‘It’s Class Warfare’: Newsweek Editor Says Biden Is Hemorrhaging Blue Collar Votes

President Joe Biden’s border policies are “class warfare” against the working class, Newsweek Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon said Friday on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

In response to a question about 100,000 Michigan Democratic primary voters who selected the “uncommitted” option, Ungar-Sargon spoke Friday on the political realignment of working class voters who have switched from voting Democrat to supporting Donald Trump, arguing that Democrats have looked for “other things to blame” instead of trying to figure out how to appeal to them again. A state campaign in Michigan, led by the sister of Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, urged voters to select the “uncommitted” option in response to Biden’s support of Israel.

“The media really, really wants to put this narrative out there that Biden is going to lose Michigan over Gaza when the truth is he’s going to lose Michigan over 600,000 auto workers because his EV market was extremely punishing to auto workers,” she said.

“There’s been this big realignment where working class Americans are very, very very much on the Trump train,” she said. “Rather than admit that, this outrage that Democrats lost the working class vote, and try to figure out how we can appeal to them again, they’re looking for excuses and other things to blame.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday revealed ten percent of voters who backed Biden in 2020 are now supporting Trump. Forty-three percent of voters think Biden’s policies have hurt them personally, the poll found.

Ungar-Sargon said Democrats “don’t want to admit that Trump has picked up a lot of the policies that used to be Democratic policies in the 90s,” pointing to securing the border as an example.

“[A]n open border and mass migration is extremely punishing to the working class,” she said. “It drives down their wages. It’s class warfare against the working class. It is an upward transfer of wealth from the working class, who end up competing with immigrants, to the elites who end up employing them, and now they can employ cheap immigrants instead of having to pay working class Americans a living wage.”

Under the Biden administration, illegal crossings have reached record highs, with Border Patrol recording over two million encounters at the southern border in fiscal year 2023, according to CPB data. To date, Border Patrol has recorded over 753,000 encounters with migrants in fiscal year 2024.