Sanders ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020. He asserted on “Flagrant” in May that both of his campaigns experienced “hatred” from the “Democratic establishment.”
“[T]he establishment did not want to open the door. They hated the idea for all these people whose hands were a little bit dirty, who didn’t have PhDs or weren’t wealthy — imagine walking in: ‘It’s my party, man. You ain’t getting in. We will fight you in the most ruthless ways that we can.’ And that’s the struggle,” he said at the time. “Are they gonna open the door, or are they prepared to lose elections, literally, and … go down with the Titanic?”
Sanders also blamed Harris’ 2024 election loss on the Democratic Party neglecting working-class voters in a November 2024 statement posted to X.
Moreover, a New York Times analysis of voter registration data released in August found that the Democratic Party experienced a decline of around 2.1 million registered voters between 2020 and 2024. A May Puck/Echelon poll also found that likely voters largely viewed the Democratic Party as “liberal, weak, corrupt.”