A prominent Democrat strategist said arrogance is causing his party to losing working-class voters.
David Axelrod, former chief strategist and senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said on CNN that he has "concerns about the way the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters."
"The only group that Democrats gained with in the election on Tuesday was white college graduates, and among working-class voters, there was a significant decline," he said Thursday on Anderson Cooper 360.
"The only group they won among … Democrats won … were people who make more than a $100,000 a year. 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."
Axelrod added that although he believed President Joe Biden's programs had done "some good things for working people," the Democratic Party "has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we've seen."
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday stunningly won the popular vote and a 312-226 landslide victory in the Electoral College in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris. Also, Republicans captured a majority in the Senate and appear headed to retaining control of the House.
Trump won all seven key swing states, reversing his 2020 losses in the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He did so by running up big margins among his white rural and working-class base while also making significant gains with minority groups.
Many Democrats have been pointing fingers and offering reasons for their losses.
Nearly three months before the election, Axelrod suggested Trump "may well" win the electoral vote tally. However, the longtime strategist had said the former president was "not closing well" in the final days before the election.
Upon reflection, Axelrod blamed Democrats for their smugness when appealing to voters.
"You can't approach working people like missionaries and say, 'We're here to help you become more like us,'" Axelrod told Cooper. "There's a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that."
Axelrod urged his party's leaders to learn from what Democrats were forced do after the Reagan revolution of the 1980s.
"Democrats had to consider, 'How have we drifted away from our base," Axelrod said. "There are these periods of renewal but they require you to think deeply, not to lash out, but to think deeply about, 'What are we missing? Why aren't we connecting?'"