The last Democratic presidential candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was Bill Clinton.
He needed every one of them in his 1992 and 1996 victories — and still failed to win 50% of the popular vote.
Since then, the Democratic brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election.
Yet this demographic still makes up 40% 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.
And today, working-class voters are being further alienated by the top-down takeover of the Democratic Party by hard-core 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 equally mystifying to the working class.
These 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.
So the Democrats’ unicorn hunt for their lost white working-class male voters is stymied not only by the off-putting democratic socialist agenda but also by the top-down, talk-down elitism of its emissaries.
Whether it’s the prep-schooled prima donna Jasmine Crockett spouting off about “white men,” the lavish-living Zohran Mamdani threatening to go after “whiter neighborhoods,” or multimillionaires Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin on “The View” lecturing America on systemic racism, DEI has become a Democratic IED.
It seems to detonate whenever a privileged “person of color” launches into the accustomed anti-white racial rant without “checking their own privilege” first.
The Democrats have three dilemmas:
White working-class voters without college degrees still comprise nearly 40% of all registered voters; in 2024, they backed President Donald Trump 66% to 34% — so any further Democratic hemorrhaging among Hispanic and black middle-class voters will be fatal.
The mainstream Democratic agenda, tailored to affluent urban voters, alienates the white working class.
The new socialists are most comfortable among wealthy leftists who talk down to the white working class and endlessly pontificate about America’s sins.
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists
Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!
Thanks for signing up!
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.
Democrats produced the unvetted madman Graham Platner, complete with a Nazi tattoo, a violently misogynistic past, antisemitic leanings and a phony working-class oysterman persona.
That didn’t work out well.
Then came James Talarico, Texas’ “next Beto O’Rourke,” the hard left’s “good” evangelical Christian supposedly destined to win a Senate seat by winning over the once-despised churchgoing Southern white voter.
Except Talarico is also inauthentic: His past quotes and posts seem obsessed with justice for gays and trans people being persecuted by the allegedly illiberal, wicked white working class he now courts.
Both followed the roly-poly, hyperactive “working man,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was picked as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee simply because he could change the oil in his pickup and (supposedly) had a shotgun.
Looking ahead to 2028, will the socialists try to recast the upper-middle-class Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a working-class sister at heart?
Ultimately, though, the question is not one of class, but of authenticity.
The left consistently attacks Trump’s “crass” tastes and appearance — his chrysophilia, his love of mixed martial arts and professional wrestling, his 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.
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.
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 that they try in vain to inauthentically emulate.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
