Bill Clinton: Democrats need to 'talk to people in ways that they can relate to'
Former President Clinton suggested that Democrats need to find a better way to relate to people, as the party searches for answers amid Republicans securing control of the House, Senate and White House.
“Politics is the only business in which you can prove your authenticity by not knowing anything. You know, and I think that’s a problem, and we’ll pay for it unless we get over it, but that’s a problem for the Democrats too. We have to learn to talk to people in ways that they can relate to that explains that,” Clinton said in an interview airing this weekend on MSNBC’s “The Saturday Show with Jonathan Capehart.”
“Just go out and talk to people because I think that we’re behind in the sense that a lot of the small-town and rural people are now highly sophisticated and how they get their information,” he added.
Clinton’s comments come as Democrats have been searching for answers amid the searing presidential and Senate loss.
Some argued that Vice President Harris’s economic message fell flat, while others said it missed President-elect Trump’s growing support among Latino voters. Some Democrats said Biden was partly to blame for staying in the race too long, leaving Harris only 100 days to campaign.
Capehart asked Clinton about the future of the Democratic Party, mentioning Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a progressive who largely caucuses with Democrats and who suggested that the party apparatus bears some responsibility for the loss.
“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 wrote in a post on the social platform X. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
“And they’re right,” Sanders added.
Clinton dismissed the notion that the party is not “progressive enough” — as Capehart put it — instead suggesting that “we should have been more against big corporations.”
“Because blue-collar workers who distrust the government feel like those votes are something they can control. And they are skeptical of big corporations,” Clinton said.