David Axelrod Says Democrats’ Problem Is They’re Becoming ‘A Smarty-Pants, Suburban, College-Educated Party’
David Axelrod, the former chief strategist and senior adviser to President Barack Obama, warned Democrats they were losing the working class by increasingly becoming “a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party,” on Thursday.
Discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat to President-Elect Donald Trump on CNN, Axelrod told anchor Anderson Cooper:
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. The only group they won among– 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.
He warned, “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,” before concluding that while President Joe Biden had done “some good things for working people,” 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.”
NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd made a similar assessment on Tuesday, arguing that the Democratic Party’s loss ultimately came down to a “total misread” by “coastal strategists.”
On the Republican Party’s gains with Latino voters, Todd noted that “the Republican Party treated them the same way they treated White working-class voters,” 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 concluded. “And I think we’re starting to see sort of a working-class coalition start to drift to the right.”
Watch above via CNN.
