by Victor Davis Hanson
Democrats can't win back the white working class with staged populism while embracing the policies and elites that drove those voters away.
The last Democratic candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was Bill Clinton. He needed every one of those voters in his 1992 and 1996 races. Yet he still failed to win 50 percent of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.
Hunting for the Left-Wing Blue-Collar American
Since then, the Democratic brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election. Yet this demographic still makes up 40 percent of the electorate and registers and votes at much higher rates than non-white groups.
Apparently, during the Biden-era influx of 10 million illegal aliens, Democrats really believed their own slogans about an “Emerging Democratic Majority” and how “Demography is destiny.” They therefore confidently abandoned most efforts to recruit white working-class voters.
In 2017, the then-neocon—and now leftist Mamdani supporter—Bill Kristol (who has advocated abolishing ICE altogether) spoke of the need to open the borders to replace the “lazy” American worker: “Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?”
Kristol then characterized this apparently dispensable group as “decadent, lazy, spoiled.”
And yet, until the novelty of Barack Obama’s candidacy and the demographic overconfidence it inspired, Democrats regularly lamented that, aside from the moderate Bill Clinton interlude, their steady leftward turn was becoming both irreversible and electorally costly.
Indeed, Obama aside, conventional Democratic wisdom apparently held that a presidential nominee, regardless of his politics, should have a Southern accent to project authenticity and appeal to working-class whites. Thus, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all won the popular vote.
By contrast, Northern liberals, who lacked Obama’s singular advantage of being the first black president, only confirmed that Democrats had lost the support of working-class whites. Witness the defeats of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and even Kamala Harris.
The charismatic Barack Obama, as the first black president, and the wax-museum blue-collar construct of “good old Joe Biden from Scranton” are merely the exceptions that prove the rule.
Toxic Agendas
These trends have only accelerated with the top-down takeover of the Democratic Party by hardcore leftists, socialists, and even the occasional communist.
Their agendas are boutique and have little appeal outside blue-city and blue-state echo chambers.
In the proverbial real world, voters have little patience with redefining what a woman is, biological men showering with teen girls, or males masquerading as female athletes stealing girls’ medals. Open borders, mass amnesties, defunding ICE and the police, and romanticizing illegal aliens are likewise 30–70 losing issues.
Working people do not understand the banning of natural gas stoves or the subsidizing of wind and solar power while phasing out fossil fuels. Nor do they like the idea of losers suddenly wishing to change the system through 70 percent mail-in voting, no-ID voting, packing the court, destroying the Electoral College, and ending the filibuster—much less socialist talk of abolishing the Senate and the presidency.
No-cash bail, revolving-door arrests and releases, early prison releases, abortion on demand until the moment of birth, and climate-change fanaticism are equally mystifying to the working class.
Democrat Oligarchs, Millionaires, and Billionaires
Working-class voters are not stupid, as left-wing elites assume. They know that the Left, for all its bombast about oligarchs, millionaires, and billionaires, is the party of precisely those groups—big-money interests from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the legal profession, the media, and Wall Street.
Lavish giving to the left has been exemplified by MacKenzie Scott, Jeffrey Epstein, Sam Bankman-Fried, Melinda Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Neville Roy Singham, and, of course, George Soros in his many manifestations. It is no accident that none of these left-wing billionaires made their fortunes by building tangible products but rather through divorce settlements, financial speculation, or social media.
The rise of the new socialists has only added another layer of hypocrisy to the Left’s preexisting elitism and dependence on big money, creating what Andrew Stiles has characterized as “Trust-Fund Socialism.”
What the new hard-left redistributionists Ro Khanna, Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and Graham Platner share are privileged upbringings, subsidized lifestyles, and prolonged adolescence sustained by parental support—all of which make their supposedly populist appeals to “fairness” ring hollow.
When Mamdani talks of “calloused hands,” we know he knows little about physical labor as the privileged child of “settler colonialists” in Uganda. Indeed, although his Indian immigrant community makes up less than 1 percent of the population, it accounts for 65 percent of that African nation’s total tax revenue, and the Mamdani family enjoys a getaway estate on Lake Victoria.
Pajama Boys and DEI
The new socialists do not employ any volatile, cranky Southern populist advisors like James Carville or seasoned campaign strategists like Mark Penn or Doug Schoen, who sought to win over the working class.
Instead, the new Democratic socialists seem to gravitate to nepo-baby handlers and silver-spoon nerds who oddly seem to speak through their noses as would-be kingmakers—as the recent clips of the trust-funded pajama boys Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff attest.
But the Democrats’ unicorn hunt for the lost—and now almost mythical—white working-class male voter is stymied not only by the off-putting Democratic socialist agenda but also by the top-down, talk-down elitism of its emissaries.
DEI plays a considerable role as well.
The Obama administration’s creation of a new “oppressed” class comprising roughly 30 percent of the nation, set against a supposedly 70-percent white “oppressor” class, infuriated the white working class.
Suddenly, the old black-white racial binary of affirmative action disappeared, along with the idea of helping statistically poorer blacks. It was replaced by a new, much broader category of “non-white,” which had nothing to do with class.
Those classified as the victimized DEI 30 percent were often wealthy, privileged, and drawn from ethnic groups whose per capita incomes exceeded those of whites.
Whiteness on the Brain
Indeed, to normal people, the four-mansion-owning, private-jet-flying Obamas dropping in to lecture Americans about “equity” and “fairness,” or to complain about “raising the bar,” seemed absurd. It reaffirmed Obama’s infamous “clingers” remark. That slur foreshadowed a cascade of Democratic insults aimed at white working-class Trump voters, who were variously branded as irredeemables, deplorables, dregs, chumps, semi-fascists, and garbage.
