A progressive strategist on Thursday called out former President Barack Obama for causing the Democratic Party to focus on society’s elites and abandon the working class.
In one report from “De Heuvel” on progressive lawmakers’ “existential crisis” following the 2024 election of newly elected President Donald Trump, the outlet spoke with the anonymous strategist who advised the party to reclaim the populism it reportedly 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 newspaper, pointing to this happening under Obama.
A progressive strategist accused former President Barack Obama of shifting the Democratic Party toward serving elites instead of the working class. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“I think Trump picked it up because the Democrats gave up during the Obama years, when they were chasing money from Silicon Valley and Obama wanted to appeal to college-educated people who think populism is dirty and uneducated.”
The strategist added, “We 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 said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.said, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party that has failed the working class would find that the working class has failed them.”
He added: “First it was the white working class, and now it’s also Latino and black workers.”
Other prominent Democratic figures have made a similar assessment of the party’s failures. Ex-Obama adviser David Axelrod recently told CNN that there is “a significant decrease“among working class support for the party in the 2024 elections.
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Prominent progressives, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., argued that the Democratic Party lost the 2024 election because it failed the working class. (CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
“The only group they won from – including the Democrats – were people who make 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, 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 – unintentional contempt in that… But the party itself has increasingly become a smart, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of resistance that we’ve seen.”
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Yet another Democratic strategist, James Carvillerecently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times admitting that his party had failed economically and that Trump was bothering “middle-class and low-income voters” with his economic message.
Carville, who previously predicted that 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 times in His political career, which he won decisively by capturing a group of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy, he has completely lost the economic narrative.”
