Democratic strategist David Axelrod agreed with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy’s assessment of the Democratic Party following Vice President Harris’s loss to President-elect Trump in the 2024 White House race on CNN Thursday.
“The people pulling the strings in the Democratic Party, get rid of them, they’ve lost the plot. Tonight it is on the Democrats,” Portnoy said on Wednesday, later adding “they gotta look themselves in the mirror, this moral superiority complex they have, this arrogance they have, it’s not working,” he added. “It’s time to wake up and see that.”
Axelrod, a former chief strategist for ex-President Obama’s campaigns, largely concurred with Portnoy’s observation of the party.
“I absolutely think that that’s what it is,” Axelrod said during his Thursday appearance on CNN. “I don’t know if I put it just that way, but I think that he’s on point there.”
The veteran strategist disagreed with Portnoy that the election outcome was a “ringing endorsement” of Donald Trump “as much as a rejection of the — of incumbency, but also of this attitude that he’s speaking of.”
Following Harris’s defeat in the contest, where she lost all seven swing states and Trump made gains in some Democratic strongholds, some argued, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), that the party has abandoned the working class. Others, like Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, pushed back, arguing that President Biden was the “most-pro worker President of my life time.”
“I think we owe people the respect for what they do and what they mean, you know, and all these blue-collar workers and people who do things with their hands in the back, they make this country go,” Axelrod said, adding that those voters “feel like they are thought of as less and that their priorities are not the priorities of the Democratic Party.”
Axelrod said on Wednesday that “racial bias” and “sexism” had some impact on the outcome of the election.
“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,” Axelrod said while also later praising Trump’s team for running a “very smart” campaign.
