Rep. Ro Khanna told The Recount that Democrats picked “small issues” in 2024, and he appeared to criticize the messaging from the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.
“We didn’t have a narrative of the empowerment of the working and middle class and an explanation that they’ve been shafted,” Khanna, a Democrat from California, told The Recount Senior Politics Producer Steve Morris in an interview Thursday.
“You don’t become the leader of the free world because you’re gonna give your people home care workers, or because you’re gonna give someone a housing tax credit,” Khanna said, an apparent reference to some of Harris’ economic proposals on the campaign trail. “You [become] the leader of the free world by telling a story: What’s happened to the American dream? We picked small issues.”
Khanna also told The Recount that Democrats would have had “better luck” if they had passed some of the populist economic proposals floated in the Build Back Better negotiations in 2021 and 2022. Most Democrats were pushing for Congress to pass proposals such as raising the federal minimum wage, paid family leave, and free pre-K and community college, but centrist Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona pushed back on the legislation's scope. Manchin, in particular, withheld his support until he convinced the Biden administration to shrink the Build Back Better Act. The eventual Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 ended up incorporating expansive investments to combat global warming and to lower prescription drug costs, while dropping the social safety net goals.
“We didn't deliver, but we also didn’t fight it enough,” Khanna said. “I mean, we didn’t say, look, it was Republicans who stood in the way and corporate Democrats who stood in the way, and we're gonna get this done. And we will get the living wage passed, we will get the paid family leave passed, we will get Medicare expanded — I’m for Medicare for all — and we are gonna get new factories, new steel plants, new aluminum plants built in communities that didn’t get the semiconductor plant or didn’t get the battery plants. We are going to have this agenda and we’re not gonna be cowed by billionaires and millionaires who may not want some of their taxes going up or who may not want this investment in the working middle class.”
“I didn’t get that that was the central thrust of the message,” Khanna said.
