By Ben Zeisloft February 5, 2025 at 5:00am
Democrats are reeling from a massive loss in November.
Beyond losing their shot at the White House and surrendering the House and the Senate to the Republicans, the Democrats are at their lowest levels of popularity with American voters in roughly two decades.
Many voters see the Democrats as the party of wealthy progressive urban elites, not the working class, which the Democrats have marketed themselves as representing for so long.
Just this past weekend, most Democratic leaders nevertheless showed they were unwilling to grapple with why they are so unpopular, electing a slate of milquetoast party insiders and leftist activists to lead the Democratic National Convention for the foreseeable future.
But at least one Democrat seems to be trying to bring his party back to the drawing board.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, posted a video on Tuesday in which he interviewed various workers left unemployed by the recent closure of Master Lock’s plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Rather than repeating platitudes and lying to their faces, as many Democrats did in the last election cycle, Khanna seemed to admit that the Democrats need to better represent Americans in the heartland impacted by the decline of manufacturing and industry.
“You know, we made a colossal mistake in this country to allow all of our industry to leave,” Khanna acknowledged to the workers.
Will even more minorities come around to MAGA as Trump 2.0 rolls out?
One of the unemployed workers said that Master Lock “took my livelihood away from me.”
Khanna noted how the employees once had “a decent life, a car, a house,” until they lost it all when the plant closed.
Another one of the workers recounted how his daughter learned that her dad lost his job, then took chalk and wrote, “I am so sorry that your lost your job Dad” on their sidewalk.
“And that made me cry,” he said.
But the video got even darker.
Chancie and Quentin’s story is why we lost the election. We failed them. Their livelihood was snatched from them. We need a transformational new economic vision to earn back their trust. pic.twitter.com/92FIA1bwGq
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) February 4, 2025
Another former employee shared how several coworkers had killed themselves after the plant closed.
Khanna once more admitted that the Democratic Party message simply was not resonating with middle America.
“Until we grapple seriously with how we have shafted working and middle class families and hollowed out the industrial base of this country, and why people are so upset at the direction of our country, we’re not going to understand how the Democratic Party comes back,” the lawmaker remarked.
Khanna spent most of the video talking to two black workers named Quentin and Chancie.
Neither of them voted this year because they had lost faith in the Democrats.
That reflects a broader trend of minority voters, particularly black and Hispanic men, either staying at home or pulling the lever for the Republicans.
Khanna is right.
It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party survives on the basis of preferred pronouns and pro-Palestinian protests while ignoring the interests of working class people in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Madison.
Americans left, right, and center are sick of seeing our country’s heritage shipped overseas.
No political party has a future any longer while continuing to ignore those matters.
Ben Zeisloft is the editor of The Republic Sentinel, a conservative news outlet owned and operated by Christians. He is a former staff reporter for The Daily Wire and has written for The Spectator, Campus Reform, and other conservative news outlets. Ben graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with concentrations in business economics and marketing.
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