Whether it was the prep-schooled prima donna Jasmine Crockett spouting off about “white men,” the lavishly living Zohran Mamdani talking about going after “whiter neighborhoods,” or the multimillionaires Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin on The View lecturing America on systemic racism, DEI became a Democratic IED. It seemed to detonate whenever a privileged “person of color” launched into the accustomed anti-white racial rant without “checking their own privilege” first.
The new batch of socialist candidates only confirms how deeply embedded this racially fueled hostility toward the white working class has become within the Democratic Party.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, the New York congressional nominee, blasted white women as “ugly colonizer women.”
Aber Kawas, a New York State Senate candidate, blamed 9/11 on “capitalism and racism and white supremacy.”
Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, shortly before the George Floyd riots, declared, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]. But we spread it wherever we go.”
Melat Kiros warned that “we were never really going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to without reparations.”
So spoke the Colorado Democrat congressional candidate and Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, who ascended into elite circles as a corporate lawyer and now as a perpetual PhD gadfly.
Working-Class Cutouts
So here are the Democrats’ dilemmas:
- White working-class voters without college degrees still comprise nearly 40 percent of all registered voters. In 2024, they backed Trump by a 66–34 margin. That reality means that any further Democratic hemorrhaging among Hispanic and black middle-class voters will be fatal—as it was in 2024.
- The mainstream Democratic agenda alienates the white working class because it is tailored to affluent urban voters, with its emphasis on climate change, trans issues, illegal immigration, radically expansive abortion rights, anti-military sentiment, DEI, and defunding law enforcement.
- The new socialists are most comfortable among wealthy leftist leaders who wish to take over the Democratic Party, talk down to the white working class, and pontificate about how awful the United States is.
So, since Democrats need the white working class to regain power, yet both loathe and mock it, what is the radical Left to do?
Presto: invent a white working-class leftist.
So Democrats produced the unvetted madman, Graham Platner, complete with a Nazi tattoo, a violently misogynistic past, antisemitism, and a phony working-class oysterman persona.
Then came James Talarico, the “next Beto O’Rourke,” supposedly destined to win a Texas Senate seat. The hard Left’s “good” evangelical Christian was likewise expected to win over the once-despised churchgoing Southern white voter.
Except Talarico is also inauthentic. His past quotes and social media posts portray a curiosity whose earlier record is apparently off-limits and who seems obsessed with justice for gays and trans people—but from whom?
Of course—from the allegedly illiberal, wicked white working class he now courts.
And does anyone remember the roly-poly, hyperactive “working man,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (who just pardoned a serial child rapist)? He was picked as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee not because he empowered Somali welfare fraud, disparaged the white working class, or embellished his résumé, but because he could supposedly change the oil in his pickup and had a shotgun.
In 2024, we heard ad nauseam the efforts of his running mate, Kamala Harris—the privileged child of two PhDs, former companion of political fixer Willie Brown, and longtime Brentwood resident—to portray herself as “middle-class.”
We were told the unverifiable tale that she had worked at McDonald’s (asking where or when was taboo) and owned a Glock semi-automatic pistol (when and where she bought it remained a mystery). The Berkeleyite was soon reborn as a longtime resident of the nearby but decidedly less upper-middle-class Oakland.
Looking ahead to 2028, will the socialists try to recast the upper-middle-class professional Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a working-class sister to the white working class? Or reboot Kamala, this time perhaps with a Smith & Wesson revolver and a previous stint at Wendy’s?
There are even fewer plausible candidates for the Great Leftist Working-Class Hope. Pete Buttigieg—the homosexual former South Bend, Indiana, mayor, ex-Wall Street consultant, and failed presidential candidate—came across in the 2020 primaries and later as transportation secretary in the Biden administration as arrogant, sanctimonious, self-referential, and contrived.
But now he sports a beard and stops in at workingmen’s cafés, achieving precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.
Then there is Gavin Newsom, the nepo-baby populist, with his $9 million estate, boutique businesses, and lifelong subsidies from oil heir Gordon Getty.
Without a hair out of place, wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch vest while shoveling cinders after the latest trademark California wildfire, even he is trying to convince voters in Akron and Grand Rapids that Gavin is one with the working man as he declares capitalism a failure.
It’s the Message, Not the Medium
The question is not ultimately one of class, but of authenticity.
Whatever the Left may say about Trump, it consistently attacks his “crass” tastes and appearance—his chrysophilia, love of mixed martial arts and professional wrestling, comb-over, orange complexion, and Queens accent—but not the authenticity of any of those preferences. Trump’s takeout meals from McDonald’s are not staged but a long-standing habit.
Billionaire Trump wears his customary blue suit, red tie, and wingtips in every setting, on every occasion, and in every kind of weather. He does not perch on straw bales wearing a John Deere cap, affect a regional accent à la Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or don blue jeans and work boots to “bond” with farmers. He is as out of place walking an assembly line as he is genuinely appealing to those who work there.
Why? His agenda is tailored to working-class tastes. He doesn’t care about race. In our 2026 America, that opposition to tribalism takes the form of refusing to gratuitously pander to the DEI industry.
The final paradox?
The Left needs to win a lot more white working-class Trump voters. Yet in their astroturf efforts, they ridicule Trump for his very tastes and appeal, which they try in vain to inauthentically emulate.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/21/the-left-wing-unicorn-hunt-for-the-white-male-working-class-voter/
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