'This is straight up BS': DNC Chair slams Bernie Sanders for saying Democrats 'abandoned working class'

As Democrats continue to mourn their embarrassing loss in the 2024 US presidential election to Donald Trump, the party’s chair slammed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s critique of US Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. Hours after Harris formally conceded defeat to Trump, Sanders claimed that the party “abandoned the working class people” during the campaign trail.

The Democratic Party Chair, Jaime Harrison, rejected Sanders’ claim, risking deepening the cracks within the party. “This is straight-up BS,” the DNC chair said on Thursday. “[Joe] 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," he added.

Harrison went on to defend Harris for proposing policies that would have “fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country.”

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This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- 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… https://t.co/6s4iR5Xtdq

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) November 7, 2024

“From the child tax credits to [$]25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior healthcare in their homes. There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one," Harrison wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Tussle between Sanders’s progressive ideas and Democrats’ moderate approach

On Tuesday, Sanders was re-elected as the Senator of Vermont for a fourth six-year term, by the end of which he will be 89. The progressive political veteran sits as an independent but is part of the caucuses with the Democrats. Sanders rose to fame after he ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020 and posed a strong challenge to both Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US President Joe Biden.

Harris’s performance in the 2024 presidential elections garnered scrutiny after she lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the “blue wall” Rustbelt states that went to Trump. Hours after Harris’s heartfelt address at her alma mater Howard University, Sanders issued a lengthy statement highlighting what went wrong.

“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,” the Vermont Senator wrote on Wednesday.

“Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago."

“Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee healthcare to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave," he added.

Sanders went on to decry the Biden administration’s decision to fund and support Israel in its  “all-out war against the Palestinian people”. Contrary to Harrison’s dismissal, several political analysts said that Democrats should have listened to Sanders and focused on the “bread and butter” issue.

“One of the things that Bernie Sanders has been saying since at least 2014 has been about how the Democratic party … needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues,” Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told CNN. “A lot of people attacked him for that, saying, ‘Well, are you saying that cultural politics don’t matter?’ That’s not what he was saying. He was saying, ‘We need to focus on these things,’” she added.

With inputs from agencies.