David Axelrodformer chief strategist and senior advisor to the president Barack Obamawarned Democrats that they are losing the working class by increasingly becoming “a smart, suburban, educated party” on Thursday.

Discuss the Vice President Kamala Harris defeat to the president-elect Donald Trump on CNN, Axelrod told the anchor Anderson Cooper:

I am concerned about how the Democratic Party relates to working class voters in this country. The only group Democrats gained in Tuesday’s election were white college graduates, and among working-class voters there was a significant decline. The only group they won among – the Democrats won – were those who made over a hundred thousand dollars a year. 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.

He warned: “You can’t approach workers like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There is a kind of tacit disdain, an involuntary disdain there,” before concluding that even if the president Joe Biden had done “good things for workers,” the “party itself has increasingly become a smart, suburban, educated party and it lends itself to the kind of backlash we have seen.”

NBC News Chief Political Analyst Chuck Todd does the same assessment Tuesday, arguing that the Democratic Party’s defeat was ultimately due to a “total misinterpretation” by “coastal strategists.”

Regarding the Republican Party’s gains among Latino voters, Todd noted that “the Republican Party has treated them the same way it has treated white working-class voters,” while “the Democratic Party has spent a lot of time to treat it as an identity group.

“Coastal strategists have completely misinterpreted this idea when it comes to targeting working-class voters of color,” he concluded. “And I think we’re starting to see a sort of working class coalition starting to drift to the right. »

Watch above via CNN.

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