In the waning days of the midterm election campaign, Republicans have finally stumbled on a closing message: defending the honor of the Cheesecake Factory.
Last week, Barack Obama made a viral crack about Donald Trump’s renovations: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Conservatives feigned outrage on behalf of the humble American volk for whom the Cheesecake Factory is the height of sophistication. Fox Business interviewed the centimillionaire Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, after lunch at the restaurant; he sniffed, “I would tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try.” (His Massachusetts beach house, which he sold for a couple of million dollars in 2012, was in Provincetown.) The Wall Street Journal suggested that Democrats had shot themselves in the foot in their quest to win back “the working man in Middle America.” The White House posted a list of Trump’s “accomplishments” in the style of a Cheesecake Factory menu.
Republicans have been trying to brand Democrats as the party of out-of-touch elitists since at least the 1960s, but this time, it felt particularly forced and desperate. After all, it’s become screamingly obvious which party represents billionaires and unchecked plutocratic power.
On the stump this week, an increasingly disinhibited Trump scoffed at the idea of “suffering at the pump” while boasting that high oil prices have been a windfall for the energy industry. Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, is almost single-handedly funding the Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign. Susan Collins ran a closing ad in which a retired broadcaster seemed to mock her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, for being a logger, saying, “We’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here; we’re sending someone to the U.S. Senate.”
Meanwhile, Democrats all over the country are running against the ultrarich. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” the Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says on the campaign trail. “It’s top versus bottom.” In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed is a political protégé of Bernie Sanders who accuses his opponent, Mike Rogers, of being bought by corporations. Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, defeated with the help of crypto dollars two years ago, may regain his seat thanks in part to widespread fury at data centers and the tech billionaires behind them.
If Democrats win big on Tuesday after running such populist campaigns, it will be more than a victory over Trump. It will be an opportunity for them to once again develop an image as the champion of working people against predatory elites. That, in turn, could realign American politics. But it will happen only if Democrats can resist the entreaties of the tech donors and lobbyists who, having realized that going all in on MAGA was a bad bet, will now spend big to rebuild bridges to the center left.
For decades now, American politics has been shaped by two very different conceptions of class. Liberals tend to view class as a primarily economic distinction: a millionaire car dealer in the Midwest has a class advantage over a Brooklyn adjunct professor on food stamps. Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to understand class as a matter of taste, culture and education. They’ve long seen America as riven between what some called a “new class” of intellectuals, professionals and bureaucrats and an alliance of capitalists and traditionalist blue-collar workers. “The simple truth is that the professional classes of our modern bureaucratized societies are engaged in a class struggle with the business community for status and power,” wrote Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism, in 1972. (He very much sided with the beleaguered businessmen.)
Neoconservatism fell out of fashion, but Kristol’s ideas about class didn’t. If anything, as the two parties sorted by education, they became a kind of cultural common sense. Obama, who was still paying off student debt in his 40s, was tagged as an elitist, while Trump, who loves to brag about his wealth, was not.
The 2024 election was a triumph for the right’s conception of class politics, with Trump making gains with low-income voters while Kamala Harris won those earning over $200,000 a year. In surveys and focus groups, voters described Democrats as elitist and condescending. When the Democratic firm Navigator Research polled swing districts after the last election, 56 percent of respondents said the party didn’t look out for working people, and a majority said Democrats didn’t share their values. The road to winning back working-class voters looked difficult and uncertain.
Trump, by abandoning all restraint in his kleptocratic smash-and-grab, has made it easier. In a September poll from The New York Times and Siena University, voters identified Republicans as the “elitist” party by 10 points. The Times quoted a 40-year-old who’d voted for Trump two years earlier: “The people that are ‘in with him,’ who look or act a certain way, are the ones that are going to be given an opportunity.”
Few things have laid bare the president’s essential elitism like his alliance with America’s tech oligarchs. Trump ran against Big Tech in 2020, when he saw it as an ally of Democrats, but he was less interested in curbing the industry’s power than co-opting it. Now that he’s done that, tying Silicon Valley’s fortunes to his own, he can’t countenance criticism of it. He’s attempted, absurdly, to rebrand A.I. as “super intelligence,” and said that communities that reject data centers risk becoming “backwards and poor.”
Silicon Valley was once seen as a bastion of liberalism, but a recent Politico poll found that voters across the political spectrum now associate it with the Republican Party. At the same time, Big Tech — and particularly A.I. and data centers — has rarely been more reviled. This summer, a leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee called data centers “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” and warned that public fury about them could cost the Republican Jon Husted his Senate seat in Ohio.
Rob Flaherty, former head of digital strategy for Joe Biden, is a founder of Tomorrow Together, a new super PAC that goes after Republicans for their ties to the A.I. industry. He shared polling his group commissioned about A.I. and data centers in several swing districts. In Pennsylvania’s Eighth District, held by a Republican, Rob Bresnahan, 51 percent of respondents feel strongly unfavorably toward data centers. Only 5 percent feel strongly favorably. Voters see A.I., Flaherty told me, as “these guys sitting in a room somewhere cooking up technology that’s going to make your life worse, making you pay for it, and buying off the government to do it.”
Now that Democrats seem likely to retake at least one house of Congress, tech companies are rushing to hire Democratic lobbyists. Given the enormous resources Silicon Valley kingpins wield, some Democrats might be tempted to seek a rapprochement with the industry. “I worry that Democrats are going to say, ‘We need to rebuild our alliances with tech,’ and miss the opportunity that’s in front of their face here,” said Flaherty. That would be a terrible mistake. The opportunity before Democrats is about more than being on the right side of a winning issue. Democrats have a unique chance, after decades of culture wars, to wrest the mantle of populism from Republicans and thus change the terrain on which American elections are fought.
“They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1936 about monopolists, speculators and war profiteers. Democrats should remember his words when they retake power. A good enemy is a terrible thing to waste.
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