A progressive strategist called out former President Barack Obama on Thursday for making the Democratic Party cater to elites in society and abandoning the working class.
In a report from “The Hill” about progressive lawmakers’ “existential crisis” following the 2024 election of President-elect Donald Trump, the outlet spoke to the anonymous strategist who advised the party to reclaim the populism it allegedly abandoned.
“I don’t know exactly when Democrats lost their comfort with populism, but I don’t think it was because Trump picked it up,” the person told the outlet, pointing to this happening under Obama.
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“I think Trump picked it up because Democrats gave it up during the Obama years, when they started chasing Silicon Valley money and Obama wanted to appeal to college-educated people who think populism is icky and uneducated.”
The strategist added, “We replaced it with a really prominent condescension.”
Since Trump’s win, prominent progressives have criticized the party for losing focus on the issues most affecting the working class. In a statement following Trump’s win, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, “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.”
He added, “First, it was the White working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”
Other prominent Democratic figures have made similar assessments of the party’s failures. Ex-Obama advisor David Axelrod recently told CNN that there was “a significant decline” among working-class support for the party in the 2024 election.
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“The only group they won among – Democrats won among – were people who make more than $100,000 a year,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on November 8, adding, “You can’t win national elections that way.”
Axelrod continued, saying, “You can’t approach people like missionaries, and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s an unwritten, kind of unspoken – unintended disdain in that… But the party itself has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash we’ve seen.”
Yet another Democratic strategist, James Carville, recently penned a New York Times op-ed admitting that his party failed on economic issues and that Trump snagged “middle-class and low-income voters” with his economic message.
Carville, who previously predicted Vice President Kamala Harris would win the presidency, wrote Thursday, “We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid… Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by seizing a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy. Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative.”
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