encountering are the most senior people in the room.

Madison is one of the smartest reporters working this beat. I think you’ll want to listen twice.

Find Madison at Axios — she co-authors the AI Plus newsletter Monday through Thursday — and on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

This was one of those weeks.

On The Friday Reporter, I sat down with Colin Demarest, who writes the Axios Future of Defense newsletter and has been covering the Iran conflict since the first strike. At one point I asked him where the center of information actually lives right now. His answer: most Pentagon inquiries get referred to the White House. Ask the Navy about one of its own ships, he said, and you’ll be told to ask the White House. You can read into that what you like. I’ve been reading into it ever since.

Colin’s beat is the space between the official statement and the operational reality — drone dominance theory meeting a downed F-15E, a defense industrial base with factories but no appropriations to fill them. He doesn’t editorialize. He’s a careful reporter. But the gap he describes is unmistakable.

On Tuesday, The Deciders drops a conversation I’ve been looking forward to for weeks: Rohit Chopra, the CFPB Chair Donald Trump fired, now at Harvard Kennedy School. Chopra spent years inside one of Washington’s most powerful regulatory agencies watching it close — and sometimes fail to close — the distance between the law and its enforcement. Brody Mullins and I asked him the question we ask every guest: what’s the one thing Washington still isn’t thinking about? His answer is worth clearing your Tuesday commute for.

Two conversations. Two institutions — the Pentagon and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The same question running underneath both: what’s the distance between what they’re saying and what’s actually happening?

Some weeks this column writes itself.

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Listen to The Friday Reporter with Colin Demarest:

The Deciders with Rohit Chopra drops Tuesday — subscribe so you don’t miss it: The Deciders

— Lisa

P.S. Colin also writes Axios Future of Defense, out every Wednesday. If you’re not reading it, this week is a good time to start — the Iran conflict coverage is some of the sharpest in the business.

Then Iran shot down an American fighter jet.

Colin Demarest has been covering the future of defense at Axios long enough to know the gap between Pentagon strategy and battlefield reality. As the author of the Future of Defense newsletter, he’s been inside the Iran conflict coverage since the first strike — tracking new weapons systems in their first real-world test, watching war costs climb past $16 billion and rising.

We get into whether drone dominance is actually delivering, what the U.S. dismissal of Ukraine’s anti-drone technology offer tells us about how Washington processes advice from allies who’ve been in the fight, and whether the defense industrial base can sustain a long war.

The future of defense isn’t theoretical anymore.

Part Three of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

That’s not a contract dispute, it’s a new kind of power struggle. And it’s reshaping the entire AI industry.

Maria Curi is the AI+Government reporter at Axios and the author of the newsletter that drives tech policy conversations across Washington. She breaks down how the Defense Department is using procurement as policy — and why the stakes extend far beyond one company’s government contract.

We get into who actually controls AI governance in this administration, what the Pentagon-Anthropic standoff means for every AI lab now doing business with the federal government, and the question Maria says nobody is asking yet — but should be.

It’s Week Two of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

I was gob smacked.

Here I was with someone I’ve known my entire life, watching the same news, asking me if it was really all that serious. The gap between us in that moment has never been that wide. Inside this city, the norms matter because we’ve organized our professional lives around them. In Ocean County, those norms have been gone long before Trump arrived. To her and her family, career politicians are all corrupt and the system is rigged. So, whether someone is “presidential” doesn’t register the same when your baseline assumption is that this is the way it’s always been.

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I’ve been trying to figure out how we got here, and I keep landing in the same place: local media and the absence of it. There was a time when my friend in Ocean County would have been reading the Ocean County Observer, a paper that covered the things that touched her life — the school board, the water quality, the shops closing on Main Street. Local politics felt personal because local information was personal.

The Observer is still there. But it’s owned by Gannett now. And it shows.

It was well-timed, then, that last Friday I published a conversation on the podcast with the executive editor of Axios Local, about exactly this — the news deserts spreading across the country and what communities lose when local journalism disappears. Holly’s argument is that it isn’t just a paper that goes away; it’s accountability, and the shared sense that what happens close to home is worth paying attention to.

