A progressive strategist on Thursday called out former President Barack Obama for pushing the Democratic Party to pander to social elites and abandon the working class.
ua reportage from “the hill” about the “existential crisis” of progressive lawmakers following the election of President-elect Donald Trump in 2024, the newspaper spoke with an anonymous strategist who advised the party to recapture 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, indicating that it happened under Obama.
One progressive strategist accused former President Barack Obama of reorienting the Democratic Party to pander to elites instead of the working class. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“I think Trump embraced it because the Democrats gave up on it during the Obama years, when they started chasing Silicon Valley money, and Obama wanted to attract college-educated people who think populism is disgusting and uneducated.”
The strategist added: “We’ve replaced it with a really prominent condescension.”
Since Trump’s victory, prominent progressives have criticized the party for losing focus on the issues that most affect the working class. In a statement after Trump’s victory, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.said, “It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a Democratic Party that 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’s Hispanic and black workers.”
Other prominent Democrats gave similar assessments of the party’s failure. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod recently told CNN that there is “a significant decline” among working class support for parties in the 2024 elections.
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Prominent progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have argued that the Democratic Party lost the 2024 election because it abandoned the working class. (CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
“The only group they won among — the Democrats won among — were people making more than $100,000 a year,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Nov. 8, adding, “You can’t win a national election 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, unspoken—unintended contempt for that… But the party itself is increasingly becoming a suburban, college-educated party, and it’s subject to the kind of backlash we’ve seen.”
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Another Democratic strategist, James Carvillehe recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times admitting that his party had failed on economic issues and that Trump had captured “middle-class and low-income voters” with his economic message.
Carville, who previously predicted that Vice President Kamala Harris would win the presidential election, wrote Thursday: “We lost for one very simple reason: It was, is and always will be the economy, stupid… Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by winning over a segment of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy, the Democrats have completely lost the economic narrative.”
