---
title: "In 2010, Someone in Las Vegas Asked Me to Run for President. (Watch the Clip!) Here’s My Platform."
canonical: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/11/in-2010-someone-in-las-vegas-asked-me-to-run-for-president-watch-the-clip-heres-my-platform/
updated: 2026-11-04T18:09:55+00:00
---

# In 2010, Someone in Las Vegas Asked Me to Run for President. (Watch the Clip!) Here’s My Platform.

In 2010, I was wrapping up my keynote at iMX, the Interactive Manufacturing Exchange, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I’d already said thank you when someone in the audience told me he had two questions.

“*Would you consider running for president of our country?”*

*“No. I’m a Canadian, so I don’t think I could.”*

Hell of a clip!

[Watch the exchange from Las Vegas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIDoTgnOuL8)

I thought about that clip this morning after the election. Suppose I’d taken the question seriously for another minute. What would I actually do? *(I have absolutely zero interest in elected office of any sort, so don’t even go there.)*

## Ten years later, what actually came back?

As a futurist, I’ve had to very carefully balance and weave and bob and weave through the political minefield that has become the topic of the future in the US, where 90%of my keynotes take place.

And yet today, I feel the need to address things. It’s been ten years since Americans were promised their country would be “*great again*.” Among many others, one of the clearest promises was that factories would come home and the jobs would follow. Let’s tackle just that one: a decade later, it’s worth looking at what actually happened.

- **The jobs didn’t come back on the scale that was promised.** The United States had roughly 12.3 million manufacturing jobs in 2016. In September 2026, it had about 12.7 million. That’s a modest gain over a decade, and it leaves the country millions of jobs below its late-1970s peak. The gain matters to the people who got those jobs. It’s a long way from the broad revival Americans were led to expect. [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics manufacturing payrolls, via FRED](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP)

- **Reshoring was selective.** There was real investment. The Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction series shows a surge in factory building in the early 2020s. But a dollar spent building a factory tells you little about how many people it will employ, where its parts will come from, or whether the suppliers around it are getting stronger. And let’s face it – a lot of the spending has been a result of the AI boom – not manufacturing jobs. A country can build impressive new plants and still fall short of a broad return of production and jobs across its industrial base. [U.S. Census Bureau private manufacturing construction spending, via FRED](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCONS)

- **Brute force global geopolitics doesn’t work.** Political pressure can’t get a trading partner to the table and have them give up everything. (Hello, Canada). An investment takes commitments people can trust for years. Wishful thinking won’t get a factory connected to the grid. Picking fights with research institutions won’t produce better science. And making every cross-border relationship a fresh negotiation makes it harder for companies on both sides to plan. What matters are the basics: honesty, trust, integrity …. reality.

Reinventing an industry like manufacturing takes hard work, not brute force. I’ve spent enough time with people who run factories to know how the conversation goes once you get past the announcement. *Who’s going to train the people? When can the utility connect the new line? Can the supplier across the border commit to a price and a delivery date? How do we implement with leading edge robotics to minimize our cost?*

I’ve long married future trends to the need for innovation. And that has always meant asking ourselves the hard question on how we do the hard work to achieve the hard things. That’s what opportunity is – we DO have better ways to make things, better tools to run our factories and better ways to train our workforce.

So what would I do? I’d start here:

- **Make it possible to retrain while earning a living.** I’d make paid apprenticeships and mid-career training a central part of economic policy. Have employers, unions and community colleges build programmes around the work people will actually do. Judge them by whether people get hired, move into better jobs or earn more.

- **Get leading technology into the hands of more businesses.** I’d help smaller manufacturers and suppliers test robotics, machine vision, advanced materials and other new production methods before committing scarce capital. Shared testing facilities and technical expertise would give more firms a shot at winning the next generation of contracts.

- **Build the infrastructure that lets industries grow.** I’d treat reliable electricity, transmission, water, broadband and freight capacity as part of the same economic strategy. When we announce a factory, we should already know who can connect it to the grid, how its goods will move and when that infrastructure will be ready.

- **Put R&D back at the centre of economic policy.** I’d give universities and labs stable, multi-year support for basic research and build a better path from discovery to use. That means pilot plants for new manufacturing methods, clinical trials for promising treatments and a way to scale what proves itself.

- **Put scientific evidence back at the centre of public decisions.** I’d protect independent review, make the evidence behind decisions public and change course when better evidence comes in. That applies to public health, energy, agriculture and industrial policy. If a result is inconvenient, I’d still want to see it.

- **Build critical capacity at home and make it easier to work with allies.** I’d identify which medicines, components and materials the country needs to be able to produce domestically. For the rest, I’d work with reliable partners on common standards, predictable trade rules and backup sources we’ve actually tested. Canada and Mexico are natural places to start.

- **Invest where the industries are going.** In automotive, that means software, power electronics and the suppliers that can make and service the next generation of vehicles. In agriculture, it means using biology, data and automation to get more from scarce water and labour. In healthcare, it means getting proven advances from the lab to patients. The test for public investment is whether it builds capabilities the industry will need five or ten years from now.

- **Measure what actually gets built.** I’d report how many plants are producing, how many workers moved into better jobs, how long grid connections take and how many smaller suppliers won new business. That gives us a way to see what’s working, expand it and stop paying for things that keep producing the same results.

If I could go back to that room at the Bellagio, I’d give the same answer to the first question. I’d just take a little longer to explain what I’d do.

I’d start with the things people have to be able to count on. A worker needs to know they can learn a new trade and still pay the bills. A manufacturer needs to know when the power will be there and whether a supplier can deliver. A scientist needs time to find out if an idea holds up and the freedom to say so when it doesn’t.

None of that makes for a particularly dramatic announcement. It’s the work that makes the announcement worth something.

Ten years from now, I’d want to be able to go back to a town that was promised a manufacturing revival and ask a few simple questions. What are you making here today? Who did you train to make it? And what can you build now that you couldn’t build ten years ago?

I’d rather hear the answers from the people on the factory floor.