In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, Democrats and liberals have been grasping at reasons for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to former (and soon-to-be again) President Donald Trump. Some analysis suggests that Harris simply couldn’t escape Joe Biden’s unpopularity and his late exit from the race.
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A top Bernie Sanders strategist on why Kamala Harris lost
Jeff Weaver explains how the Democratic Party lost working-class voters.
“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden in 2020 and endorsed Harris. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”
Others have speculated that the Democrats’ continued hemorrhaging of Latino support is to blame. “We need a deep reflection about what’s going on Latino voters,” Carlos Odio, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Equis Research, told Politico.
But soon after Harris conceded the election on Wednesday, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who won reelection on Tuesday, released a fiery statement criticizing the Democratic Party for mishandling the election.
“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 wrote. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
In the hope of better understanding where the Democratic Party went wrong and what it needs to do to win back the trust of voters, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Jeff Weaver, a political consultant and longtime Sanders adviser.
By Abdallah Fayyad
By Rachel M. Cohen