I thought about that conversation a lot sitting in my friend’s living room. What fills the space left by local journalism is a national news cycle that never turns off, and consumed long enough, it doesn’t sharpen your political instincts so much as dull them — until the behavior that has people inside the Beltway genuinely rattled just lands differently out there, because it reads as yet another chapter in a story they’ve been watching for years.

We didn’t get here because voters stopped caring. We got here because we stopped giving them something worth caring about close to home. That’s what keeps me up at night — not the next election cycle, but the world we built that made this one feel inevitable.

Holly Moore is helping change that.

As Executive Editor of Axios Local, she’s leading one of the most ambitious efforts in journalism to fill the news deserts spreading across this country — and to remind audiences that what happens at city hall, in their school district and on their block still matters deeply.

We talked about what’s been lost, why it’s so hard to get back and why Holly believes local journalism isn’t just worth saving — it’s worth rebuilding from scratch.

This is a conversation I didn’t want to end.

Axios Owns April. Again. — Episode 1 of 5

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For the second time since the Friday Reporter launched, April belongs to Axios.

This month, five of their brilliant reporters will join me for conversations I’ve genuinely been looking forward to — each one bringing a different lens on the stories shaping Washington and the world right now.

But first, a moment to say something I believe: Axios figured something out before most of us did.

There was a time when more meant better in this business. Longer pieces, longer rundowns, longer everything — as if volume was proof of value. Axios saw around that corner. Their Smart Brevity format isn’t a gimmick. It’s a philosophy. Lead with what matters. Respect your reader’s time. Trust them to ask for more if they want it.

And it’s working. In an era when attention is the scarcest resource any of us have, they’ve built one of the most trusted news platforms in the country.

That’s not an accident. It’s a model.

So I’m proud to hand them April — because introducing my audience to the journalists behind the bylines is exactly what this platform is for.

Five conversations. Five reporters. Five chances to hear how the people covering history are actually thinking about it.

The April of Axios starts tomorrow.

One of the first things the President said was that it was about oil.

Mike Sommers had spent years at the American Petroleum Institute arguing that these conflicts weren’t about oil. So before he talked to a single reporter, he made three phone calls — to his biggest member companies — and asked each of them point blank: did you know about this?

They all said no.

That’s what gave him the credibility to say it publicly.

That moment — and the instinct behind it — is exactly why Brody Mullins and I wanted Mike in the chair for the second episode of The Deciders.

Mike Sommers has run API since 2017. He came up through the Speaker’s Office under John Boehner. He knows how Washington actually operates — not the version of it that gets explained on television, but the version where decisions get made on Saturday mornings and the people who matter are the ones who already know what they’re going to say before they pick up the phone.

We talked about what it means to build an organization that’s influential no matter who’s in charge. About affordability, pipelines, and why cheap natural gas isn’t translating to lower electricity bills. About a multi-million dollar bet on a Taylor Sheridan show that nobody knew was going to be a hit.

And about what John Boehner told him when he walked in ready to resign.

The whole conversation is worth your time.

Watch The Deciders, Episode 2.

This week on The Friday Reporter, I sat down with Judy, founder of Altamont Strategies and the host behind Purple Inspiration, where she highlights women and community leaders who are quietly doing the work that actually changes places, organizations and people’s lives.

Our conversation wasn’t really about politics, and it wasn’t really about business either. It was about leadership — the real kind — the kind that happens where people are trying to make things better with limited resources and a lot of persistence.

Judy has spent more than two decades working across government, public policy, business advocacy and community leadership. She has seen how decisions actually get made, how organizations succeed or fail and how much of leadership really comes down to showing up consistently over time.

One of the things we talked about was how most people misunderstand leadership. They think leadership is loud or visible or tied to a title. But in reality, the most effective leaders are often the ones making sure progress keeps moving forward even when no one is watching.

We also talked about why she started Purple Inspiration — to highlight women and community leaders who don’t always get recognized but are doing meaningful work every single day. It’s a reminder that leadership doesn’t just happen in Washington or in corporate boardrooms. It happens in the smallest corners — all across the country.

