LoveKimWexler
Active Member
- May 2, 2026
- 140
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It is mainly because of the party's near complete abandonment of the working class combined with whose causes it has taken up instead. Los Angeles Times has a decent article about the working class, but that article was not the tipping point for me.
The Times does not ask the question of how the Democrats can win back the working class, but rather reports that there is a "cottage industry" based on asking that question. According to them:
The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.
Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”
Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates — tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders — whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.
Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.
“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”
How does he define the working class? “Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.”
That is not the definition of working class. Many people have need to "make their money" through government benefits. But such a lifestyle does not make them part of the working class, just because they do not have large stock portfolios. To state what should be blindingly obvious, being in the working class requires working.
Tattoos do not impress me; they are long since not a badge of the working class. Nor does a former job that required manual labor. Many Congressmen and billionaires brag that they started out at McDonalds or other entry-level job. But as teenagers saving for a car by working after school, they had little in common with a parent trying to raise a family on minimum wage that barely covers daycare costs.
I don't care if your dad was Richie Rich or Caspar, I care about the policies you enact when you're in power that benefit the American worker. That's how you reclaim that identity, not just by announcing that you want to reclaim it.
The Times does not ask the question of how the Democrats can win back the working class, but rather reports that there is a "cottage industry" based on asking that question. According to them:
The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.
Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”
Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates — tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders — whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.
Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.
“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”
How does he define the working class? “Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.”
That is not the definition of working class. Many people have need to "make their money" through government benefits. But such a lifestyle does not make them part of the working class, just because they do not have large stock portfolios. To state what should be blindingly obvious, being in the working class requires working.
Tattoos do not impress me; they are long since not a badge of the working class. Nor does a former job that required manual labor. Many Congressmen and billionaires brag that they started out at McDonalds or other entry-level job. But as teenagers saving for a car by working after school, they had little in common with a parent trying to raise a family on minimum wage that barely covers daycare costs.
I don't care if your dad was Richie Rich or Caspar, I care about the policies you enact when you're in power that benefit the American worker. That's how you reclaim that identity, not just by announcing that you want to reclaim it.
