Amid Democratic mourning over the loss of the presidential election to Donald Trump, the party chair risked deepening already growing divisions by rebuking the leftwing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders for saying Democrats have “abandoned working class people”.
“This is straight up BS,” Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, said on Thursday. “[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime – saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line.”
Harrison also defended Kamala Harris, the vice-president who lost the election to Trump, for proposing policies that “would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country”.
He said: “From the child tax credits, to [$]25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior healthcare in their homes. There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
Such words seemed guaranteed a chilly reception in Vermont, where on Tuesday Sanders was re-elected for a fourth six-year Senate term, by the end of which he will be 89.
Sanders sits as an independent but caucuses with Democrats and ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, mounting strong challenges to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and becoming immensely popular among progressive voters.
On Wednesday, as Harris delivered her concession speech in Washington, her party continued to digest defeat in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the “blue wall” Rust belt states that have now gone for Trump in both his presidential election victories, though Biden won them in 2020.
At the same time, Sanders issued a lengthy statement.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
“Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
“Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.
“Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee healthcare to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.”
Sanders also decried US funding and support for Israel in its “all-out war against the Palestinian people”.
Asking if “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic party” will “learn any real lessons” or “understand the pain and political alienation” of millions of Americans, or have “any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy which has so much … power”, Sanders came to a mordant conclusion.
“Probably not.”
Harrison has reportedly chosen not to seek to stay on as DNC chair but his dismissal of Sanders’s statement provoked anger of its own, including from the reporter and columnist Glenn Greenwald.
“You and the corporatist and militarist party you lead just got your ass kicked all up and down the US, because Americans see that you only care about enriching yourselves at the corporate lobbying trough,” Greenwald wrote. “If the humiliation you just suffered doesn’t usher in some humility and self-reflection, nothing will.”
CNN analyst says Democrats should have listened to Bernie Sanders when he said the focus should be “on bread and butter issues.”
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 6, 2024
“A lot of people attacked him for that, saying, well, are you saying cultural politics don’t matter? He wasn’t saying that.” pic.twitter.com/1Y9FE0WSlj
Elsewhere, a political historian’s contention that Democrats should have listened to Sanders spread rapidly on social media, in video viewed millions of times.
“One of the things that Bernie Sanders has been saying since at least 2014 has been about how the Democratic party … needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues,” Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told CNN.
Bread-and-butter issues including inflation and the cost of living featured prominently in exit polls on Tuesday, in an election that produced a resounding win for Trump over the vice-president, Kamala Harris.
“A lot of people attacked him for that, saying, ‘Well, are you saying that cultural politics don’t matter?’ That’s not what he was saying. He was saying, ‘We need to focus on these things.’”
By midday on Thursday, one video of Rigueur’s remarks had been viewed more than 6.5 million times on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
