A former senior adviser to Barack Obama has criticized the Democratic Party for snobbery, and disillusionment among working-class voters following its US election rout.
In an excoriating takedown of his own party, David Axelrod highlighted the Democrat failure to reach blue collar voters and large parts of the electorate who hadn’t gone to college.
In an interview with CNN on Thursday night, Axelrod said the Democrats had become an increasingly “smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party”, suggesting that they failed to appeal to people from lower-class and non-college educated backgrounds.
“The only group that Democrats gained within the election on Tuesday was White college graduates, and among working-class voters, there was a significant decline,” he added.
The former chief strategist to the Obama administration said the blue vote was only won by people “who make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year” and that the party failed to have commonality with a broad spectrum of classes in the US.
Adding: “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.”
As the news broke of Donald Trump’s projected defeat on Wednesday morning, the veteran strategist appeared on CNN to spell out to viewers that racism and sexism had severely impacted the result and urged analysts to remain “clear-eyed” about the reality of that bias.
He told the broadcaster: “Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be absolutely blunt about it: There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country.”
Anyone who did not believe that prejudice played a part in the outcome was simply “wrong”, he stated.
Donald Trump became the first criminally convicted US leader after he was elected by the American people to be the 47th president of the United States.
His extraordinary victory was an improvement on his 2016 win, and 2020 defeat to President Joe Biden.
