CNN contributor and former Barack Obama chief strategist David Axelrod has warned that the Democratic Party is losing its connection with working-class voters. Speaking with Anderson Cooper on CNN, Axelrod admitted that the party has increasingly become a "smarty pants, suburban, college-educated party," a shift he believes contributed to Donald Trump’s crushing victory over the Democrats.

Axelrod expressed concern about the Democratic Party’s approach to working-class voters, pointing out that the only group Democrats gained during this election was white college graduates who make over a hundred thousand dollars a year. He stressed that this demographic shift poses a major problem for future elections.

He argued that Democrats must change how they relate to working people, criticizing what he described as a “missionary” approach. “You can't win national elections that way and it certainly shouldn't be that way for a party that fashions itself as the party of working people,” he explained.

While Axelrod credited President Biden for “doing programmatically good things for working people,” he said the Democratic Party has “increasingly become a smarty pants, suburban, college-educated party and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we've seen.”

Earlier in the week, Axelrod attributed Kamala Harris’s overwhelming loss to President-elect Trump partly to “racism” and “sexism,” but now appears to be reflecting on broader issues within the party. Several left-leaning commentators have also pointed out the major gains Trump and the Republican Party made among key demographics. Trump has an overwhelming amount of support from male voters and outperformed past GOP nominees among black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.