David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, on Thursday said Democrats have “become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party” ― and that led to Kamala Harris’ defeat in the White House race.
Many pundits have been upping their blame game in the aftermath of the 2024 election. But analysis from Axelrod, a strategist who successfully helped engineer both of Obama’s national campaigns, merits attention.
“I do have concerns about the way the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters in this country,” Axelrod told broadcaster Anderson Cooper on CNN. “The only group that Democrats gained with in the election on Tuesday was white college graduates. And among working-class voters, there was a significant decline.”
He continued to hammer home a point about the more affluent income bracket that Harris appealed to.
“The only group … Democrats won among were people who make more than $100,000 a year,” Axelrod said. “You can’t win national elections that way, and it certainly shouldn’t be that way for a party that fashions itself as the party of working people.”
Axelrod suggested snobbery played a part in Democrats’ failed messaging after President Joe Biden had helped working people.
“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that,” he said.
“I think Biden has done programmatically some good things for working people. But the party itself has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), a Harris campaign co-chair, somewhat echoed Axelrod’s point in a separate conversation on CNN.
“There’s a lot of work to do to ensure that we communicate to folks that the Democratic Party is the party of working people, is the party that supports immigrants, is the party that supports the social safety net,” Garcia said.
