Bernie vs. Nancy: Dems' working-class reckoning

Zoom in: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who campaigned for Vice President Harris, was unsparing in his critique this week of a party that he believes "has abandoned working-class people."

• "While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right," Sanders wrote, citing failures to tackle wage inequality and costly health care.
• "Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?" Sanders asked. "Probably not.

The scathing post-mortem drew immediate backlash from establishment Democrats — including DNC chair Jaime Harrison, who labeled Sanders' criticisms "straight up BS."

• "Bernie Sanders has not won," former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shot back in an interview with the New York Times, pointing out that Harris actually out-ran Sanders in Vermont on Tuesday.
• "We are the kitchen table, working-class party of America. And that's why we are a close call in the House right now in a year where the map is bright red across the board," she argued.
• Former Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), a top Biden ally, concurred — and pointed to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act as drivers of the strongest economic recovery in the world.

Between the lines: Given the party's erosion among working-class voters of all races, those rebuttals suggest Democrats either failed to convey their accomplishments or were punished for deeper cultural reasons.

• Some critics say it doesn't matter what Biden did: The Democratic brand is toxic because it's associated — fairly or unfairly — with sneering elites and activists whose language alienates working-class Americans.
• "The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they're disrespecting people," Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), who won re-election in a rural Trump district, told the Times.

The intrigue: Post-election polling by the Democratic strategy group Blueprint found that swing voters' top reason for not choosing Harris was a belief that she was "focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class."

• Harris and Democrats barely talked about trans issues during the campaign — but Republicans spent nearly $123 million on TV ads referencing trans athletes.
• "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you," a narrator declared in what the Trump campaign and Harris allies both found to be one of the most effective ads of the cycle, including with Black and Latino voters.

The big picture: Some Democrats say there's a far simpler explanation for the working-class shift: the ferocious headwinds of inflation, which have fueled incumbent losses around the world since COVID.

• Compounding the pain of high prices was the insistence that the U.S. economy is "the envy of the world" — a claim backed by data, but clearly irrelevant to personal perception.
• "People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists," Gluesenkamp Perez said.

What to watch: Trump has always been ruthlessly effective at channeling elite discontent. He cranked his working-class appeal up a notch this year, with aggressive tax promises and viral stunts, such as his McDonald's photo op.

• Whether he can actually bring down prices and justify his populist credentials — especially with a kitchen Cabinet stocked with billionaires — will be a test Democrats are hungry to exploit.
• "[I]f you're talking about messaging, you're talking about communications, that's one thing," Pelosi said.
• "If you're talking about what we stand for versus what they stand for, the public's in for a big surprise."

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to clarify that Republicans spent nearly $123 million on TV ads referencing trans athletes, not trans men in women's sports.