HANSON: Left-wing unicorn hunt for white male working-class voter

Published Jul 25, 2026  •  Last updated 17 minutes ago  •  10 minute read

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Photo by Spencer Platt /Getty Images

See more Toronto Sun on Google — save as a Preferred Source

Article content

The last U.S. 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% of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.

Article content

Article content

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 Joe 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 Zohran 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?”

Article content

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.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

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.

Article content

Article content

The charismatic 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% 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.

Article content

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.

Read More

1. 

   ELDER: Trump war critics discuss everything except the point

2. 

   MCCAUGHEY: Beware of flamboyant candidates with no experience

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.

Article content

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, 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 labour as the privileged child of “settler colonialists” in Uganda. Indeed, although his Indian immigrant community makes up less than 1% of the population, it accounts for 65% of that African nation’s total tax revenue, and the Mamdani family enjoys a getaway estate on Lake Victoria.

Pyjama 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.

Article content

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 pyjama 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% of the nation, set against a supposedly 70% 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.

Article content

Those classified as the victimized DEI 30% were often wealthy, privileged, and drawn from ethnic groups whose per capita incomes exceeded those of whites.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama speaks with students during a visit to Learning Through Play Pre-K in New York City, April 18, 2026. Photo by Angelina Katsanis / Pool / AFP /Getty Images

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 Mamdani talking about going after “whiter neighbourhoods,” 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 colour” launched into the accustomed anti-white racial rant without “checking their own privilege” first.

Article content

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 females 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:

Article content

1. White working-class voters without college degrees still comprise nearly 40% 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 U.S. 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.

Article content

So Democrats produced the unvetted madman, Platner, complete with a Nazi tattoo, a violently misogynistic past, antisemitism, and a phony working-class oysterman persona.

Then came 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 resume, but because he could supposedly change the oil in his pickup and had a shotgun.

Article content

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.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks as United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 22, 2024 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kent Nishimura /Getty Images

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 Harris, 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.

Article content

But now he sports a beard and stops in at working men’s cafes, 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 shovelling 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.

Article content

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 a 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. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.

Article content