Desi Talk

www.desitalk.com – that’s all you need to know A Democratic Dark Horse Visited Pennsylvania. Workers’ Message Was Simple M embers of the United Auto Workers gathered in a U in a hotel conference room not far from Dana Inc.’s facility in Montgomery County. Most of them have worked at the 105-year-old auto parts plant for years. Their guest: Ro Khanna, a California Democrat known as a policy maven on the left - and whose name is often thrown around as a potential dark horse presiden- tial contender. From the head of the table, he had a clear view to gauge everyone’s reactions to his questions about their lives, how they see the world, and what they expect from the party. The congressman is known for repre- senting Silicon Valley, but his roots are here in Southeast Pennsylvania, where he was born and raised. Originally, he was set to tour the manufacturing plant; when his team was unable to get company permis- sion, the UAWmembers who work there - many of them Democrats, many of them not - decided they still wanted to chat. Many were eager to tell him where Demo- crats have lost their way when it comes to appealing to the working class. So they took the meeting to a nearby Marriott. Zac Richards was the only open Repub- lican and Trump supporter in the room - if anyone else was, they did not admit it, perhaps out of politeness. He has 15 years at Dana as a machine operator. He’s also secretary of the bargaining committee of the plant’s union and vice president of the local union. “When I was younger and started work- ing with people here at Dana, they kind of told me to vote Democrat for the union, and that’s what I did,” he said. He pulled the lever for Obama twice - but in 2016, like many working-class Democrats, he started migrating toward Republicans. “I believe that they’ve gone pretty extreme to the left,” he said, pointing to a blind eye at the border, support for trans athletes play- ing in women’s sports, and the stridency of the party’s abortion rhetoric. Khanna was not shy about engaging with Richards, he said, peppering him with questions and probing for common ground across the aisle. “He kind of asked me if I’d be in sup- port of free college and Medicare-for-all, and I did not support either of those is- sues,” Richards said. Some debates broke out during the chat, but it stayed civil. Going to middle-of-somewhere places is something Khanna told me he has been doing for years - nine years to be exact - frequently visiting cities like Allentown in the Lehigh Valley and Johnstown in Cambria County at least three times. “It is important to visit places like Bucks and Cambria counties, places that have not had economic prosperity. And for that I say ‘shame on us’ as a nation that we did not do better by those communities for decades,” he said. “You cannot have a na- tion half prosperous and half in economic decline. And I think a lot of people who voted for President Trump said, ‘Look, for 40 years, 50 years, we’ve been seeing our kids have less opportunity. The system isn’t working. We’ve got to blow the system up.” If the Silicon Valley congressman is run- ning for president, he is not saying, and he denied any connection between his visits and any ambitions to be on a national ticket in 2028. But he says if his party isn’t able to convince voters in Pennsylvania, they need to rethink both their message and purpose. Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, is one of the must-win swing states, and within Pennsylvania, the area including Bucks and Montgomery counties is one of the most important swing areas …which brings us back to his back-and-forth with the union men and women here offering him their worldview. Jim Hutchinson, president of UAW Local 644, was sitting with the other at- tendees including Richards during the roundtable. Hutchison is a Democrat who the party has not lost, and he worked tire- lessly last year knocking on doors to help Democrats Kamala Harris and Sen. Bob Casey win the state. They didn’t. “I do understand that social issues break off a good amount of voters and certainly voters in my plant,” Hutchinson said. What he appreciated about Khanna was his humility. In a week when Califor- nia Gov. Newsom was generating head- lines with all-caps posts satirizing Trump and skewering Republicans, Khanna was quietly emphasizing that he wanted to listen to voters where they were. “And this isn’t the first time I met him,” Hutchinson said. “I met him in June in Allentown. I think what I like about him is that he thinks it is important to recog- nize and respect other people’s concerns, whether we agree with him or not.” Bucks County is of a piece with Erie, Luzerne, Cambria and Northampton counties, all of which are treated as bell- wethers. The political rule of thumb here is that if you are running for president of the United States, you need to win three out of five of them to have a shot at carry- ing the state. Winning Bucks County was something Democrats had done for decades, until November when Trump narrowly won the county by just under 300 votes. He lost in 2020 by 17,345 votes. In July of last year, registered Republicans began outnumber- ing Democrats in the county by just 264. By Election Day, the margin had soared to 4,437, and it’s still rising: the September numbers from the Pennsylvania De- partment of State show the Republican advantage has more than doubled since the election to 9,815. “I want to listen,” Khanna said. “I want to understand, ‘What did we do wrong? What are we not getting?Why are we dis- connected?What can we do better?’ And I really have come at it not with, like, ‘Hey, here’s my plan,’ but have them tell me what would make a difference.” What he has heard so far, he said, is that voters want to hear a real vision and road map for what is going to create good-paying jobs or how people are going to be able to afford a house or how their kids will be able to make a living. What they tell him is pretty simple, he said: “We just want economic independence and economic vision, and we don’t want to be judged, and we want to be respected for what we’ve done to build this country.” There’s plenty of tension between com- panies headquartered in Khanna’s district and workers in the state where he grew up. Artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, ad- vanced robotics and renewable energy all are driving fears that jobs in a wide range of fields will soon be replaced or undercut. The congressman has spent much of his career negotiating a path forward that would benefit both sides, even penning a book on the topic. One of its themes was finding ways for people to participate in the economy without leaving the commu- nities where they were raised and where their families still live. “Now I happen to understand this stuff about technology, and people look at me talking about some of the future jobs and our kids having those jobs and say we’re open to that,” he said. “But what they want to know is that you get that our communities have been screwed and that we don’t see ourselves in the economic future.” That process starts with respect. He always stresses his immense gratitude for the people who built America before his family even came here and for the people who fought in the wars, labored in the coal mines, forged the steel and made America a superpower. “I think that that is so important for the Democratic Party to understand the anger there, to understand why they feel aban- doned by our party and to understand and to articulate a sense of true patrio- tism, which is not about mouthing the words; it’s not about calling it economic patriotism,” he said. “They can sense it in my bones when I speak to them - that I’m filled with gratitude and the chances Pennsylvania gave me.” Longtime Democratic strategist and pollster John Anzalone - who recently conducted a poll with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio that found Democrats’ popularity at its lowest point in three decades with a whopping 63 percent of voters holding an unfavorable view of the party - said Khanna’s listening tours may not get him a lot of views on social media but that they matter. “It’s the heart of working-class America, and it is gritty in a time where I think most politicians just think about middle-class America in the service industry,” he said. Personal trips to places that “might feel uncomfortable” for Democrats, he said, are a better use of time than engaging in debates over message-testing at the national level. He pointed to the summer Democratic National Committee meeting in Minnesota, where members watched a polling presentation that argued “tough on crime” messaging is less powerful than “serious about safety.” “One of the things that we see in focus groups is that voters don’t believe that Democrats listen anymore,” he said. “And so we’ve got to get back to listening and being the party of working-class families.” A genuine interest in what ordinary Americans have to say is where it starts. As Newsom soaks up the spotlight mimick- ing Trump’s social media style, Democrats would be wise to remember that Trump paired his own prolific posting with numerous visits to Pennsylvania, not just in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia but also in Johnstown, Erie, Luzerne and at a Mc- Donalds drive-through window in Bucks County. “You cannot just be Mr. All-Caps on X to win over voters; you have to be willing to take tough questions and have vot- ers kick the tires when you are in town, as Khanna did in Bucks County,” Mike Mikus, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic consultant, said. “When a candidate is kept in a bubble, voters notice.” -TheWashington Post By Salena Zito PHOTO:Philip Cheung/ForTheWashington Post PHOTO:Philip Cheung/ForTheWashington Post Rep. Ro Khanna in March. Supporters cheer as Donald Trump walks off stage at rally in Erie, Pa., in 2023. 9 CITY VIEWS September 12, 2025