Sanders: Democrats can't 'hang your hat' on identity politics

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election because they relied too much on talking about race, gender and sexual orientation, warning that candidates shouldn’t “hang your hat” on identity politics.

Sanders, a progressive independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, said Vice President Harris didn’t spend enough time talking about how to help working-class Americans by raising the minimum wage and lowering the cost of health care.

And while he said Democrats deserve a lot of credit for fighting against racism and promoting women’s rights and gay rights, that wasn’t enough to win over the many Black and Latino working-class voters who supported Trump.

“You can say, ‘Look, isn’t great that we have in fact a very smart and effective Black woman who’s on the Supreme Court?’ Great. But you don’t hang your hat on that,” Sanders said, referring to President Biden’s appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

“What you also want to do is talk about the reality of what’s going on in the African-American community all over this country,” he said.

Sanders made his comments in an interview with Michael Barbaro, the co-host of The New York Times podcast “The Daily.”

The Vermont senator faulted Harris for not talking more about wages and the cost of health care during her presidential campaign.

“What is the vision of the Democratic Party? Who is the Democratic Party taking on?” he asked.

“What were they going to do to address the fact that so many people in America are struggling? Does it have anything to do with the greed of corporate America? The fact that you have a billionaire class that wants it all, they want to own the political system? Does anybody really talk about the degree to which the people on top own this country and want more and more and couldn’t give a damn about ordinary Americans?” he asked.

Sanders isn’t happy that billionaires such as Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, spent millions of dollars to support Harris, which he believes gave them too much influence over her campaign agenda.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” Sanders asked in a statement issued last week reacting to Donald Trump’s victory.

He declared in that same statement that the Democratic Party “has abandoned working class people” and should not be surprised “the working class has abandoned them.”

“First, it was white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” he said, referring to Trump’s gains among Black and Latino men.

Sanders told “The Daily” that Democrats won’t be able to effectively advocate for working-class Americans “unless we are able to take on the big-money interests who want to use this economy to make themselves even richer than they are right now.”

He argued that Trump’s attacks on policies promoting diversity, equity and inclusion resonated with lower- and middle-income Americans because Democrats couldn’t explain how they would improve their lives.

“It resonates within the context of Democrats not recognizing the pains that ordinary people are feeling and taking on the people who caused that pain and rallying people around an agenda that works for them,” he said of Trump’s message, reiterating his call for the party to confront wealthy special interests.

“You can’t fight something with nothing. You got to have an alternative vision,” he said.

“Trump had his vision. It was incorrect, it was dishonest, it was in many cases racist and sexist. He had a vision. He had an explanation. To my view, Democrats really did not,” he added.