Amid a postmortem of how President-elect Donald Trump won the election, former Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill pointed the finger at the Democratic Party on Monday.
Last week, Trump’s victory in the electoral college and the popular vote sent shockwaves across the media, as left-leaning commentators ranged from panicking over the future of American democracy to asking themselves how Trump managed to win over voters to the point he gained the popular vote.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace spoke to a panel about a recent article from The Grio, headlined, “Why Kamala Harris lost, explained.” One quote from the piece, referring to Martin Luther King’s dream for America contested, “And if we truly interrogated ourselves, we can only conclude one thing from the 2024 election of Donald Trump: Black people are the only group in this entire country who are willing to make a dream come true. Whose fault is that?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Is it okay if I say I’m not sure at this point?” McCaskill said when asked for her thoughts about the piece. “I’m getting a little bit of a headache with all the Monday morning quarterbacking because I think this needs to sink in. I’m not disagreeing with anything that anyone has said so far in this segment. But I know there’s three or four or five things that are swirling around.”
Former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill argued that Trump tapped into voters’ everyday grievances better than Democrats did. (Screenshot/MSNBC)
While McCaskill agreed with the idea that there is racism and sexism in modern America, she instead highlighted another major factor in modern politics.
“There is the very powerful word of change and who best represents that to a country filled with people who don’t understand when they played by the rules, and they’ve worked as hard as they know how, they can’t afford to retire, they can’t afford to send their kids to college, sometimes they can’t afford to take a vacation, they can’t afford to take care of their parents,” McCaskill said. “And their grievance is deep and it’s palpable and it’s real. And Donald Trump did a better job of reaching that through fear and anger than the Democratic Party did.”
McCaskill argued that even so, the Democratic Party, as she has known it, has sought to aid those Americans who are “just playing by the rules,” but specified that some Democrats have lost touch with voters.
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Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
“I do know this. I do know that now we have to be mean and tough, and we have to be willing to accept people that don’t see every issue exactly the way we do. We all don’t have to agree 100% on everything. And I think sometimes the Democratic Party has been hectoring and lecturing about what people should feel about things, whether it’s immigration or whether it’s climate or whether it’s guns,” she said. “Those are the social and cultural issues that Chris Murphy was referring to.”
McCaskill was referring to a thread from Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who argued Democrats are “out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA.”
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“The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us,” the senator wrote.