Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’s harsh words about the Democratic Party’s losses on election night made party leaders even more angry than they were before.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” the Vermont senator said in a fiery statement after the election was called.
Sanders said that the Democratic Party didn’t talk to voters enough about or at all about issues like inflation, historically low wages, AI, sky-high prescription drug costs, sending billions of dollars to Israel’s “horrific” war on Palestine, and widespread corporate corruption.
Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison took issue with Sanders’ comments, calling them “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 [Kamala Harris’s] plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison tweeted Thursday morning.
“From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
Regardless, there is a clear gap between the Democratic Party and the large groups of working-class voters who soundly rejected their plan this election cycle.
A whopping 67 percent of voters across the country said the economy has been bad for them under President Biden’s direction.
David Axelrod — a political analyst on CNN who previously worked for the Obama campaign — also slammed Democrats by saying they are turning into a “smart-pants, suburban, college-educated party” that could keep losing elections if it doesn’t change.
“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,” Axelrod, a CNN contributor, said in an interview with the outlet.
Axelrod praised Biden for doing some “good things for working people,” but stated that the party as a whole “has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen.”
After Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss, Democrats started pointing fingers at who or what was to blame for the upset. Axelrod weighed in on the defeat alongside CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“I do have concerns about the way the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters in this country,” Axelrod told Cooper. “The only group that Democrats gained within the election on Tuesday was White college graduates, and among working-class voters, there was a significant decline.”
“I do have concerns about the way the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters in this country,” he added. “The only group that Democrats gained within the election on Tuesday was white college graduates. And among working-class voters, there was a significant decline.”
