The Democratic Party has long been viewed as the party of the working class. Now, the party has become that of “a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party.”
That is just what David Axelrod, former chief strategist and senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Thursday, as Mediaite reported.
Axelrod talked with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the Democratic Party in the aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
Axelrod spoke of his concerns about the Democratic Party.
“I do have concerns about the way the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters in this country. 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,” Axelrod said.
“The only group they won among – Democrats won were people who make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year,” he said. “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.”
The focus of the party has changed, he said.
“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us,’” Axelrod said. “There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that.”
He also pointed out that President Joe Biden has done “some good things for working people.
However, 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,” said Axelrod, who is not alone in his assessment of the party.
NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said the party’s loss on Tuesday was a result of a “total misread” by “coastal strategists.
Todd also talked about the GOP’s increase in Latino votes.
“The Republican Party treated them the same way they treated White working-class voters,” Todd said, while “the Democratic Party has spent a lot of time treating it as an identity group.”
“It was a total misread sort of by the coastal strategists when it comes to how to target working-class voters of color,” he added. “And I think we’re starting to see sort of a working-class coalition start to drift to the right.”
