Bernie’s Working-Class Fairy Tale Has a Big Blindspot

The progressive folk hero's mantra has always been: "Fix the economy, and magically racism goes away!" Except it doesn’t, and Black voters know better.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaigns at the University of Michigan in 2020. | Andrew Roth

A few weeks ago, I watched Bernie Sanders sit across from Dana Bash and, against my better judgment, let the volume stay on. I expected the usual sermon about millionaires and billionaires — you know, the one we’ve all memorized by now, where he hunches over the podium like a disappointed rabbi yelling about yachts.

Instead, Bernie decided to rewrite the Kamala Harris campaign from scratch. According to him, Harris lost in 2024 because her campaign was vague, donor-driven, and disconnected from the working class. I damn near spilled my Sprite. Vague? Donor-driven? Was Bernie watching the same Kamala Harris I watched in those 107 days? Because the Harris I saw said “working class” so often I started checking her podium for a swear jar.

Now, right after I watched that interview, I jumped on social media and told folks an article about it was coming soon. Then days went by, weeks went by, I published other pieces, and suddenly my inbox turned into a customer service line: “Hey, when’s that Bernie piece dropping?” “What’s it gonna say?” People were acting like I owed them a mixtape. The truth is, I had to marinate on it. Bernie was talking a lot of noise, and if you follow me you already know how I feel about Kamala Harris. I didn’t want to bang out something sloppy and emotional. I needed to gather myself, let the heat cool, and make sure I wasn’t writing an angry Yelp review of Bernie Sanders’s political career.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Bernie Sanders does not know how to talk to Black people. That critique isn’t new; it’s been tattooed on his forehead since 2015, when Black Lives Matter activists confronted him and he responded like someone had unplugged his teleprompter. Instead of engaging on race, he pivoted — again — to his greatest hit: Wall Street greed. Writers called it out at the time, noting that Bernie treated racism like an economic side effect, the way some people treat a cough as a side effect of the flu. Fix the economy, and magically racism goes away! Except it doesn’t, and Black voters knew better. They knew in 2016 when he got obliterated in South Carolina. They knew in 2020 when his “revolution” couldn’t get past Super Tuesday. And now, in 2025, he’s still acting like Harris lost because she didn’t chant “working families” with enough conviction.

But here’s the kicker: Bernie doesn’t know how to talk to poor white people either. Or, let me clarify — he knows how to talk at them in abstractions. “Working class this, working class that.” He’ll pound the table until the table files a workers’ comp claim. What he won’t do is name poor whites directly. He hides behind euphemisms because saying poor white men forces you to grapple with America’s racial demons instead of pretending billionaires are the only villains in the story. And Harris’ campaign exposed that blind spot. She didn’t have a working-class problem. She had a poor whites problem, specifically with poor white men who didn’t want anything to do with her. That’s the reality Bernie won’t admit because it punctures his fantasy that all those coal country voters are just waiting for a Vermont socialist to set them free.

And in a truly pathetic move, Harris had to wage that campaign without the support of the Teamsters. Union President Sean O’Brien strutted around like he was making some bold statement, but what he really did was hand Donald Trump and the GOP the talking point of the century. For decades, Democrats bent over backwards to save the auto industry, to bail Teamsters’ pensions, to keep paychecks coming. And when it came time to return the favor, the union suddenly discovered the joys of playing Switzerland. It was cowardice dressed up as strategy, and it showed exactly what Harris was working against: a supposedly pro-worker union more concerned with protecting its political leverage than protecting the country from Trump. If you ever wanted a case study in how Democrats get undercut not just by Republicans but by their own supposed allies, look no further than O’Brien and the union that decided neutrality was more important than democracy.

The numbers spell it out. Harris actually won poor voters overall. Among people making less than $30,000 a year, she edged Trump, 50 to 46, according to exit polls from the 2024 election. She crushed it with poor Black voters. She carried poor Latinos. She even made some surprising inroads in Appalachia, like eastern Kentucky, where voters had finally gotten tired of being conned by Republicans. That was supposed to be Bernie’s sweet spot — the salt-of-the-earth laborers who hate billionaires — but it was Harris who actually gave them something to work with. And still, poor whites as a group went for Trump. White men without college degrees voted 69 to 29 for him. White women without degrees, 63 to 35. Those numbers aren’t a working-class problem. Those numbers are a poor-white problem. And they’re the ones Bernie keeps sweeping under the rug.

And it wasn’t because Harris was “vague.” She rolled out detailed plans on wages, childcare, housing, healthcare — so many that PBS had to publish a catalog just to keep track. She didn’t just mention the working class; she practically set up camp on their front porch. If you were playing a drinking game where you took a shot every time she said “working class,” you’d be dead by day three. But poor whites — especially poor white men — didn’t care. They wanted Trump. And that’s not a messaging failure. That’s a cultural and racial loyalty problem.

