The internal debate among Democrats about how the party lost touch with working-class voters started almost immediately after Kamala Harris conceded the election.
What will it take to win them back?
Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under Bill Clinton, joined KNX News’ daily political show Countdown 2024. He said Democrats need to connect with voters by talking about the economic issues that impact their lives, like food, housing, and healthcare prices.
Listen here:
“The Democrats need to once again become the champions of working-class America – people who have not had a college degree, who really have not done very well over the last four decades, if you look at their inflation-adjusted incomes,” he said. “And that means a paid family leave. It means giving people access to community colleges much, much more easily than now. It means that people ought to have a public health care option.”
President-elect Donald Trump built his campaign on populist promises to cut taxes and bring down grocery prices (even though his proposed tariffs would do exactly the opposite). Reich suggested that a Democratic approach to populism would involve taking on corporate power.
“It would enable people to see that one of the problems they have with prices, and the reason prices are still stuck very high, is you've got a handful of very big corporations that have monopolized a lot of markets,” he said. “This rigging the system on behalf of the wealthy and big corporations, it's got to end. The system has to work for average people.”
Reich also said it’s “very important” that Democrats vocally oppose Trump’s planned economic agenda, like tax cuts for the wealthy.
Listen to the full episode above to hear more postmortem analysis from Rep. Robert Garcia, national co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, and catch new episodes of Countdown 2024 every weekday at 2:30 p.m.
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