On Populists and Politicians

Are Democrats too concerned with image over ideas? Do blue-collar candidates have any value? It seems almost everyone is trying to draw big lessons from the Platner campaign fallout. Some fair, some foul.

Plus, Bhaskar Sunkara in a wide-ranging interview.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Ben Krauss at Searchlight, a centrist political strategy outfit, argues that populists are too obsessed with class, and that what matters more is perfectly calculating the issues to meet the electorate.

His essay gets some things right but he makes one monster claim that completely misses:

Who knows if Chris Murphy will run for president? If he runs, wins the Democratic nomination, and loses in the general election, it won’t be because he’s a lawyer from Connecticut. It will be because he failed to take on the heterodox set of issues necessary to win over the sort of swing voters who previously supported Trump. His lack of an authentic blue-collar identity will not be a liability or an asset.

He goes on to argue that: “Blue-collar identity politics might sound good to the sort of cosmopolitan folks who pontificate about politics online. It just isn’t sufficient to win over voters who decide elections.”

Of course it isn’t “sufficient” to win elections, who ever claimed it was? That’s a cheap shot. But his broader point here is that class just doesn’t matter. It’s all about the policy mix.

Krauss, cites Dan Osborn, comparing his campaign favorably to the ill-fated Platner. By doing so, he cuts the legs out from under his own argument. Because it’s not that Platner seemed too working-class while Osborn appears less so, nor that Platner came off as too populist, while Osborn seems moderate. It’s the opposite.

It was Platner’s Brahmin upbinging and expensive education that imparted to him the very worldview Krauss criticizes. It’s not by accident that Platner embraced nearly every progressive slogan that whistled by his campaign office. Forget the aesthetics, a lot of Platner’s populism — complete with All Cops Are Bastards bumper stickers —was the populism of the professional class, the social class he was born into. It makes some sense, then, that he appealed to those voters.

Osborn, of course, has no such trouble because he’s never been socially indoctrinated into the world of Brahmin liberalism.

Krauss argues that Osborn’s appeal lies in his “heterodox” views, but this also misses the mark. Osborn’s worldview is consistently populist, which is exactly what puts him out of step with down-the-line professional-class progressives. Populism isn’t just about bashing billionaires. It’s also a reaction against the failures of globalization. That explains Osborn’s positions on tariffs (in favor) and immigration (not so much). While Krauss reads Osborn’s “balance the budget” position as a concession to fiscal conservatives, it’s more honestly read as a demand for popular sovereignty. Osborn is entirely right to criticize the debt state and the cash that flows from taxpayers’ pockets to all sorts of unsavory and undeserving special interests. FDR made the same appeals. As did AMLO, the popular (and populist) former president of Mexico.

Moreover, it’s not so-called “heterodox” views that make Osborn credible — it’s his social position. When he says he’s not beholden to the techno-financial-political complex, voters have every reason to believe him. The point of running blue-collar populists isn’t that they merely look the part, but that they are far more likely to get the issues right for the right reasons.

Here’s another argument about how everyone got Platner wrong because they were dreaming of his beard and baritone voice. This time it’s Dace Potas in USA Today:

Democrats prioritize candidate profiles over policy. “Every cycle, there is a different hot candidate profile that everybody’s trying to be,” Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told The Washington Post in 2025. The piece, headlined “Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms,” detailed progressive strategists’ effort to engineer wins in the coming November elections.

Modeling their approach on John Fetterman’s Senate win in Pennsylvania, strategists at Fight Agency have tried to replicate that formula in other races. Their major win in 2025 was with Zohran Mamdani in New York — less “rugged” than the archetype, but still an “everyman” campaign.

Let’s leave aside the fact that John Fetterman and Zohran Mamdani aren’t comparable politicians on any meaningful level. The main argument here, much like Krauss’s, is that some significant chunk of the Democratic Party is running around recruiting tough guys to run for Congress. This just isn’t happening. The few candidates Potas names as examples of this (Osborn, Brian Poindexter, and Platner) are all outsiders whom establishment Democrats distrust. Plus, all of them were inspired to run as a consequence of their populist convictions, not because they wanted to showcase their tattoos or beards.

Ultimately, Potas makes the same mistake Krauss does when he argues, “Democrats don’t have a candidate problem. They have a substance problem.” Sure. Sounds good. Except the candidates are the very people who make substantive political appeals.

The problem is that liberal candidates who come from elite backgrounds have consistently failed to articulate a political vision that resonates with working-class voters. You can’t make Pete Buttigieg into a populist by handing him a bullhorn any more than Kamala Harris can become one by putting on a Carhartt. The candidates themselves matter, not because they wear flannel or curse, but because working-class candidates organically express a working-class worldview.

On the other side, Nate Cohn in the New York Times gets a lot right in his Platner postmortem. Unlike other mainstream liberals, Cohn recognizes the role populism must play in any successful strategy. Further, he recognizes how difficult it is for establishment insiders to become populists:

What’s telling, though, is that very few mainstream liberals like Mr. Murphy or Gavin Newsom have actually succeeded at seizing this potential middle ground — populist and anti-corporate but not democratic socialist or focused on identity politics — even when they’ve identified it as an opportunity.

The reason varies, but one overarching issue is that mainstream liberals struggle to run as populists or anti-system candidates. Mr. Trump’s brand of populism made it much harder for them: He co-opted the traditional Democratic message on trade, promised not to cut entitlement programs, and put Democrats in the position of defending the establishment. Against the backdrop of Mr. Trump, most mainstream liberals just aren’t populist.

Again, it’s not just a matter of poll-testing messages and rhetoric. Voters don’t like politicians plucked from the Nonprofit-Law Firm-Washington pipeline.

Sarah Jones in New York Magazine has her own diagnosis of the Platner phenomenon:

While the pundits earn their paychecks, they avoid other, more complicated questions. Was Platner a real proletarian or a nepo baby who put on a show? Were his supporters working class? The truth may be that he was both: a Hotchkiss dropout who had experienced some hardship. […] The question about his base is harder to answer without a firm definition of the American working class. As the writer Osita Nwanevu pointed out in a piece for The Guardian, Platner was “down by roughly 15-20 points among voters without college degrees,” and one poll showed him “25 points behind among white men without degrees specifically,” which pokes holes in simple narratives about the oyster farmer and his rise. Still, polling can only tell us so much about the working class and who’s in it. If the category includes anyone without a college degree, a car-dealership titan can be a man of the people.

This is a popular line from many on the left who want a more expansive definition of the working class. The trouble is that it risks missing a growing section of blighted trees by zooming out to see the forest. It’s blue-collar and non-college educated workers, specifically, who are leaving the Democratic Party. What some people call the ‘traditional’ working class. If you don’t like that term, call them ‘a section of the broader working class,’ or whatever, just recognize that it’s the single largest group of working-class voters and it’s drifting away from left-leaning parties all over the world.

That’s the problem that we need to solve.

CWCP Board member Bhaskar Sunkara was interviewed on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast for the New York Times.