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DEMOCRATS DESERTED WORKING POOR: BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER ON HEALTHCARE,
LIVING WAGES, VOTING RIGHTS  
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Amy Goodman
November 6, 2024
Democracy Now
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_ 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. _

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“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.”

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
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“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._

_And,
when you see me,
do not ask me
'What do we do now?' or
'How do we get through the next four years?'_

_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.

AMY GOODMAN: Bishop William Barber, I want to thank you for being
with us, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, co-author
of the new book _White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and
Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy_.

_William Barber
[[link removed]] is national
co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president and senior
lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the
Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School._

_Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted
by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our
reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth
interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most
pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of
voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes
provocative perspective on global events._

* voting rights
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* poverty
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* Health Care
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* Minimum Wage
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* Donald Trump
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* presidential election
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* Joe Biden
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* Kamala Harris
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