Kamala Harris thought she’d be running away with the race.
Instead, she’s facing one problem that could sink her.
And Kamala Harris felt sick when she got this awful message from a firefighter.
Kamala Harris has a serious problem with working-class voters
The road to the White House runs through the Rust Belt swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Former President Donald Trump became the first Republican since the 1980s to carry them in the 2016 Election.
He was able to flip these “Blue Wall” states on the strength of his performance with working-class voters.
President Joe Biden won them in 2020 by a narrow margin.
He spent decades building his phony “Blue-collar Joe” persona.
Vice President Kamala Harris is a San Francisco Democrat who has never had to compete for the work-classing vote in her political career.
Democrats have become the party of the coastal elites and have lost touch with working-class voters.
Former United Steelworkers Local 2227 president Scott Sauritch in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, went to a Hillary Clinton rally in 2016 in Pittsburgh.
He was hoping that she would talk about jobs, but she went on a rant about how Trump wasn’t fit to be President.
Sauritch left wondering what her plan was to help steelworkers.
He voted for Clinton in 2016, but this year he’s supporting Trump because Democrats are out of touch with working-class voters.
Trump is extremely popular with the rank-and-file members in his union.
“I don’t care what you see on TV,” Sauritch said. “The grunts in the lunchroom love Trump.”
The steel mills and factories of Western Pennsylvania used to be dominated by Democrats.
Democrat Presidential candidate Walter Mondale won 10 counties in Western Pennsylvania in his landslide loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 Election.
Clinton only won a single county in Western Pennsylvania in 2016.
Democrats sold out the working class
A retired firefighter in Berks County, Pennsylvania, named Steve told the New Yorker that he voted for former President Bill Clinton twice.
“Grandpop was a Democrat, Dad was a Democrat,” Steve explained. “They had a pro-union stance, and that was that. I learned it from them.”
But he started to reconsider his views when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that Clinton signed, was followed by heavy job losses in the Rust Belt.
“Those places laid off hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people,” Steve said.
Aaron Joseph, a Pennsylvania union organizer for the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said there was disappointment in his union when Biden dropped out of the race.
Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and his longtime support for labor appealed to working-class voters in Pennsylvania, according to Joseph.
Kamala is facing a challenge with these workers.
“She’s from California – that generally does not play well in western Pennsylvania,” Joseph said.
State Representative Manuel Guzman (D-PA) who represents Reading, Pennsylvania, said that Kamala’s message of Trump being a threat to democracy doesn’t connect with people who are struggling to make ends meet.
“We’ve become so focussed as a national party on saving democracy,” Guzman said. “I’m gonna be honest with you—I’ve not heard one person in the city of Reading talk to me about democracy! What they’re telling me is ‘Manny, why is gas so high?’ ‘Why is my rent so high?’ No one is speaking enough to these issues.”
Democrats have become the party of voters in New York and San Francisco.
