Democrats need to be extremely careful not to slip into a mode of condescending mockery of white working class culture as a whole.
Democrats have without question had an incredible 10 days. Since President Biden finally dropped out of the race to make way for Vice President Kamala Harris, the party has unified around their new nominee swifty and enthusiastically. Fundraising is through the roof, the polls have tightened, and in Harris, the party may have inadvertently landed on precisely the kind of happy warrior that is the perfect contrast to former President Trump’s relentlessly dour and apocalyptic vision of America.
It’s about as thorough a slate-wiping as we’ve seen in politics, and if nothing else, it has rank-and-file Democrats who had grown pessimistic about Biden’s prospects feeling like they at least have a chance in November.
But I’m a little worried that the Left has decided that its new «These people are weird» angle is a strategic masterstroke. It’s a line of attack that has been deployed most prominently by veep-hopeful-of-the-moment Tim Walz, the popular governor of Minnesota, and his cable news appearances have gotten the viral treatment as a consequence. The Harris campaign has also depicted both Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), as weird. And while it might be effective to target specific MAGA-aligned candidates with a charge of weirdness, Democrats need to be extremely careful not to slip into a mode of condescending mockery of white working class culture as a whole.
Democrats should have learned the hard way in 2016 that things can actually get consequentially worse with groups of voters that you are already losing decisively. In 2012, there was a steep and worrisome drop in President Obama’s support with non-college-educated white voters that the party brushed aside in the glow of victory. That overconfidence led to perhaps the most politically damaging remark of the past decade, which was Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ fiasco from September 2016, something that a lot of people on the Left defended at the time as a perfectly reasonable appraisal of the average MAGA voter.
