Amid Democratic mourning over the presidential election loss to Donald Trump, the party chairman risked deepening already growing divisions by rebuking left-wing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for saying Democrats were “failing the working class have left”.

“This is straight up BS,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said Thursday. “(Joe) Biden was the most pro-labor president of my lifetime — he saved union pensions, created millions of good-paying jobs and even marched in a picket line.”

Harrison also defended Kamala Harris, the vice president who lost the election to Trump, for proposing policies that “would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people in this country.”

He said: “From the child tax credits up to ($)25,000 for a home down payment to Medicare that covers the cost of seniors’ health care in their homes. There are a lot of post-election recordings and this one isn’t a good one.

Such words seemed to ensure a chilly reception in Vermont, where Sanders was re-elected on Tuesday to a fourth six-year term in the Senate, at the end of which he will be 89.

Sanders sits as an independent but is in talks with Democrats and ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, firmly challenging Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and becoming immensely popular among progressive voters.

On Wednesday, as Harris delivered her concession speech in Washington, her party continued to digest defeat in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, says the ‘blue wall’ Rust Belt, which has now gone for Trump in both of his presidential election victories, although Biden won them . in 2020.

At the same time, Sanders issued a lengthy statement.

“It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that a Democratic party that has failed the working class would find that the working class has failed them,” Sanders said.

“First it was the white working class, and now it’s also Latino and black workers. While Democratic leaders defend the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they are right.

“Today, while the very wealthy are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Incredibly, real inflation-based weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were fifty years ago.

“Despite an explosion of technology and labor productivity, many young people today will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them fear that artificial intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.

“Despite spending far more per capita than other countries, today we remain the only wealthy country that does not guarantee health care for all as a human right and we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among the big countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.”

Sanders also denounced US funding and support for Israel in its “all-out war against the Palestinian people.”

The question of whether “big money interests and highly paid consultants who control the Democratic party” will “learn real lessons” or “understand the pain and political alienation” of millions of Americans, or “have any idea about how to confront” the increasingly powerful oligarchy that has so much… power,” Sanders came to a biting conclusion.

“Probably not.”

Harrison has reportedly opted not to remain as DNC chairman, but his rejection of Sanders’ statement sparked anger of its own, including from reporter and columnist Glenn Greenwald.

“You and the corporatist and militaristic party you lead have been taken down across the US because Americans see that all you care about is enriching yourselves through corporate lobbying,” Greenwald wrote. “If the humiliation you just suffered doesn’t lead to humility and self-reflection, nothing will.”

Elsewhere, a political historian’s claim that Democrats should have listened to Sanders spread quickly on social media, with the video being viewed millions of times.

“One of the things Bernie Sanders has been saying since 2014 is about the way the Democratic party … should talk about bread-and-butter issues,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. , told CNN.

Bread-and-butter issues including inflation and the cost of living featured prominently in exit polls on Tuesday, in an election that gave Trump a resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“A lot of people attacked him for that and said, ‘Are you saying cultural politics don’t matter?’ That’s not what he said. He said, ‘We have to focus on these things.’

As of Thursday afternoon, a video of Rigueur’s comments had been viewed more than 6.5 million times on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Read more about the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage