Biden: Dems ignored middle class in 2016 campaign

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday said that Democrats and Hillary Clinton failed to keep a focus on the middle class during the 2016 presidential election they lost to President Trump, according to Mediaite.

“This is the first campaign that I can recall where my party did not talk about what it always stood for, and that is how to maintain a burgeoning middle class,” Biden said at an event at the University of Pennsylvania.

“And the truth of the matter is you didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making 60,000 bucks a year and a wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant and they’re making 90 grand and they’ve got two kids and they can’t make it and they’re scared.”

{mosads}President Trump upset Clinton in part on the strength of his appeal to white middle- and working-class voters. Trump was the first Republican in decades to win the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Biden noted that many voters felt they weren’t being heard during the election and pointed to the “angry white men” who backed Trump and have been called a “racist.” The former vice president said that many of them “voted for a black man twice in a row.”

Biden, who left office earlier this year, is working at the University of Pennsylvania on foreign policy and continuing his efforts on his “moonshot” initiative to develop a cure for cancer.