The Difference Between Working-Class Wendy and White-Collar Karen

Sometimes a woman can use a good old dose of mansplainin’, especially when she’s fishing for a man’s vote.

To wit(mer): Don’t go to a bar on a football Sunday and kick guys off their stool so you can order a 200-calorie beer that nobody drinks and pretend you didn’t know the microphones were there.

“So my thing is,” Harris whispered to Whitmer and the eavesdropping press, “we need to move the ground among men.”

Interrupting football is no way to impress the dudes. And if you absolutely must, then you should do what normal chicks do at the bar: Order a flute of Pinot Grigio or a cold can of High Noon (just 100 calories, no sugar, and gluten-free. Yummy!).

But this election isn’t about the guys anymore, is it? They’ve decided, and Madam Harris has decidedly lost them, if the polls are to be believed.

It’s the women she needs to convince. Specifically white women, the biggest voting block in the country. More specifically still, she needs to convince working-class white women.

Who are working-class white women? The definition is contemptuous, indeed—those without a bachelor’s degree.

The white women with college degrees, who write for failing media publications in the concrete canyons of Manhattan, call this divide “the education gap,” implying that working women are somehow less intelligent than their counterparts who hold a liberal arts degree in feminist theory. That is hardly the case.

Rounding off for conversation’s sake, the White Collar Karens break 60-40 Democratic. Working Class Wendys go 60-40 Republican.

And remember, there are approximately 8 million more Wendys than Karens.

When you ask Wendy her concerns, she’ll tell you (and the pollsters) that it’s the economy first, then the border, and then foreign wars.

When pollsters ask Karen, she says her top priority is abortion, then Trump, with the economy coming in a distant third.

Who knows, maybe Wendy is more worldly than Karen, because Wendy lives in the real paycheck-to-paycheck world. She’s more tuned in to the market movements that push the price of electricity, gasoline, and taco meat to the point where it is nearly breaking her household.

Wendy has no stock portfolio to fall back on. Her daddy can’t help her, because chances are good that he’s living in the guest room.

Wendy remembers the Covid mandates and the bunk science that cost her kids their well-being, cost her mother her life, and have led her to work two jobs to keep up with inflation.

Wendy wants change. More to the point: Wendy wants change in her pocketbook.

It’s late in the game for the vice president, but it ain’t over. White Working Class Wendy will likely decide this election, so Harris might want to speak with her instead of bum-rushing Sunday Night Football.

The vice president might learn something. When Wendy orders an expensive beer, she actually drinks it, because Wendy doesn’t have $12 to waste.

But then again, Kamala Harris must know that. After all, she says she grew up in the middle class.

Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools.