Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Sunday that Democrats should move beyond “identity politics” to connect with a larger share of voters, according to the Hill.
“It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ That is not good enough,” Sanders told a crowd at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, according to WBUR. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industries.”
Sanders, who placed second in the Democratic presidential primary this year, spoke out about how Democrats are losing ground in middle America.
“The working class of this country is being decimated — that’s why Donald Trump won,” the senator said. “And what we need now are candidates who stand with those working people, who understand that real median family income has gone down.”
Sanders, who was named to Senate Democratic leadership as chair of outreach this past month, said the party must figure out how to win back blue-collar workers.
“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from,” he wrote on Twitter last week:
I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 14, 2016
Even though Sanders was named to Democratic leadership, he remains an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Politico confirmed.
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