David Axelrodformer senior advisor to Barack Obama During his presidency, he said Thursday that Democrats had “become a smart, suburban, educated party” — leading to Kamala Harris‘ defeat in the race for the White House.

Many experts have been stepping up their blame game in the wake of the 2024 elections. But the analysis of Axelrod, a strategist who successfully helped run Obama’s two national campaigns, deserves attention.

“I’m concerned about how the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters in this country,” Axelrod told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “THE single group What Democrats won with in Tuesday’s election was white college graduates. And among working-class voters, there was a significant decline.”

He continued to emphasize the top income bracket that Harris was appealing to.

“The only group Democrats won among was the one that earns more more than $100,000 per year“, Axelrod said. “You can’t win national elections that way, and that certainly shouldn’t be the case for a party that presents itself as the party of workers.”

Axelrod suggested that snobbery played a role in the failure of Democrats’ messaging after President Joe Biden helped workers.

“You can’t approach workers like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s a kind of tacit disdain, an unintentional disdain there,” he said.

“I think Biden has done some good things on programming for workers. But the party itself has increasingly become a smart-aleck, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash we’ve seen.”

Representative Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), co-chairman of the Harris campaign, somewhat echoes Axelrod’s views in a separate conversation on CNN.

“There is a lot of work to do to ensure that we communicate to people that the Democratic PartyEast the workers’ party, East the party that supports immigrants, East the party that supports the social safety net,” Garcia said.

H/T Medit

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