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Ex-Obama advisor David Axelrod said Thursday that Democrats have become the “smarty pants” party and have moved away from the working class.
President-elect Donald Trump clinched a victory for the White House early Wednesday morning after sweeping key battleground states over Vice President Kamala Harris. In the wake of his win, Democrats have been breaking down what went wrong for the vice president.
Axelrod, along with a number of other pundits and lawmakers, blamed the Democrats for not appealing to working class voters. He said that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had a point when he railed against Democrats for forgetting the needs of working voters.
“Well, you‘ve heard me over the last few days. I do have concerns about the way the Democratic Party has relates to working class voters in this country. The only group that Democrats gained with in the election on Tuesday was white college graduates and among working class voters, there was a, you know, a significant decline,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
“The only group … Democrats won among were people who make more than $100,000 a year. You can’t win national elections that way, and it certainly shouldn’t be that way for a party that fashions itself as the party of working people. So I think he has a point,” he continued.
Axelrod went on to explain that Democrats should not be talking to working class voters as “missionaries.”
“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, we’re here to help you become more like us. There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that,” he said. “I think Biden has done, you know, programmatically some good things for working people, but the party itself has increasingly become a smarty pants, suburban, college educated party. And it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen.”
The argument that Democrats did not appeal to working class voters has also received some backlash as the party plays the blame game about the results of the 2024 election. Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democrat Party, criticized Sanders for saying that Democrats do not appeal to this group of Americans.
“This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison said.
Trump made significant inroads among key demographics that helped deliver him a victory, including younger voters and those without a college degree, according to AP VoteCast. Meanwhile, Harris narrowly carried the suburbs as Trump received more support from rural areas, according to AP VoteCast.
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