A progressive strategist criticized former President Barack Obama on Thursday for making the Democratic Party serve society's elites and abandon the working class.
In a Report from The Hill On the “existential crisis” progressive lawmakers face in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's 2024 election, 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's because Trump chose it,” this person told the newspaper, noting that it happened under Obama.
A progressive strategist accused former President Barack Obama of turning the Democratic Party into serving elites at the expense of the working class. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“I think Trump picked it up because Democrats abandoned it during the Obama years, when they started chasing Silicon Valley money and Obama wanted to appeal to college graduates who thought populism was lousy and uneducated.”
“We replaced it with a really notable concession,” the strategist added.
Since Trump's victory, prominent progressives have criticized the party for losing focus on the issues that most impact the working class. In a statement after Trump's victory… Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.“It is not surprising that a Democratic Party that has abandoned the working class finds that the working class has abandoned them,” he said.
“First it was the white working class, and now it includes Latino and black workers as well,” he added.
Other prominent Democratic figures have made similar assessments of the party's failures. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod recently told CNN that there is a “A Significant decrease“Show working class support for the party in the 2024 election.
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Prominent progressives, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have argued that the Democratic Party lost the 2024 election because it abandoned the working class. (Charlie Tripalo/AFP via Getty Images)
“The only group they won — that the Democrats won — were people making more than $100,000 a year,” he told CNN's Anderson Cooper on November 8, adding: “You can't win a national election that way.” .
Axelrod continued, “You can't approach people like missionaries and say, 'We're here to help you become more like us.' There's an unwritten, unspoken kind of unintended disdain in that… But the party itself is increasingly becoming a party “Smart, articulate, college-educated, he lends himself to the kind of backlash we’ve seen.”
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Another Democratic strategist, James Carvillerecently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times acknowledging his party's failure on economic issues and that Trump has hijacked “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: The economy was stupid, is and always will be stupid… Mr. Trump, for the first time since 2018.” He won his political career decisively by capturing a large group of middle-class and low-income voters who were focused on the economy.
