It was all a lie. 

“Starting with their launch video last August, Platner and his team billed him as an oyster farmer — a title most of the media… repeated without scrutiny,” Axios reported on the eve of his withdrawal from the Senate race. “But as early as August, he told ideologically friendly outlets that he makes little money from selling oysters and it’s not how he makes a living.”

Platner’s father was a lawyer who attended Dartmouth and served as an assistant district attorney in Maine. His grandfather was an architect. He grew up in relative privilege, attending a private boarding school (from which he was expelled). His father loaned him the money to buy his home and helped pay for his wife’s international fertility treatments. His mother’s restaurant is his main oyster-farming customer. Platner has an elite New England background.

“The fact that he was cast as a man of the people by elites, while the working class rejected him, seems kind of emblematic of the whole progressive project right now,” writes Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, who called Platner “a rich person’s idea of a poor person.”

Apart from Platner personally, the socialists’ theory of the past decade of national politics is that conventional, corporate Democrats lost the working class to President Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent, Republicans more generally. Only the socialists can win them back.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said in a statement after Trump won his second, nonconsecutive term. ​“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”

“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he added, after winning his own race for a fourth Senate term with a little over 63% of the vote.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” Sanders asked. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

If that critique sounds familiar, it is much the same as what Sanders said when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

“Look, you can’t simply go around to wealthy people’s homes raising money and expect to win elections,” Sanders told NPR in 2017. “The Democratic Party swallowed the bait,” he said. “They became hooked on big money.”

Sanders’s allies believed the Vermont senator could have prevented the loss of Rust Belt states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Sanders sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, when the party’s nominee lost these states to Trump, and 2020, when Democrats narrowly won them. They lost them again in 2024.

“The Democratic Party can no longer afford to alienate working-class voters,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the Sanders-aligned Our Revolution, said in a statement earlier this month. “Reversing the trend means electing a new generation of party leaders who will embrace broad-based, popular economic policies and progressive solutions that resonate with the people it claims to represent.”

Geevarghese’s outfit joined with the Congressional Progressive Caucus in “calling for bold reforms to rebuild trust with working-class voters and refocus the Democratic Party’s priorities.”  A pillar of their agenda is for the Democratic National Committee to “Rebuild a Multiracial, Working-Class Base.”

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) traveled to the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, her assignment was to espouse a foreign policy for the working class.

“I predict someday she will become president of the United States. I’ve called her ‘madam president’ before,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told NBC News of Ocasio-Cortez. Espaillat was later defeated by a socialist challenger in the Democratic primary.

“I stand alongside construction workers in steel-toed boots and halal cart vendors whose knees ache from working all day,” socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared in his inaugural address in January, later adding, “Here, where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.”

There’s just one problem: There isn’t much evidence that socialist Democrats actually appeal to the working class.

Here, too, Platner was reflective of a broader trend. A New York Times–Portland Press Herald-Siena poll on the Maine race released last month found him doing especially poorly with working-class whites against Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).

Collins led Platner among whites without college degrees by 23 percentage points, 59% to 36%. In the same pollster’s findings in September 2020, Collins led her Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon, by just 3 points among this demographic, 48% to 45%. Collins trailed Gideon in that poll by 5 points overall, but won by nearly 9 points in November.

Platner’s real base, and the reason the Maine Senate race was competitive at all, was college-educated whites. He was winning these voters with 68% of the vote to Collins’s 31%. In September 2020, Gideon’s advantage with college-educated white voters was 57% to Collins’s 37%.

This isn’t an isolated example. Mamdani didn’t put up his best numbers in working-class precincts last year. He had a strong appeal to educated, downwardly mobile, yet still relatively affluent voters.

Last November, Mamdani won 46% of voters with an associate degree (good enough for a plurality in a mayoral race with three major candidates), 57% with a bachelor’s degree, and 57% with an advanced degree. This included 53% of college-educated whites and 64% of non-white voters with college degrees, according to exit polls.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo won a 47% plurality of voters without a college degree, including 58% of non-college-educated whites. He lost non-white voters without college degrees by less than 10 points.

