Allies close to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are blasting progressives for their claim that Harris lost the presidential race because the Democratic Party “abandoned” working-class voters.
Following Harris’s loss to President-elect Donald Trump, Democrats from all sides of the spectrum have raced to point fingers and scramble for solutions as to how her 100-day campaign fell short of rallying enough voting blocs to choose her over Trump.
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Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sent shockwaves through the party on Wednesday after he criticized Democratic leadership for defending the “status quo” and said it should come as “no great surprise” that working-class voters “abandoned them” at the polls.
This did not go over well with Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, who called Sanders’s words “straight-up BS.”
“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 and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison wrote in a post to X. “From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes.”
“There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one,” Harrison added.
Already, strategists and analysts are looking for answers to determine how Harris missed the mark with so many voting blocs despite her targeted outreach efforts.
Despite Harris breaking records by raising over $1 billion and her campaign touting large numbers of voter registrations in the 100 days of her campaign, it was not enough to sway over battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. Harris conceded the election to Trump on Wednesday but said she will “not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”
Democratic members of Congress have been quick to offer their explanations, with some, like Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), blaming the far Left for the working-class voting for Republicans.
He said in a post to X that the far Left managed to “alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”
“There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world,” Torres said. “The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”
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Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), one of the so-called progressive “Squad” members, said in a social media video that Democrats lost because of working-class people turning to Trump.
“Our main project is to unite the working class in this country against a fascist agenda, period,” she said. “We have had an enormous setback in this election because the fascist won a lot of working-class support, which has happened before in history.”
Though not all states have been called in the 2024 election, Trump has received 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with 270 needed to win the Electoral College and the presidency.
Meanwhile, several battleground House races and a handful of Senate races remain too close to call. Republicans have flipped the Senate, but the battle for House control is still in play.