Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) blamed the Democratic Party’s poor performance in the 2024 election on unpopular positions on foreign policy and ineffective messaging on inflation in an interview with POLITICO.
Khanna said in an interview on “The Conversation” with Dasha Burns that Democrats became “the party of war” by standing with Israel amid the country’s ongoing war in Gaza.
“I think the Gaza situation really hurt us with a lot of young people, certainly in Wisconsin and Michigan,” Khanna told POLITICO. “We would have won those two states, but for that.”
Khanna, who has represented the San Francisco Bay Area since 2017, also pointed to his party’s failure to take decisive action on supply chain shortages and other causes of rising prices as a key factor in Democrats’ failure to woo voters.
“We were too late in recognizing how much people were hurting,” Khanna said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday and is set to air in full on Sunday. “We kept calling it transitory. We didn’t have the urgency of a plan of what we were gonna do to tackle inflation.”
Khanna also weighed in on Elon Musk’s recent fallout with President Donald Trump and whether the Democratic Party should welcome the billionaire back into its fold.
Khanna served in the Commerce Department for the Obama administration, and he said that administration helped Musk’s SpaceX secure key federal contracts to compete with industry heavyweights like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Musk also wrote a testimonial for Khanna’s 2012 book “Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America’s Future,” calling the future lawmaker “a leading thinker on how to make U.S. manufacturing more competitive across this country.”
But Khanna, who has known the former DOGE leader for over a decade, told Burns “I don’t recognize what happened to him,” condemning the Tesla CEO for politicizing the recent assassination of a prominent Democratic state lawmaker and her husband.
“The far left is murderously violent,” Musk wrote in a June 14 post on his social platform, X, reposting a commenter who erroneously claimed that the left was responsible for the Minnesota shooting and was a “full blown domestic terrorist organization.”
Khanna said Musk has “done so much damage” — but credited him for criticizing the GOP’s advocacy of stiff tariffs, harsh crackdown on international students and proposal to deepen the U.S. deficit by about $2.8 trillion over the next decade.
“My hope is just that he’s not going to continue to enable an extreme agenda that hurts innovation, which is what the Trump administration has pursued,” Khanna said in the interview.
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