CNN host Fareed Zakaria said in a column published Friday that Democratic Party influence with working-class voters has cratered so badly in recent years that it’s time to give up on appealing to that bloc.

“Democrats have many electoral advantages,” Zakaria explained in a Washington Post column. “They have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites.” 

“Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working class Whites whom they lost decades ago,” Zakaria wrote in a piece headlined, “Biden failed to win the working class. Democrats might want to stop trying.”

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Zakaria argued that despite President Biden’s policy successes while in office, he has “failed” as a political leader. 

“He leaves office with among the lowest presidential approval ratings in history and his party having lost the presidency, the House and the Senate in the 2024 elections,” Zakaria wrote. 

It’s important to understanding that political failure is Biden’s economic policy, Zakaria explained.

“Biden’s presidency has been an important test of a powerful theory that has animated Democratic Party elites for almost two decades — that the party’s shift to more market-friendly economic policy was a mistake and that the way to win back the working class was to change that orientation,” he wrote. “The Biden presidency pursued economic policies infused with this new interventionist spirit. It passed massive infrastructure and climate spending bills, explicitly designed to help the noncollege educated Americans.”

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Zakaria wrote that working-class Hispanic and Asian American voters, who felt ignored by Biden’s sharp turn leftwards on issues like immigration and DEI, gave their support in 2024 to the Republicans.

Zakaria’s article echoes a debate among Democrats over its relationship with working-class voters. Notably, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said in November that the party had left behind blue-collar voters. 

“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,” Sanders said after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.