Fmr Obama Advisor Says Dems Let GOP ‘Brand’ Them As ‘Cultural Elites’ Who Alienated Working-Class Voters

Former President Barack Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday on his podcast that the Democratic Party has allowed Republicans to brand them as “cultural elites,” which he claims is why working-class voters have left the party.

Following President-elect Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday evening, Democrats and political pundits appeared puzzled by the former president’s landslide victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote. On “Pod Save America,” Pfeiffer told guest and anti-Trump Republican strategist Sarah Longwell that while critiquing Democrats for “woke” ideology is popular among the party’s strategists, the party is also struggling with working-class voters due to losing the “branding war” to Republicans.

“It’s such a hard thing because there’s been a bunch of people — like a great way to get attention right now is to go on like Fox News, and say, as a Democratic strategist, and say, ‘Democrats are too woke. They do all these things, like they should stop saying Latinx and all these things,’” Pfeiffer said. “Then you’re like, ‘Well, when did Kamala Harris do those things … in this campaign.’”

“So I say that only because we have a broader branding problem as a party. We have allowed the Republicans to brand us as the party of cultural elites. So we have this cultural disconnect from working-class voters of all races that is preventing them from liking us,” Pfeiffer added. “Despite the fact that we just laid out our policies and Trump’s policies in a blind taste test, they’re gonna pick ours almost every single time — on economic issues, right? Higher minimum wage, tax cuts for the middle class, raising taxes on the wealthy, protect Social Security, Medicare, all those things. But they don’t trust us to do those things because they don’t believe that’s who we’re fighting for or what we’re focused on. So we’ve absolutely lost a branding war here and we have to, I think, for the party we have to really think about how we fix that.”