The Left-Wing Unicorn Hunt for the White Male Working-Class Voter › American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson
13–16 minutes
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 AmericanSince 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.
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https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/21/the-left-wing-unicorn-hunt-for-the-white-male-working-class-voter/
