Activist Bishop William Barber slams Dems for abandoning the working poor

“Why is it that the issues that most of the public agrees with — healthcare, living wages, voting rights, democracy — why is it that those issues weren’t more up front?” We speak to Bishop William Barber about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s failed election campaigns, Donald Trump’s election as president and the urgent need to unite the poor and working class. Barber is the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and a co-author of the book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. He urges the Democratic Party to recenter economic security and poverty alleviation in its platform and draws on historical setbacks for U.S. progressive policies to encourage voters to “get back up” and “continue to fight.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump and his allies celebrated his election victory with calls to implement the far-right policy plan to overhaul the federal government, known as Project 2025, as Republicans also took the Senate and will probably take the House.

Meanwhile, at the White House, President Biden Thursday said he had called President-elect Trump to congratulate him and promised a peaceful transition of power.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The struggle for the soul of America, since our very founding, has always been an ongoing debate and still vital today. I know for some people it’s a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made. I’ve said many times, you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.

Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans, bring down the temperature. I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden spoke in the Rose Garden a day after Vice President Kamala Harris conceded her loss in a speech at her alma mater Howard University.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our look at where Democrats went wrong with Bishop William Barber, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to increase voting among low-income residents, an often ignored but massive bloc. He’s a senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, co-author of the new book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.

Bishop Barber, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about what you think happened in this election. Respond to Trump’s presidency and where you think the Democrats went wrong.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you, Amy, for getting up this morning and continuing to say “Democracy Now!”

You know, we’ve got a lot of questions that we must wrestle with deeply. We can’t be flippant or knee-jerk in this moment. We have to deal with the fact that America has often chosen wrong and had to pay for it later. We have to look at the fact that this week 71 million, 72 million people chose to return Donald Trump to the White House despite his vitriol, his anger, his regressiveness, his outright racism and lean toward fascism. And we may not know exactly what he’s going to do, and it may take him doing it to the point that even his followers are hurting so bad that they admit, they ask the question, “What did we do?”

But Nikole Hannah-Jones said something the other day, and I shared it with my co-chair Liz Theoharis, and she reminded us that 60 years after America’s first attempt at Reconstruction in the 1920s, right after the election of 18— excuse me, of 1865, 1866, in that area, the majority of Americans went back and embraced white supremacy. And if we think about where we are, we’re 60 years now after the ’60s, after the white Southern strategy.

And what did we see the other day? We’ve got to ask a deep question. We saw most Americans, many Americans did not vote. Trump got 2 million, almost 3 million votes less than he did in 2020. Harris received almost 13 million, 14 million votes less than her and Biden received in 2020. They got 81 million votes. A lot of people just didn’t vote.

And what’s the reason? We know that in 2020, when Harris and — Biden and Harris focused on living wages and voting rights out front, that they got 56% of the votes of those that make less than $50,000 a year in a family of four. But this year, the exit polls show that it was even, 49-49. Trump came up, Democrats went down. And the question becomes: Why? Did we adequately focus on the 30 million poor, low-wage, infrequent voters that held the key to the largest swing vote in the country? We reached out to more than 12 million of those persons.

We’ve got some serious questions to wrestle with. Did white women, for instance, who are against taking abortion rights, then — but also voted for Trump and chose Trump? They’re with Harris on the abortion issue but not for presidency. Where did Hispanic men turn out? We have a lot of wrestling to do. Why is it that the issues that the most of the public agrees with — healthcare, living wages, voting rights, democracy — why is it that those issues weren’t more up front? And why is it that persons would choose to vote against — for someone who’s diametrically against the very things that the percentage of the people say that they are for? We have some serious issues.

What we don’t now have the option to do is to give up. You know, I do think there were some failures also in the media. You know, we didn’t have — I didn’t see one debate where there was a focus on poverty and low wage, even though 800 people are dying a day from poverty, even though you have a million — over 32 million people making less than a living wage. We haven’t raised the minimum wage since 2009. Not one major debate. You didn’t hear about it in the Congress. Why didn’t the Democrats, for instance, bring up living wage in the Senate before the election and force a vote on it, to expose where the Republican Party actually stood on this critical issue? Because everywhere that raising the minimum wage and paid family leaves and things that matter was on the ballot, they won. They won, in Missouri, in Alaska, in places like that. We have some serious questions to ask.

But we also — lastly, Amy, I have to also say something. Somebody said Trump has a mandate. Nobody has a mandate to overturn the Constitution. Nobody has a mandate to engage something like Project 2025 to try to take us backwards and undo progress. Nobody has a mandate to say we’re not going to address people who are literally dying from the ravages of poverty. Nobody has a mandate to say we’re going to take away people’s healthcare.

We have to get up every morning from now until and still, with every nonviolent tool in our disposal, and challenge any form of regression, regardless of who is in office. And I thought about this. When Plessy v. Ferguson came down in 1896, the activists that chose against “separate but equal” fought 58 years, 58 years until they overturned it. They got up, and they continued to battle. And so, when we get up this morning, we’ve got to go back to the same kind of strength the people had when they woke up in 1877 and there was an election to turn back America; or when 1896 happened, Plessy v. Ferguson; or 1914, when a white supremacist entered the White House, played Birth of a Nation in his Oval Office; in 1955, when they woke up, and Emmett Till was killed; in 1963, when four girls were killed in Birmingham church; 1963, when a president was assassinated; 1968, when Martin King was assassinated. People had to own their tears, own their pain, own their frustration, but then still get back up and declare that we will still fight for this democracy, and we’ll not just go away and slink away into the dark.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go to independent Senator Bernie Sanders tweeting, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Well, the DNC Chair Jaime Harrison called Sanders’s statement “straight up BS.” He said, “Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time.”

