Former Obama adviser David Axelrod has warned that Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss shows Democrats are just becoming “a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party.”
Axelrod, a chief strategist during the Obama administration, stressed in a CNN appearance Thursday that the 2024 election results proved the left was at risk of losing the working class vote altogether after President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory.
“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 told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“The only group… Democrats won were people who make more than a hundred thousand 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.”
While he argued that President Biden had done “some good things for working people,” Axelrod said he was concerned 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 criticism comes after Trump managed to reverse his 2020 losses in the crucial states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — running up big margins among his white rural and working-class base while making significant inroads among ethnic minorities.
Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders echoed that sentiment a day earlier as he unleashed a blistering takedown of his own party in the wake of Harris’ loss.
“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,” the Democratic socialist said in a fiery statement on X.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
