Sanders: Democratic Party 'has abandoned working class people'

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday accused the Democratic Party of largely ignoring the priorities of the working class and pointed to that as the biggest reason for why they lost control of the White House and Senate.

“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 in a statement about the results of Tuesday’s election.

“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he said.

Sanders’s blistering statement is the harshest and most pointed criticism of the Democratic leadership yet in the aftermath of the election, in which Vice President Harris appears to have lost the popular vote by nearly 5 million votes and Democrats lost Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana and Ohio.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said “those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.”

He cited the huge growth in economic inequality in America in recent decades, advanced technologies that threaten to put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, the high cost of health care and U.S. support for the war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?” Sanders asked.

“Probably not,” he said in response to his own question.

Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was never able to get a vote this year on his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $17 an hour by 2028.

Sanders also failed in his effort as Senate Budget chair in 2021 and 2022 to advance a $6 trillion budget reconciliation proposal to expand Medicare and address what he called a “housing crisis.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) later negotiated a scaled-down version of President Biden’s "Build Back Better" agenda with centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), but it fell short of the big ambitions that Sanders and other progressives had at the start of Biden’s term.

Tensions between Sanders and Manchin erupted in October 2021, when Sanders blew up at the West Virginia centrist at a leadership meeting during which Manchin tried to put limits on what Democrats were trying to pass, ruling out tuition-free community college.