The Daily Signal - Beards, Flannel & Fake Roots? Democrats’ 2028 Rebrand Won’t Fool Voters | Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Following the Democrats’ crushing defeat at the ballot box in 2024, the DNC launched a postmortem to answer a very simple yet surprisingly elusive question: What went wrong? Their findings? On 70-30 issues, Democrats landed on the 30 side. Their solution? Democrats aren’t changing their message—they’re just rebranding the mess. From Pete Buttigieg in flannel to Tim Walz playing hunter, the “working-class pivot” looks more like political cosplay. Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to connect on issues that actually matter to voters. The bottom line: You can’t fake authenticity—and voters aren’t buying it. 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1 👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. The Democratic Party, after their loss of the presidency in 2024, and they were not able to take back any of the congressional seats, and they don't control either the House or the Senate, they ran a post-mortem, an autopsy. What went wrong? Now, they didn't really divulge what they found, but I think we all know what it was, because it's sleek. out in various manifestations. They feel that the white working class, that demographic that used to go for John F. Kennedy and even Bill Clinton, but was a solid Roosevelt, Truman, Democratic group, union, and the middle

working class in general, not just the white working class, Hispanics, blacks, but the working class, they had lost that. And they wanted to know why. And they found out that their message, and I guess I could be as bold to say, open borders, illegal immigration, the trans issue radical green energy at the expense of fossil fuels, indecision or appeasement abroad, signified by the Afghanistan disaster of 2021, et cetera, et cetera, were 37 issues, and they were on the 30 side. So what did they do? They said, well, you know, Joe Biden won in 2020 because we used him as a waxen effigy. We presented him. Well, we didn't really present him.

He was in the basement the whole campaign. We didn't let him out. But we presented him. We constructed him. We rebooted him as old Joe Biden from Scranton, the working man hero, Catholic, tough guy. And we won. And then when he got in, he was cognitively challenged. And so we were able to run the most radical agenda in history since the Roosevelt administration.

Now, we can still do that and get our radical agenda through in 2008 or in the midterms, but we've got to get a Joe Biden-like artifice. And so what happened was they had a problem, especially if you look at the string of pejoratives that started with Barack Obama, But then in 2016 was continued by Hillary Clinton and emblemized by Joe Biden. I mean, it was very hard to reclaim that rubric, that demographic, because besides not being on the issues with them, they were insulting them. Obama called them the clingers.

For Hillary Clinton, there were the irredeemables and the deplorables. For Joe Biden, they were the dregs, they were the garbage, they were the chumps. Remember that? Chumps. And so they said in this report, and the Democrat said, is we're going to get left-wing people, of course, but we're going to hide their left-wing with a veneer. We're going to get working people.

So everybody who's going to run, you have to reboot yourself. So we saw Pete Buttigig. Remember him? He couldn't open his mouth but talking about how brilliant he was, how sanctimonious he was, how self-righteous. He knew all these languages. he looks sort of like a pale professor, and he talked like one. Nobody cares whether he speaks Finnish or not, but he let all that stuff be known.

So they said, Pete, it's not going to work if you want to run. So all of a sudden, he's turned up now with a beard. He wears a tractor cap, and he has a flannel shirt. And he's old Pete Buttigig from Indiana. I don't think it's going to work, but you can see what's going on. And then there was Tim Walz. Now, he was a sort of a bumbling, I'll be candid, a bumbling fool in Minnesota. He oversaw that great $9 billion theft by the Somali community of federal, local, and state funds.

But during the campaign with Kamala Harris, and afterwards, when for a brief moment he thought he had presidential aspirations, he talked about hunting. He used, he liked to hunt. He wore a vest, a hat. He talked about all the soft drinks that he devoured, like he was a working guy. He said that he had a pickup truck, and he could not very many people to change the oil. It was completely phony. It came out false. It reinforced the idea that he was buffoonish, but it showed you what the Democratic Party was trending to.

And then I think they came up and said, you know, you can't change these people. You can't turn Pete Buttigig into a working man. You can't turn Tim Walt's radical message and then paste it over with Tim Walts, the duck oner. So we need different candidates. We need left-wing candidates, but they have to be more authentic, and they have to be pretty much unknown to the people. So they started searching, and they came up with some. One was Mr. Talarico from Texas. He was an evangelical minister.

