On Monday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” CNN Political Commentator and former Obama administration official Van Jones stated that Democrats failed to see how much inflation mattered for working-class voters and pointed out that people do have to deal with inflation every day, while they don’t have to deal with abortion or voting every single day.
Jones said that while many campaigns did focus on the economy, “I think there was this kind of fool’s gold, this idea that the threat to democracy is so severe in the wake of this insurrection and in the wake of these election deniers possibly grabbing control of the government, that that was something that you had to talk about. But you also have to talk about the economy. I think the tragedy here is that the Democrats have something to say on the economy in terms of what Biden has done when it comes to 10 million jobs, what Biden has done when it comes to prescription drug prices, standing up to China on the CHIPS Act, and also the fear of what Republicans will do.”
He added, “Dobbs versus jobs, most people are going to be focused on the jobs.”
Jones concluded, “You don’t get an abortion every week. But you do buy gas every week. You don’t vote — democracy’s on the line, you don’t vote every day. You do have to eat every day. So, the price of food and the price of gas matters for a lot of working-class voters in a way that I don’t think Democrats really factored in.”
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