Barack Obama‘s former chief strategist warned that the Democratic party was losing the working class by becoming a ‘smarty pants, suburban, college-education party’ following Kamala Harris‘ defeat in Tuesday’s presidential election.
Speaking to CNN‘s Anderson Cooper, David Axelrod, a contributor on the news channel, weighed in on why he believed Democrats lost to Republican Donald Trump, and noted how he had ‘concerns about the way the Democratic party relates to working class voters in this country’.
Discussing the decline of working class Democrat voters, Axelrod explained how the only group the political party gained in the election ‘was White college graduates’ who ‘make more than a hundred dollars 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’.
He also advised that ‘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 did, however, praise President Joe Biden’s efforts, stating that he ‘done programmatically good things for working people’ but highlighted how the Democratic 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 CNN contributor earlier this week spoke about how ‘racism and sexism’ had played a role in the vice president’s stunning defeat.
‘Let’s be absolutely blunt about it,’ he said. ‘There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country, and anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong.’
He added: ‘I am not saying that was the main reason that Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won.’
Axelrod’s comments come as Harris’ campaign boss was grilled last night for ‘personally’ getting the election ‘so wrong’ after the Democrat presidential nominee conceded election defeat to Donald Trump.
Speaking on CNN Rep. Roberto Garcia, a co-chair of Harris’ campaign, was questioned by anchor Jake Tapper on why the Democratic party lost votes from Latino men to Trump.
Garcia affirmed that Harris ‘won the Latino vote overall’ but confessed that the Democrats had ‘a lot of work to do with Latino men’ following this week’s election result.
President-elect Trump made an astounding political comeback after being backed by 46 per cent of all Latino voters – the most by any Republican in modern history.