There was a moment in our conversation where we talked about whether one person can actually change a community. Judy’s answer was thoughtful and honest — communities don’t change because of one person alone, but they often change because one person decides to start something and keep pushing when others give up.

That idea stuck with me.

In Washington and in public affairs, we spend a lot of time talking about power and influence at the highest levels. But the truth is, a lot of the most meaningful change in this country happens far away from Washington, driven by people who care deeply about where they live and who they serve.

This was a conversation about leadership and the people who make things happen without needing a headline.

I think you’ll enjoy this one.

Listen to my conversation with Judy B. Lloyd here.

But there’s another layer—the people shaping what happens before it ever becomes a headline.

This week on The Friday Reporter, I sat down with Brody Mullins and Dave Tobey to talk about a new show we just launched: The Deciders.

It’s not a news show — It’s about how influence actually works right now—and who’s driving it. Because, the loudest voices aren’t always the ones making decisions.

Most people are still looking in the wrong places — that’s the gap we’re trying to close.

The Deciders is live.

And we’re open for business — reach out.

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The Deciders officially launches today and Episode 1 is live and available for everyone.

If you subscribed over the weekend, you’ve already seen it. But if you’ve been waiting — today’s the day.

Our first guest is Brian Ballard, one of the most connected and consequential lobbyists in Washington. He has a direct line to the president and a client list that spans nearly every major industry in the country. This is one of his only on-camera, in-depth conversations — and what struck me most was how different he is from the reputation that precedes him. More grounded, more humble and more candid than someone in his position has any reason to be.

That’s the show. Every episode, a conversation like this one — with the people who are actually shaping what happens in Washington, behind the headlines.

[ Watch Episode 1 now → ]

If you haven’t subscribed to The Deciders yet, now is a great time. You’ll get every new episode directly in your inbox.

[ Subscribe to The Deciders → ]

Thank you for being part of this from the beginning. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

— Lisa

The longtime Donald Trump friend and fundraiser created the top lobbying firm on K Street by leveraging his relationship with the president into more than $200 million in fees and a client list that includes the biggest companies in America.

Ballard built his empire in the shadows of the city’s influence industry. He’s largely unknown outside the White House and Mar-a-Lago. Most Washington insiders have never spoken to him – or even know what he looks like.

Until now.

In his first in-depth, on-camera interview, Brian Ballard joins the first episode of The Deciders to share insights about Donald Trump, their relationship and the keys to his success.

Episode #1 of The Deciders airs on Tuesday, but Authentically Speaking readers can watch it today by joining our new mailing list!

At the time, the media industry was in the middle of profound change. Newsrooms were shrinking, beats were shifting and the relationship between reporters and the people they cover was evolving quickly. I wanted to create a space where those conversations could happen openly — where journalists could talk about their craft, their challenges and the stories shaping Washington.

What I didn’t know then was how much I would learn in the process.

Over the last five years, hosting the show has given me an opportunity to demonstrate how important relationships are in Washington. Reporters, communicators, lobbyists and advocates all show that in every conversation I have hosted.

What I’ve also learned is that the daily news cycle — while important — isn’t always what people most want to understand. Headlines tell us what happened, but news coverage no longer illustrates how decisions are actually made, or who is shaping the strategy behind the scenes.

That realization is what led to my newest project.

On Tuesday, March 17, I’ll be launching a new show called The Deciders, alongside Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Brody Mullins, with the incredibly talented Dave Tobey as executive producer.

The Deciders is built around a different kind of conversation.

Instead of reacting to the news of the day, we’ll be peeling back the curtain on the people and strategies shaping Washington’s influence economy — the insiders who are rewriting the playbook for effective advocacy in a rapidly changing political and media landscape.

Just as importantly, the show represents a step forward in how I’m thinking about storytelling.

This won’t be a home-studio podcast. Each episode will be a tightly produced, 25–30 minute video conversation — thoughtfully edited and designed to give viewers a clearer understanding of how influence actually works in Washington today.

