What are your reasons why this keeps happening where the candidates who are said to represent the working class more often than not are the choice of the wealthy instead?

You are using it a bit misleadingly, it is not the income of voters, but the voting trends of  precincts with different median incomes, it is still possible that the poor in rich precincts majorly vote for Madani and vice versa.

We don’t really have a proletariat.

We have an intelligentsia and a petite bourgeoisie. Laborers even labor unions tend to politically act more like small businesses than proletarians. Their top priorities are public security, subsidies for their sector, and cultural stability. They find themselves thus drawn to candidates who are or at least seem tough on crime, and who look and behave familiar. They see the state the way progressives see corporations, selfish, nearsighted, incompetent. They may like some subsidies but dislike taxes or unfamiliar proposals.

This leaves only ideological Marxists to be socialists, which by definition are more likely to be educated clerical workers. ideology is itself a luxury of wealth. when you’re rich enough to forgo a subsidy on principle. You’re also more likely to be drawn towards novelty, and “policy tchotchke”, what I like to call the miscellaneous assortment of ideas like “free buses” and “state grocery stores” most progressives tack on as opposed to platitudes about values.

Add the fact that progressives have a rancid reputation among the poor for meaning well but moving fast and breaking things in a way that makes normal people less safe and stable.

So much of this is just because labor is legally protected in the United States. Conservatism is good for labor. Cops don’t exactly break strikes anymore. Labor has triumphed in America, they have achieved what every labor in class wants to achieve, becoming the petite bourgeoisie that is protected by the extant system and its enforcers. The American laborer has achieved the end of history.

True story I was listening to the baseball game after voting and an ad came on for a labor union. It wasn’t boasting their plans to increase wages or stick it to the fatcats, it wasn’t telling you to join if you hate your job, it was bragging about how they already won, about how their employees are already happy with great well paying jobs that let them live their best life.

The end of every social movement to help the marginalized, is to make them conservative. The Gay Rights movement has triumphed when gay people are conservative. The Civil Rights movement has triumphed when black people are conservative. The American Laborer is conservative. It must therefore follow he is conservative because he has triumphed, and more concerned with defending what he has than gambling to get more.

Let’s say I have a great business idea. My business is called [sock.ai](http://sock.ai)

We use AI integrated with smart washing machines and driers to scan and inventory every sock that enters your laundry cycle. When a sock doesn’t have its matching pair, it’s declared missing by the system and AI creates a comprehensive digital profile of its lost twin and uploads it to our global sock-matching network, which is a secure and distributed blockchain-enabled network that connects to every other [sock.ai](http://sock.ai) user’s washing machine

It connects [sock.ai](http://sock.ai) users together to match the socks and create a synchronous pair

In order to get this off the ground, I’d have to quit my job and be without income for 3 months until we have an MVP and sequoia cuts me a check.

I can do that. I’m rich and have savings. Can someone making under $50K do that? No, probably not

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Now replace [sock.ai](http://sock.ai) with Mamdani’s policies, only [sock.ai](http://sock.ai) is probably more realistic than most of Mamdani’s policies