Democratic lawmakers are pointing fingers within their party for the “mistakes” of Vice President Kamala Harris’s “disastrous campaign,” which ultimately cost her the election, Axios reported.
“Will the big-money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lesson from this disastrous campaign? … Probably not,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, said in a scathing statement. 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.”
Progressive Democrats, including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (Calif.), echoed Sanders’s sentiment, blaming the strategy of the party’s elite leadership for the defeat, while more moderate Democrats criticized the campaign’s message as too extreme.
Bowman, who lost his primary bid this year, told Axios that “there were a lot of mistakes” in the Democrats’ campaign strategy.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.), a moderate, argued that the party needs to start appealing to a wider coalition, saying “people are sick of extremism.”
“We have to stop pandering to the base and we have to start listening to the people … people are sick of extremism,” Suozzi told Axios.
Multiple House Democrats, speaking anonymously, told Axios the election results are a consequence of party leadership.
One lawmaker blamed Vice President Harris for the loss but was “not sure [President] Biden would have been any better.”
Another House Democrat argued that Harris “didn’t really engage with moderates” in Congress and criticized Biden for “failing to leave early enough.”
A third congressman said his party needs to “pick and choose our battles” and get over “this idea they call ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.'”
“Democrats just literally attacked everything he did. We could never agree with anything, never give him credit for anything, could never say, ‘Well actually securing the border is a good idea, I just disagree with how he’s doing it,'” the lawmaker said.