Now, he did go to Harvard, and he did say crazy things like God is non-binary, and we've got to go after the billionaires, and they're the people ruining Texas. And he did say something that they didn't quite vet him. He said that white males are the greatest terrorist threat in the United States. But all that said, they packaged him as a Christian fundamentalist preacher. They didn't realize that when he talked, he sounded more like a Central American liberation theology radical, which he is. But the idea was in Texas, if you presented a democratic white male as a evangelical Christian, and you just kind of hid the social media history, we could pass him off as an effective candidate. And we'll see how he does.

he's won the Texas Senate primary in the Democratic Party over the racial essentialist, Jasmine Crockett. They had a better tact when they went to Maine. They got a guy, Graham Platner. Now, he grew up in a very upscale family. He went to the Hotchkitts prestigious prep school. But at some point in his career, he decided that he was a man of the people. He's currently an oyster man. He's been a harbor master, he's been a bartender. This all just thrilled the Democrats. Now remember, this is the party that not long ago called them deplorables and clingers and chumps. Now they needed that veneer. That doesn't mean they want to change the radical message, which turns off the middle class just to get the veneer. So they've got him and he has a beard and he's a working guy, he wears a tractor

hat. And it was all going well. And then they looked at his social media because he's supposed to represent the white working class. And he said that the white rural American, white rural Americans are stupid. That's what he said, stupid. And then it turned out he had a tattoo, which was a good. That was even greater tattoo. He's a man of the people. But unfortunately, it was a Totenkov tattoo, Death's Head.

And it was the exact insignia that Hitler's worst of the worst, the Eisengruppen war, That is, people who were in special units of the SS, Wafin SS, pretty bad, the worst of the worst. And they were often assigned to extermination camps to facilitate the Holocaust. So why would he put that insignia that they wore on their collar as well as some of the SS divisions? It didn't make sense he had to try to redo the tattoo and any way. But you can see where they're going. It's going to be very hard because their hatred of the middle class pops up everywhere. Not long ago, Joey Behar said, well, Trump, somebody must have voted for him, but Trump's voters are not well educated.

In fact, the Heartland Institute ran a survey not too long ago that people that listened to talk radio and the political issues were better informed than the people on the left. Remember, Phil Caputo? Mark Caputo, you might not. He was the CNN reporter that went to a Trump rally and said there's more, one person has more teeth, meaning I guess himself, than everybody at this rally is if the white working class was toothless, poor, stupid. Jimmy Kimmel got a lot of praise and criticism. He recently made fun of Mark Wayne Mullen, the new Homeland Secretary, because he said, Can you imagine he's a plumber? Aside from the fact that plumbers are skilled, they're very necessary, and they're often quite brilliant to figure out the labyrinth onto your house. But he reduced all the things that Mark Wayne Mullen had done. He'd been a congressman for 10 years. He's a U.S. Senator.

He turned his family plumbing business into one of the largest plumbing services companies in all of Oklahoma. But to the snob, Jimmy Kimmel, he's a plumber. Maybe the worst was David Letterman. You remember him when he said that Sarah Palin, remember Marine Dow, all of these people made fun of her. They made fun of her white, poor background, that she was from Alaska, her accent. And I think at one point, Letterman said,

maybe she's going to dress up like a sleazy airline hostess. That's pretty bad. Airline hostess are pretty great people. But then he said something else. And then maybe her daughter, who was 14, Willow, I think her name was, will get pregnant by Alex Rodriguez in the Yankees' dugout. So what I'm getting at is they're so imbued with hatred and they're so artificial and their ways to manufacture an appeal to a demographic. They now conclude they can't win without. That they're ridiculous.

The whiteworking class is not looking for somebody that looks like them. Look at Donald Trump. He's a millionaire Manhattan billionaire. billionaire Manhattan. Now at Palm Beach in a mansion. They voted for him. What the white working class wanted was somebody who said, you didn't do well under globalization. You weren't in the part of the bi-coastal elite manufacturing, assembly, natural resource extraction development form. You didn't do well. And we're here to make sure that we have an economy that works for you and be honest about it and then not direct. ride them. And by the way, being a college graduate these days doesn't really mean much. It means that you're going to be in debt. You're not going to be that well-educated. And your ubers or arrogance

about having a degree is not going to be well-founded. Bottom line, Democrats, they can't get away from the fact they're on the 30% of these hot-button issues. They're losing the white working class and they will not change their ideology instead they want to change their appearance their veneer their facade it's not going to work thank you very much victor davis hanson for the daily signal thank you for tuning in to the daily signal please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this can also check out my own website at victor hanson dot com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition You know,