Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) called Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) a “crock” after the progressive senator said Democrats abandoned the working class, as the party grapples with President-elect Trump’s November victory.
“What a crock. What an absolute crock,” Huffman told Politico’s Playbook. “[President] Joe Biden and Democrats did more for the working class in the last four years than we’ve seen in a long, long time.”
“And Bernie Sanders — Mr. Working Class — underperformed Kamala Harris in his own state,” he added. “I just see that as a classic example of someone saying ‘the answer to this problem is the stuff that I was saying all along before and I’ve been saying for years.’”
With Trump’s victory over Vice President Harris in every swing state and increased his vote share almost across the board, Democrats are now engulfed in a debate over what went wrong, and what to do about it.
The day after the election, Sanders released a statement rebuking Democrats.
“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,” Sanders said in a statement at the time.
“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he added.
Huffman this week also touched on Biden’s historic decision to drop out of the presidential election so late in the race.
“It’s not unkind or uncharitable to acknowledge that he just shouldn’t have done it,” he told Politico. “And even by starting down that path, he set us back tremendously.”
He added that Biden’s decision to run stemmed partially from a lack of self-awareness, particularly around key economic concerns.
“I was frustrated that for the first year of our inflation problem, the Biden administration’s answer was to call it ‘transitory’ and be dismissive about it,” he said. “That was a huge mistake; deeply tone deaf. And it took us a while to correct. And by the time we did, I think we’d lost a lot of credibility on what might have been the No. 1 issue in this election cycle: costs and inflation.”
