The stealing class has figured out that it’s a working-class election.
You can tell by what they pilfer.
By “stealing class,” I mean the Harris-Walz campaign in particular, and the party of big government in general.
They exist, and flourish, not by creating new wealth and ideas, but by stealing the produce of others.
In Harris’ case, that means shamelessly stealing Donald Trump’s “no taxes on tips” proposal and floating it as if it were her idea, something made less plausible by Kamala’s lifelong history of not having original ideas.
But it’s meant to show that she cares about the working class.
In Walz’s case, what he stole was valor, posing as a combat soldier when he never was, and claiming he retired as a command sergeant major when he didn’t actually do so.
Instead, he abandoned his unit, taking early retirement rather than deploy, an act that caused even his old unit’s chaplain to call him “cowardly.”
That’s a working-class issue because most of our combat soldiers share a working-class background, and Walz was pretending a solidarity with them that he never actually earned.
Well, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and by pretending to care about working-class people, the Democrats are telling us that they think it’s a working-class election.
The press — which decades ago was filled with working-class reporters but is now stocked with elite journalists — is focused on issues like trans rights, abortion, gun control and the like.
And those issues do matter to the college-educated Karens who are the biggest consumers of news media today — but the working class is busy working, or trying to, and has been doing much worse ever since 2020.
Trump’s four years in the White House were the first time the working class made gains since the early 2000s, and while the press and its audience may not care, you can bet that working-class people do.
The working class has also been most affected by various foreign wars and disasters, like Biden’s humiliating skedaddle from Afghanistan. It’s been most affected by the urban riots and crime waves spread by Democrats’ woke policies.
By suddenly starting to take account of working-class issues,even if they have to steal to do so, the Harris-Walz campaign is telling us that they know that.
And they’re not the only ones.
As Ruy Teixeira wrote in these pages not long ago, “Working-class (non-college) voters will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election.”
Teixeira estimated they will comprise about two-thirds of eligible voters in November,and even higher in all the key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Worse yet for the Dems, many of the minority voters they expected would produce their “new Democratic majority” — a term coined by Teixeira in the 1990s before reality set in — are not only unmoved, but are positively repelled, by woke issues like trans rights, abortion, defunding the police and more.
But hey, if Harris takes your kid away from you because you won’t let him or her be surgically mutilated, at least she won’t make you pay taxes on your tips.
The problem for the Democrats is that they haven’t been the party of the working class for a long while.
They’re now the party of billionaires, well-off, college-educated whites, especially unmarried white women, and their poor client groups — though even those clients are getting a bit restive.
It’s the Republicans who are now a multiracial party of the working class.Which is especially a problem for Dems in a working-class election.
It’s not all bad news for the Democrats: They retain the political equivalent of air superiority via their control of the legacy media, which since Kamala was selected have reached new levels of obsequiousness, and of most social media platforms.
It’ll be fun to watch places like Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, which mocked Trump’s no-tax-on-tips proposal as a “lame political stunt” and the like, spin on a dime and praise Kamala’s genius in helping out America’s oppressed waitresses.
I don’t have a great track record on political predictions, and this election — complete with an assassination attempt that the press has done its best to erase from memory — defies all experience.
But the press hype is all about atmospherics and vibes, and while Democrats are hoping for a “vibe” election, there’s a certain vibe when the utility bill arrives, too.
That may stick with voters more than the natterings of pundits.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