Cuomo actually beat Mamdani among voters making less than $30,000 a year. Mamdani won most other income groups, but his biggest majorities came from those who earned between $50,000 and $99,000 (56%) and $100,000 and $199,000 (55%). Mamdani did better with voters making over $50,000 (52%) than under $50,000 (48%, just a 4-point margin over Cuomo).

Much of this should be unsurprising, since left-wing politics is much more common among the highly educated. But many thought socialists and populists would revive the old, more economically motivated Left rather than the culture-war liberalism that has alienated blue-collar voters at least since George McGovern back in 1972.

This was to some extent true of Sanders, whose political career and activism long predate the culturally dominated Left of today. Sanders rebuffed liberals urging him to support open borders.

“What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy,” he said. “Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.”

“It would make everybody in America poorer; you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there is any country in the world which believes in that,” Sanders said of open borders. “If you believe in a nation-state or a country called the United States or U.K. or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation, in my view, to do everything we can to help poor people.”

Promoting his book Fight Oligarchy on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast last year, Sanders made a startling admission about the border. “Trump did a better job,” he said. “I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. [Former President Joe] Biden didn’t do it.”

Mamdani wouldn’t talk like this. His cultural radicalism is well known, and a collapse in national pride among progressives likely helped fuel his rise. But he, for the most part, deemphasized controversial social issues while running for mayor, focusing heavily on economics and affordability in a city where the cost of living was high long before inflation hit a 41-year high.

Some other Democrats in this tradition have made socialism sound like it is mainly about economic fairness and spending tax dollars close to home.

“All we were asking for was healthcare,” Platner said in the video announcing the suspension of his campaign. “Was to end the genocide. To use our taxpayer dollars at home to uplift our communities instead of waging war overseas. We were asking for a fairer system. We were asking for an end to the corruption. The end to the money in politics.”

But Sanders was limited by his inability to assemble a racially diverse enough coalition in either 2016 or 2020. Black primary voters consolidated against him in South Carolina to help deliver the nomination to Biden as a backstop against his brand of socialism.

The Mamdani-endorsed socialists who recently won their primaries aren’t shy about their radicalism extending beyond lunchpail or pocketbook issues. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the graduate student and community organizer who toppled Espaillat, is for open borders and taking money away from prisons and police.

Avila Chevalier had to delete social media posts saying “F*** Kamala Harris.” She campaigned against the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as if he was some kind of immigration hardliner.

“Where is our congressman when ICE is kidnapping his constituents? Why should we let Adriano Espaillat vote to spend billions on bombs overseas when we’re struggling to afford rent and groceries right here in New York City?” she asked in her campaign launch video.

These candidates are anti-American, anti-Western, and certainly virulently anti-Israel, with a history of all the excesses of “peak woke” from a few years ago, from which Democrats unsuccessfully tried to distance themselves in 2024. Mamdani nevertheless argues his allies are at the vanguard of a Democratic Party that realizes the need “to be fighting for a vision that reckons with the fact that working people were not left behind just four years ago or 16 years ago. They were left behind a long time before that.”

In some ways, this is just an angrier and more radicalized version of the same old Democratic base.

“This shift represents a fundamental reorientation of the Democratic base’s psychological appetite,” writes the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini. “Where the 2018-era Resistance found comfort in institutional stability and the defense of norms, the 2026 version looks with admiration to Trump’s two victories and aims to create a left-wing version of them. The goal is to overthrow an economic order they were blocked from changing both by Clinton-era moderation or Obama-era liberalism.”

TWO AMERICAS: MAMDANI AND TRUMP GIVE SPEECHES AHEAD OF INDEPENDENCE DAY

Not only do these socialists not share the values of many working-class voters, but there is also little reason to believe their economics will deliver for them either. The COVID-19 lockdowns weren’t good for working people. Neither has been the inflation sparked by excessive government spending undertaken by Democratic majorities less socialistic than the party is in 2026. Inflation and an out-of-control border did considerably more damage to Democrats than not talking enough about the oligarchy.

Even with those long-term risks and the shorter-term setback in Maine, Democratic Socialists of America is on the march. The midterm elections could still go well for them. Whether they can get the workers of this country, much less the world, to unite is another story.

W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.