LARRY KUDLOW: A working-class party without workers

Larry Kudlow's got a point buried under the usual Fox Business polish: the Democratic Party keeps insisting it's the party of working people while its energy, its fundraising buzz, and its most-watched primary races are increasingly running through candidates who'd have been laughed out of the room at a 1990s DNC meeting. You don't have to love the framing to notice the pattern. Zohran Mamdani wins in New York, party leaders tie themselves in knots over whether to endorse him, and meanwhile actual union guys in Pennsylvania and Ohio are voting Republican in numbers that would have stunned Tip O'Neill.

Here's the part that doesn't get said enough: this isn't really about socialism as an economic theory. Most swing voters couldn't define democratic socialism if you paid them. What they can spot is a party that talks about the working class while its cultural instincts, its donor class, and its loudest new stars feel like they belong to a different world entirely. That's the gap. It's not ideological purity, it's authenticity, and voters have a pretty good radar for the difference between someone who grew up punching a clock and someone who majored in it.

We'd push back on one thing, though. It's a little rich for a party that's spent years catering to Wall Street and Big Tech to suddenly discover working-class solidarity through the language of socialism. Neither side has clean hands here. But the Democrats' problem is specific: they built their identity around being the party of labor, and now they can't decide if the future is Amy Klobuchar or somebody quoting Eugene Debs. That's not a coalition, that's a hostage situation.

If there's a lesson for us, it's not to gloat. A working-class party without workers is a warning sign for any party that gets comfortable, not just theirs. Populism doesn't stay put on one side of the aisle just because you'd like it to.