Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders warned on The New York Times’ “The Opinions” podcast Monday that the Democratic Party’s survival is not guaranteed.
The Democratic Party’s favorability stands at just 33.4%, according to the RealClearPolling average. Sanders said on the podcast that the party’s survival hinged upon opening up to the masses instead of catering to elites.
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“When I ran for president, you know, one of the things that I learned is there ain’t much of a Democratic Party. There are people on the top,” Sanders said. “When I think about a party, I think about the involvement of large numbers of people at the grassroots level … People disagree. They yell and shout at each other. As people have said, democracy is kind of messy.”
“But I think sometimes when people think about the Democratic Party, they think of these cocktail parties in New York City or LA, where wealthy people mingle with consultants, mingle with the leadership. That’s not much of a party,” he added. “That’s really kind of an elitist institution. So, one of the things that I believe — if the Democratic Party is to survive, maybe it will, maybe it won’t — the transformation has to be to open the doors, to bring in millions of people, to hear what they have to say, to have them start running for office, etc.”
Sanders ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020. He asserted on “Flagrant” in May that both of his campaigns experienced “hatred” from the “Democratic establishment.”
“[T]he establishment did not want to open the door. They hated the idea for all these people whose hands were a little bit dirty, who didn’t have PhDs or weren’t wealthy — imagine walking in: ‘It’s my party, man. You ain’t getting in. We will fight you in the most ruthless ways that we can.’ And that’s the struggle,” he said at the time. “Are they gonna open the door, or are they prepared to lose elections, literally, and … go down with the Titanic?”
Sanders also blamed Harris’ 2024 election loss on the Democratic Party neglecting working-class voters in a November 2024 statement posted to X.
Moreover, a New York Times analysis of voter registration data released in August found that the Democratic Party experienced a decline of around 2.1 million registered voters between 2020 and 2024. A May Puck/Echelon poll also found that likely voters largely viewed the Democratic Party as “liberal, weak, corrupt.”
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