Harris didn’t have a working-class problem. She had a poor whites problem, specifically with poor white men who didn’t want anything to do with her. That’s the reality Bernie won’t admit because it punctures his fantasy that all those coal country voters are just waiting for a Vermont socialist to set them free.

Bernie, of course, pretends not to see this. For him, the “working class” is a kind of magical incantation. Say it enough times, and voters of every stripe will unite in proletarian harmony. Except in America, “working class” is code for “white.” Everyone knows it. When pundits say “working class,” they mean white people without degrees. When they say “soccer moms,” they mean middle-class white women. It’s political Mad Libs, and Bernie plays right along. By hiding behind those euphemisms, he avoids asking the only question that matters: why do poor whites keep voting against policies that would make them richer, healthier, and safer?

Lyndon Johnson answered it sixty years ago, and it hasn’t aged a day: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” That’s not just folksy wisdom — it’s the operating manual of American politics. Poor whites aren’t necessarily voting against their interests. They’re voting for what they see as their true interests: maintaining racial hierarchy, holding onto Christian nationalism, controlling women’s bodies, keeping the police state untouched. From their point of view, that’s rational. It’s not irrationality; it’s rationality with a Confederate flag bumper sticker.

So when pundits throw up their hands and ask why poor folks “vote against their interests,” I always go back to that LBJ quote. Then I reframe the question: Whose definition of interest are we using? If you define interest as higher wages and healthcare, sure, they’re voting against it. But if you define it as preserving dominance, then they’re voting exactly the way they want to. That’s the psychological firewall progressives like Sanders never want to acknowledge, because it ruins their favorite bedtime story about class solidarity fixing everything.

And that’s why Bernie’s critique of Harris is so offensive. She did everything he said Democrats should do. She made the economic case. She named the working class constantly. She had the policies, the messaging, the receipts. And she still got torched by poor white men. That fact alone nukes his whole argument. If “working class” rhetoric was the magic bullet, Harris would be in the Oval Office right now instead of Donald Trump.

Democrats can’t win these voters back with class talk alone. They have to go into poor white communities and tell the truth: your poverty isn’t caused by immigrants, or Black neighbors, or trans kids. It’s caused by billionaires who pick your pocket while telling you to blame everyone else. And minorities doing better doesn’t take anything away from you. Somebody has to say that out loud, in those neighborhoods, without flinching. But Bernie won’t, because it requires putting race and class in the same sentence instead of pretending one cancels out the other.

Republicans, meanwhile, have weaponized the opposite approach. They show up with scapegoats, fairy tales, and a steady diet of cruelty packaged as protection. They tell poor whites their enemies are immigrants, women, and kids in drag shows. They tell them their cultural dominance is under attack, and in exchange for voting red, they’ll get to keep looking down on somebody. And it works, because Democrats show up with policy papers while Republicans show up with bedtime stories. Guess which one goes down easier at the county fair? Obama figured this out in 2008 and 2012, which is why he managed to peel off some of these voters. He made them feel respected even when they disagreed. But if Obama-era politics don’t work anymore, the answer isn’t that Harris was too cozy with billionaires. It’s that racism calcified, disinformation spread, and Democrats stopped naming poor whites as people worth fighting for.

That’s what makes Bernie’s act so tired. He goes on CNN and acts like the prophet in the desert, warning that Democrats will lose unless they speak to the working class. Kamala Harris did exactly that. She spoke to the working class until her throat was dry. And poor whites — specifically poor white men — rejected her anyway. That’s not a failure of Harris. That’s a failure of Bernie’s worldview. But instead of owning it, he protects his brand. He keeps peddling the myth that if Democrats just say “working class” with the right Brooklyn accent, the white guys in MAGA hats will put down their Trump flags and pick up a Harris sign. Spoiler alert: They won’t.

And it can’t just be minorities saying this to poor whites. It has to come from other white people. That’s not letting anybody off the hook — it’s basic social psychology. People are more receptive to hard truths when they come from someone they perceive as part of their in-group. If the messenger looks like them, talks like them, and understands their culture, the walls come down a little faster. It’s why anti-smoking ads hit harder when they feature former smokers instead of doctors in lab coats. It’s why soldiers listen to other veterans before they listen to politicians. And it’s why poor whites are more likely to hear the message about how MAGA is playing them if it’s delivered by another white person instead of by a Black preacher or a Latina politician. That doesn’t make it right, but it does make it real. The only way to crack through the MAGA bubble is for white voices — especially poor and working-class whites — to tell their neighbors: “You’re being conned. You’re voting away your healthcare and your wages just so you can feel superior to somebody else.” Until that happens, the GOP scam will keep working.

The bottom line is simple: Kamala Harris didn’t have a working-class problem. She had a poor-whites problem. Until Democrats are willing to admit that, and until progressives like Bernie Sanders stop hiding behind euphemisms and start confronting the racial manipulation at the heart of this country, nothing will change. Republicans will keep selling fairy tales, Democrats will keep wringing their hands, and Bernie will keep shouting about billionaires like a guy trying to sell a greatest-hits album nobody asked for.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons.

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