Pete Buttigieg likes to style himself as Mr. Midwest but goddamn if this isn’t the fifteenth freshest take from March of 2016. It’s almost as though he’s part of our glorious new perfect aristocracy and doesn’t actually have any specific or personal observations to make about what’s going on in the Rust Belt than anybody else! Because, of course, not all of the Midwest is rotted out factories. I know this because I’ve been there a lot. Some parts of it are doing real well! Other parts are not doing well at all. Just like…California! I wrote about going to Fresno before, and it is a terrifying town, and one where I did worry about my safety in a way I never did in Wisconsin or Cleveland or Southwest Pennsylvania. And it’s a mere three hour drive from the Bay Area! Mayor Pete can’t seem to put in any personally observed details in his take on the working class though, and I’ll tell you why: because he doesn’t have any.

But there is a point to this. Buttigieg is putting this view out there as part of his quest to win the elite white guy primary, which he’s doing an excellent job at. Brooks! Sully! Axelrod! And it will no doubt keep on growing. He’s succeeding exactly where Howard “Am I Still Running?” Schultz failed. Needless to say, implicitly blaming working class white voters for Trump is the natural choice for higher status white people who don’t want to admit that it was their friends (or themselves) wot won it. Not that I’m blaming Buttigieg for it personally, but the evidence is pretty strong that Trump did better among working class people of all races and ethnicities than Romney did, not just white people in Michigan. Fact: Hillary Clinton did worse among union voters than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1980. This has a lot of factors behind it but not a small one is that virtually all Democrats have, over the past few decades, completely forgotten how to talk about class. In most recent elections this wasn’t much of a detriment—it’s not as though Mitt “47%” Romney knew how to use it as a wedge against Democrats—but when up against an opponent who did know how to talk about it…yeah, it didn’t turn out so great. If you want to fix that you probably want to find somebody who can speak well about class, and there are some out there. Mayor Pete is not one of them.

Buttigieg is certainly not a favorite of mine. I’ll still vote for him if he’s the nominee (which I’m guessing he will be…for veep). But damn, if anybody thinks that this guy knows uniquely how to unlock the working-class white voter in the Midwest, you’re just fooling yourselves. Pundit speak instead of empirical detail, the basic worldview of the ruling class, a lot of talk but no real record at all…just don’t be surprised at how it turns out.