And then there was also the comment of David Brooks, who is the well-known columnist in the paper. And I wanted to go to that column. He wrote in a piece headlined “Voters to Elites” — this is The New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks — “Do You See Me Now?” — he said, “I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me,” David Brooks wrote, “feel uncomfortable.”

So, if you can —

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — respond to that and give us the facts on the number of people we’re talking about in this country? And, of course, it’s not just about numbers. It’s about what people are dealing with, millions of people all over this country, and they could vote.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Right. And, Amy, what we’ve got to do is get out of our feelings. It’s a total different thing to say our policies were such and such and such, and we helped people, and whether or not that was articulated and whether or not people got it. For instance, we know that, yes, we need tax credits, child tax credit, and we support that. And yes, we need healthcare, money for housing, new housing. We’re clear about that. We support that. But to say, “Wait a minute. We have to take a look at where we were and what’s going on. Is it a messaging? What is it?” Because what we know is in every — around this country, raising, for instance, the minimum wage, that would affect 32 million people who live every day for less than a living wage. For instance, yes, we need to deal with price gouging, but people also need money to buy goods, buy gas, buy whatever. And we have not raised the minimum wage, Democrats or Republican. We’ve sat on this issue now for 15 years. We’re talking about 140 million poor and low-wage people. We’re talking about 43% of our country that’s poor and/or low-wealth. We’re talking about adult population, people who make less — who are $500 away from economic ruin. We’re talking about 800 people that die per day. This is not hyperbole. And we have to be able to talk about this.

And to talk about it is not to say that a candidate was wrong. It is to evaluate what is going on and what is going to be our position. And why, for instance, why, for instance, that we did not make a determined effort right up front that every time we opened our mouths, we said, “Listen, if you elect Democrats, from the presidency to the Congress, in the first 50 days, first hundred days, we’re going to raise the minimum wage to at least $15 or a little bit more”? We have the data. Three Nobel Peace Prize economists won the Nobel Peace proving that raising the minimum wage would not hurt jobs, would not force more taxes and would not make prices rise. At some point, we have to take this very seriously.

And, you know, I know people — everybody’s in their emotions, and should be. Now, that’s not the only issue, though. And I would agree with Jaime in this. That’s not the only issue. There’s a lot of issues. We’ve got to — that’s why we have to drill down on this. What factor did race play? What factor did sexuality play and gender play? But we have to take serious that the fundamental issues — even in Mississippi, 66% of Republicans now say that they want healthcare, that they support the Affordable Care Act, or what we used to call Obamacare. We have to take seriously, when we look at these other states — when living wages was on the ballot, it won. You know, do need to then make sure that across the country we have these things on the ballot? But what we can’t do is walk away from them.

So, we have to do introspection. We have to look at why there was less voting. We have to look at why, when — and I remember in 2020 when Biden and Harris — when they were running. Every time they talked, they said, “If you elect us, we’re going to do living wages and healthcare and voting rights.” Fifty-six percent of those who make less than $50,000 a year supported that ticket. Also, we have to own the fact that some of this is not Biden or Harris or anybody’s fault. It started when the Democrats brought up for a vote to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and eight Democrats joined every Republican and blocked it, blocked it in the United States Senate, after it passed the House. We can’t have Democrats running rogue when they have power and voting against something at that time would have impacted 55 million people. And it would still be at 55 million if Biden had not and Harris had not increased the minimum wage for federal workers. But you run rogue when you have power, and then when you come back to the people for election, you say, “We are with you.” People are hurting out here. People are dying out here. And until we can face poverty and low wages in this country, we’re talking about 66 million white people. We’re talking about 26 million Black people, 60% of Black people, 30% of white people, 68% of Latino, 68% of Indigenous people. We cannot walk away from this issue.

And lastly, we cannot allow people to suggest that if you focus on this issue, that it’s a far-left issue. It’s an American issue. It’s a moral issue. It is a — the level of poverty and low wages in this country is a violation of our claim of our Constitution to establish justice and promote the general welfare. It is disgusting and damnable that we’ve not had a full-on dealing with this issue in the media, in the halls of Congress and in our election. Not one presidential candidate was asked at any of the two debates that were held, “Where would you — do you stand on the issue of poverty and low wages? And what are your plans to address it? And how will you lead this country?” For issues that affect nearly 50% of the population. We’ve got to face this issue.

And that’s why one of the things I’m saying, Amy, you know, Venice Williams said something in a poem that all of us ought to read. It said — she said this:

“You are awakening to the
same country you fell asleep to.
The very same country.

Pull yourself together.

Some of my Ancestors dealt with
at least 400 years
under worse conditions.”

She said:

“Continue to do the good work.
Continue to build bridges and not walls.
Continue to lead with compassion.
Continue to demand
the liberation of all.”

I would add to that, continue and seriously fight for living wages and healthcare and the end to genocide around the world and the end to the battle of war in Gaza. Continue, continue the fight for women’s rights. Continue to fight for children. Continue to fight to expand voting rights.

How much of this low vote was because of voter suppression? Why is it in a state like North Carolina, for instance, all of the Democrats at the top of the ticket won, and yet the presidency did not win? We have to deal with some serious questions. We can’t get in our emotions. We’ve got to ask serious questions because we have serious pain out here, that people are hurting, and millions of them didn’t vote either way. They just didn’t vote. I want people to hear that. The vote totals went down. They didn’t go up. They went down. And we have to take this very seriously.