Democrats’ Midterm Strategy? Pretend to Be Working Class Again

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

The Democratic Party has a lot of problems that have been widely discussed.  

One of the most notorious is, since the 2009 to 2017 presidencies of Barack Obama, and especially under Joe Biden, they have completely lost the so-called white working class.  

People have estimated that in 2024, Kamala Harris only gained about 30% of that demographic. They had put so much emphasis on each particular community.  

Every time a Democratic politician would address a crowd, he’d say, I’m for the LGBTQ plus something community, or, I’m for the Hispanic community. I’m for the Asian community.  

And with the onset of DEI in the post-George Floyd, the white working class felt that they were unwanted or not liked or actually despised. We heard again and again—white privilege, white supremacy, and there was a whole vocabulary of disparagement.

It started with Barack Obama when he wrote off his loss to Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania because people he basically called clingers, mindless automatons who cling to their Bibles and guns, didn’t understand the sophistication of Barack Obama.  

Hillary Clinton went to West Virginia and said she wanted to shut down the coal industry as if all of those white middle-class and working-class coal miners didn’t matter.  

Joe Biden said they should learn coding, get rid of them, ban mining. 

Hillary, remember, called them deplorables and irredeemables. Joe Biden expanded that vocabulary with chumps, dregs, and most infamously, garbage.  

And of course, when any time a Democrat or liberal’s communications were leaked or found their way to the public, they were always anti-white working class.  

The CNN reporter who said he went to a Trump rally and had more teeth than everybody in the crowd, or Peter Strzok, the infamous FBI rogue agent, who said to his paramour, Lisa Page, texted her that he went to Walmart and he could smell them. 

 So they had a problem with them, and they can’t win without that rubric. It might be as—if you count women and men—it could be as much as, of the voting age, 30% to 50% of the electorate. 

So now they think they’ve gotten smart, and they have a new approach. And the new approach is the old approach. They’re going to back off publicly from DEI in all of these primaries, publicly a little bit from open borders.  

But you know what will happen? Kamala Harris was for banning deportation. She was going to ban fracking, but she didn’t say that when she was running.  

Many of the candidates in the last election cycle—the governor of Virginia, the governor of New Jersey—had run as moderates, and then they showed their real selves once they were elected.  

But now the emphasis is on, we’ve got to find white working-class, authentically genuine people. And it’s very hard for them because they are not genuine people themselves, the Democratic Socialist Islamist New Party. 

So now all of a sudden, Pete Buttigieg is wearing a Caterpillar hat, grown a beard, Levi’s, as if he is going to represent the white working class. He’s the most sanctimonious, self-righteous, off-putting Democratic candidate who has zero chance to appeal to the white working class.  

They thought that maybe they could have the evangelical angle, and so they dug up James Talarico, and he is a Christian evangelical minister of sorts.  

And they thought, well, this will get a red state. He’s out of red state Texas. We’ll run him for Senate. He might be the next presidential or vice presidential candidate. Who knows? And of course, they didn’t check his background because the Democratic Party of today, as I said earlier, has a long record of despising traditional values and middle-class America. 

And lo and behold, James Talarico has disparaged, in social media and in speeches, the white working class. He’s called Texans illiberal, gun-toting. He said that Jesus was nonbinary. He said there were six or seven genders. He said all of these things. And he comes across as a Pete Buttigieg at a pulpit. 

They tried it again in Maine. They think they can knock off Susan Collins. Remember what their agenda is. They want to win the House, even if by one vote, because unlike the Republicans, they have mass solidarity.  

And as soon as they get the House in January of 2027, they will impeach Donald Trump. But they can’t do anything to Donald Trump unless they get 60 votes to convict him.  

And so they really, in their delusional mindset, think they can do that, and one of the people they’ve targeted is moderate Susan Collins.  

There couldn’t be a more anti-MAGA Republican official. She’s as moderate as you can be in the Republican Party. She’s in a moderate purple state, and she’s a winning personality.  

Even Donald Trump, who gets very exasperated when she votes against him on key pieces of legislation, has a working relationship, and why not? She’s about as conservative as you can get in Maine, and she is a loyal Republican. 

So they ran an ex-oyster farmer. That’s what we were told. But there are no really oyster farmers in Maine. That term is not even used in Maine. It’s really a nepo-baby, a man who grew up very affluent and went to one of the most, I don’t know, prestigious but extremely expensive prep schools in the nation at Hotchkiss until he was kicked out.  

He admirably served his country in Iraq when he had four tours. But in those tours, he was a disruptive figure. He put a Totenkopf Nazi symbol as a tattoo on his chest.  

He disparaged women on social media. He went on disreputable, predator-like social media communications posts. He rough-handled women. 

And when he was asked about all of this, Graham Platner said that he assured the Democrats on three areas that they could relax and he would be a viable candidate and beat Susan Collins.  

Number one, he said he had no idea that 18 years ago when he put that Totenkopf tattoo on that it had any connection with the 3rd Panzer Division or SS Einsatzgruppen that ran the death camps.  

Two, he said he was never physical—he was kind of a bore with his many girlfriends—but he never physically assaulted them or manhandled them.  

And three, there would be no more revelations. 

Within hours, some of his girlfriends came forward, even though they were manipulated by The New York Times, who didn’t tell their full narratives, but they told enough that that was all a lie, that they knew that he bragged about his Totenkopf. He used the German word for death’s head, which is only used since World War II in the context of the SS.  

Number two, he did manhandle. He grabbed a woman, pushed her in a room, locked her in all night, and he was very abusive.  

And number three, after he had assured people there would be no new revelation, there were these revelations, as aired in The New York Times. 

Graham Platner is no more middle class than Donald Trump is.  

The difference is Donald Trump is authentic. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he wears his blue suit, his red tie, his orange makeup, his comb-over, his black Florsheim shoes, whether it’s 110 degrees or whether it’s 40 degrees, whether he’s in Tulare, California, or whether he’s watching mixed martial arts matches, or whether he’s talking with [Vladimir] Putin or [Jinjing] Xi.  

He is what he is. He doesn’t fake himself and act as if he’s a working-class man who had to get a veteran loan to buy his home when he actually was given a loan by his rich father. 

Everything about Graham Platner is artificial, but it displays this desire to appeal to a class that they despise.  

And I’ll just finish with good old Joe Biden from Scranton. Remember him? In the 2020 primary, Elizabeth Warren was radical, so was Bernie Sanders, so was Cory Booker, so was Pete Buttigieg. They were all going to lose against Donald Trump. They panicked.  

They got them all out by various backdoor mechanisms, the politicos, and then they refashioned Joe Biden into, “He’s good old Joe Biden. You remember him from the 1970s, the working guy from Scranton.” 

That was kind of hard to do because he was out in the public saying that he would ban fracking. He would stop the wall. He was going to open the border. He was 100% behind DEI.  

In fact, he was a waxen effigy that play acted as if he was middle class so that the Obama cadre could come back into power and push through, through the agency of Joe Biden, the most radical progressive agenda we’ve seen since the New Deal. 

Add it all up, there is no way in the world that this elite party of Antifa, BLM, bicoastal elites, billionaires, fake socialists, wealthy people like [Zohran] Mamdani or Hasan Piker can appeal to the working class, especially the white working class.  

So expect more fake middle class people like Graham Platner, James Talarico, and more Joe Bidens. And guess what? They’re all going to crash and burn just as these have because they’re not authentic. 

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