It's Still the Class Divide, Stupid: College Grads Are Electing 'Socialists' Over the Wishes of the Working Class
From Graham Platner to Darializa Chevalier to Zohran Mamdani, it's faculty lounge and HR lady politics masquerading as a working-class agenda.
One of the things that’s really surprised me about the continued viability of Graham Platner is that despite his Nazi tattoo, racist and anti-veteran Reddit commentary, his view that women who get raped should take responsibility for it and the accounts from ex-girlfriends that he scared them and left bruises, it feels like it’s women especially who have Platner’s back.
Not infrequently, one catches sight of him standing in front of a group of women gazing up at him adoringly—despite all the heinous things he’s said about women and done to women.
Graham Platner is a “rebuke of HR lady politics”! we’re told by the DSA punditry class who are so down with the youth!
But it turns out, it’s HR ladies who are voting for him—and if he wins, it will be despite the working class voting against him, not because they chose him.
Progressives want you to believe socialism is on the march because working-class people have had enough. They want you to believe they are “fighting the oligarchy!” and they are taking on the billionaires and the “Epstein class” and bringing back an agenda focused on labor. But it’s all nonsense.
You know how I know?
Because it’s rich people who vote for them, and working people voting for their opponents.
This was wildly apparent in the New York elections last week, in which rich, over-credentialed gentrifiers voted out candidates preferred by working-class New Yorkers, as I explained in a piece called “Stop Calling Them ‘Socialists.’ They’re Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates.”
But the latest evidence of progressives and socialists pretending to fight for the little guy while actually winning with the credentialed caste at the expense of the desires of working-class voters comes out of Maine.
Platner is polling ahead of Republican incumber Susan Collins by two points. But he has absolutely cratered with working-class voters.
Susan Collins has a 21 point lead against Platner with working-class voters.
So how is Platner winning?
With college educated voters!
Platner is demolishing Collins with college-educated voters—by 34 points.
51% of working-class white voters say that Platner is “too far to the Left”—while 61% of working-class white voters say that Collins is “not too fair either way.”
Platner is also cleaning Collins’ clock with women, leading her by eight points.
So much for solidarity! College-educated women, those very HR ladies the pundits were delighted had been vanquished, looked at Graham Platner, who shoved and manhandled his ex girlfriend and locked her in a room, according to the New York Times, and thought, “Me, too.”
Platner’s handlers and supporters sold him as a working-class hero, an “oysterman” and veteran with rough edges who has tattoos and wasn’t developed “in a vat.” This, like all their socialist frippery, turned out to be cosplay: The oyster farm is fake, a vanity hobby that makes no money apart from $6,000 Platner’s mom gives him to sell the oysters at her restaurant. His VA loan turned out to be fake; his dad bought him his house for $200,000. He went to a fancy prep school. His farm is on a private island owned by a friend.
This working-class cosplay was just enough to convince college-educated women that he was a real man—though not, it seems, good enough to convince working-class men, who can smell a faker a mile away. As my friend Ryan Girdursky aptly put it, “Graham is what a college educated person thinks a working-class person is supposed to act like and working-class people can see he's a fraud.”
Progressives look at Graham Platner and see a “real man.” These are the struggles of working-class men! They tell themselves.
Meanwhile, real, working-class men just see a scumbag.
This kind of fake class warfare is common in the progressive world. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a Nepo baby and child of privilege, and like the other “socialists” who won in New York, his victory came from transplants—particularly college educated women and Muslim immigrants.
Congressman Ro Khanna, who has vowed to “Fight the Epstein Class” and made chanting against billionaires the cornerstone of his social media commentary, is himself worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
As the Free Beacon reported this morning,
Khanna lives in a $6 million luxury home with a four-story elevator and so much high-end marble that even the home’s two laundry rooms have marble countertops. But he’s moving on up to a nearly $10 million home near the exclusive Virginia private school that his two young children attend. The Khanna kids have large ownership shares in three private golf clubs and a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm focused on distressed debt. Khanna’s wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover—and was so displeased with it that she sued the dealer, alleging that the car was irreparable, records show.
This is the man trying to replace AOC as the standard bearer of the progressive, anti-oligarch Left.
It’s all so fake.
It would be less offensive if, in the name of fighting for a “working-class centered politics,” they focused on policy that working-class voters actually wanted, and managed to secure the votes of voters without a college degree.
But they do neither of these things: They pay lip service here and there to ideas like Medicare for All, but the bulk of their campaigns are about the things that make the college educated feel like heroes: Free Palestine and Abolish ICE.
Neither of these is going to improve the health care of working class Americans, and they know it.
Take this on the interview circuit, Batya. These statistics need to be on every news outlet and podcast. The “do-gooder” (just ask them), over-educated elites think they are helping the working class. In reality, they are dooming them to the hamster wheel of basic survival instead of the ability to excel.
This is so unfair to Ro Khanna, who made his fortune the old-fashioned way: he married it.
His wife is a wealthy heiress, daughter of Monte Ahuja, the founder of the Transtar automotive supply company.
Like a Jane Austen novel except here the lucky groom also tries to run the country.