DSA Should Drop The Blue-Collar Cosplay That Working Voters Reject
Classic Labor Day imagery shows men wearing hard hats and tough women in uniforms. These are Americans who did not build their muscles at a wellness club.
By contrast, actual photos of the Democratic Socialists of America show seas of white faces belonging to college graduates. The only work most of them have done with their hands is typing. But the DSA is run by leaders who pretend otherwise, pushing forward candidates who play-act as tradespeople.
Their costume party doesn't seem to fool actual blue-collar workers. In Democratic primaries, DSA candidates routinely trail behind traditional Democrats among this voting group — and by a lot.
These fake working folk are so transparently phony, you wonder why even the left-wingers buy into it. The best explanations are they like the show, are young and lonely, and see radical politics as a career path to being an influencer.
This month's proletarian-in-drag is Gustavo Gordillo, chairman of New York's DSA chapter. Before he was outed as privileged, Gordillo described himself as a child of struggling immigrants from Peru and as an electrician. It so happens that his father founded an engineering and consulting firm and owns two multimillion-dollar homes in Florida.
Gordillo's parents bought their boy a Brooklyn townhouse now worth $1.4 million through a limited liability corporation. During a gut renovation, Gordillo lived in a rental apartment where he failed to pay rent. His landlord tried to evict him.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani nevertheless chose Gordillo as The Right Stuff to explain his plan for city-owned grocery stores to the public. In a local TV interview, Gordillo rejected the bodegas' complaints that their city-run rivals, unlike them, would be paying no rent or property taxes — and that taxpayers would capitalize them to the tune of $70 million and also subsidize their prices.
Asked on a news show if he thought that was fair to the bodega owners, Gordillo responded that if they couldn't compete with publicly-owned stores then "they shouldn't be in business."
By the way, Gordillo was never a licensed electrician, but you guessed that. He did, however, graduate from Yale with an art degree.
The director of Mamdani's Office to Protect Tenants is the inexplicable Cea Weaver. She famously described "homeownership" as "a weapon of white supremacy." It was subsequently revealed that Weaver's mother lived in a $1.5-million home in Nashville, where the median single-family house is valued at under $500,000.
As implied earlier, real blue-collar voters haven't been taken in by these performances. In Michigan, the radical left candidate Abdul El-Sayed barely scraped a win in the Democratic Senate primary. Michigan doesn't break down the primary vote by education, but a Detroit News poll taken before showed Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens ahead of El-Sayed among the non-college-educated by 22 points.
In Maine, Graham Platner, the preppie who claimed to be an oysterman, won the Democratic primary to challenge Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins with DSA support. But confronted with an abuse-of-women charge too far, he had to drop out.
Which is just as well. Polls had Platner trailing Collins by 21 points among voters without a four-year college degree. His Democratic replacement, Troy Jackson, polls a bit better among this group but not well at all. A NYT/Siena poll showed Collins leading Jackson by 18 points among voters without a college degree.
Wonder what the real oyster farmers are thinking.
The left ought to stop hating on Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. He won a purple-state seat with 46 percent of the non-college vote, a far higher number than Democrats normally get. Fetterman is one reason Democrats might win a Senate majority in the midterms. Not that the fringe cares.
Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.