If The Friday Reporter helped illuminate the world of journalism, The Deciders will explore the world that surrounds it — the strategists, advocates and decision-makers whose work often shapes the stories we eventually read about.

And for those who have followed The Friday Reporter since the beginning, don’t worry — that show isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it will continue to grow and expand.

But sometimes new conversations require new formats.

And sometimes the most interesting stories in Washington aren’t happening at the podium — they’re happening behind the curtain.

That’s where The Deciders comes in.

I can’t wait to share it with you.

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This week, Lisa sits down with Jess Beeson Tocco, a seasoned strategist who helped grow one of the nation’s most successful women-owned lobbying firms before making the bold decision to sell the business and rethink what a modern lobbying practice could look like.

In this conversation, Jess shares why she stepped away from the traditional retainer-driven model that has long defined the lobbying industry. Instead of keeping clients on indefinitely, she’s developing a different approach — helping industries navigate government, secure federal funding and new opportunities, and then sending them on their way once the work is done.

It’s a results-driven model that reflects the evolving nature of lobbying today. While Washington remains central to the work, Jess’s approach serves clients across the country, connecting policy expertise with real economic opportunity for industries and communities far beyond the Beltway.

Lisa and Jess also discuss what it takes to build and sell a successful firm, the importance of women leading in the lobbying profession and how the next generation of public affairs professionals should be thinking about influence in a changing policy landscape.

🎧 Tune in for a thoughtful conversation about building, scaling and reinventing a lobbying firm that serves clients nationwide.

Find us on YouTube —>

He knew the cost of gas. Bread. Eggs.

He was part of a generation that measured stability by essentials. They didn’t talk about the Dow. They talked about what it cost to fill the tank and feed a family. They understood that when those numbers moved, something deeper was shifting.

They didn’t need market reports. They had grocery receipts.

I’ve been thinking about him as Washington, D.C. prepares for the State of the Union this week — the annual reset, the speech that quietly signals how the White House wants the economy framed heading into the political season. Because somewhere along the way, our definition of “the economy” drifted.

Today, when leaders talk about strength, they point to markets, GDP, unemployment, investment. Those numbers matter. They tell a story about growth and momentum.

But they don’t tell the whole story.

There are two economies operating at once.

One is measured in portfolios and asset appreciation.

The other is measured in milk, gas, deli cold cuts and healthcare prices.

One benefits when markets rise, while the other feels squeezed when everyday costs rise — and never fall back.

In Manhattan, where compensation is tied to assets and performance, the macro story feels real. Markets are strong. Bonuses are back. The resilience narrative tracks.

At the Jersey Shore, the conversations are different.

Property taxes. Insurance premiums. Adult children struggling to buy into their home towns.

Home values are up and on paper, families are wealthier. But they don’t feel wealthier.

That gap — between aggregate strength and lived strain — is where the chasm widens.

Populism doesn’t require collapse. It requires a sense that the people talking about the economy aren’t living in the same one you are.

And inside political circles right now, there is a very real debate about language. Whether “affordability” should even anchor the midterm message. Whether leaning into that word risks validating a narrative of economic weakness when the macro indicators suggest resilience. Whether it’s smarter to emphasize growth, investment and strength instead.

From a macro perspective, I understand the instinct. From a kitchen-table perspective, I do not.

Because voters don’t experience the economy that way. They experience it in gallons, cartons, premiums and paychecks.

The State of the Union will likely highlight growth, strength and resilience. And those stories are real. But if the tone for the season sidesteps the everyday math families are doing, the messaging gap won’t close.

It will widen.

The party that wins in November won’t be the one that shouts about growth.

It will be the one that speaks credibly about both economies at once — acknowledging that markets can thrive while households still feel tight.

My grandfather never raised his voice about any of it.

He just paid attention.

He understood that the health of a country could be felt in small, everyday numbers.

I think about that now — how much wisdom lived in that quiet awareness.

And how easy it is, especially from offices that watch the markets all day, to forget to listen to the math happening at the kitchen table.