WATCH: Bernie Sanders Says Democrats to Blame for 73 Million Trump Voters, ‘We’ve Got to Reach Out To Those People’
Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah that the 73 million votes cast for President Donald Trump are “a reflection of the Democratic Party,” and that Democrats have “got to reach out to those people.”
On Friday’s edition of The Dean Obeidallah Show, the host asked Sanders about Trump and fascism, but came away with a critique of the Democratic Party.
“Donald Trump and some of his elected officials are, at least seems like laying in the path for fascism in its undemocratic ways to acquire and retain power, and with Trump, not only can you check off some of the alarming things of fascism, about hypernationalism and turning people against each other, but he in the fall actually defended violence by his own supporters, the ones who went to Portland and shot people with paintballs,” Obeidallah said, and asked “Do you think it’s overblown to use the term fascism?”
Sanders declined to call Trump a fascist, instead telling Dean “What I would say is that to my mind, it is not overblown to say that Donald Trump is an authoritarian who does not believe in democracy.”
But then Sanders pivoted to critiquing Democrats for not doing unspecified things that Trump does, and demanded they reach out to the 3 million voters who propelled Trump to a 7 million-vote (and counting) loss to President-elect Joe Biden:
It goes beyond Trump. I mean, we have got to ask ourselves why 70, whatever the number, 73 million I think, voted for him, and we’ve got to reach out to those people.
I think that there is, and I think that to some degree, Dean, I’m sure a lot of my Democratic colleagues do not agree with me, but this is a reflection of the Democratic Party because I think if you talk to many of those people, working class people who voted for Trump, they’ll say ‘Look, of course we know he’s a liar, we know he’s full of shit, but at least he does this, he does that,’ something the Democrats don’t do.
So we’ve got to figure out a way to bring our people together, Black and white and Latino, Native American, Asian American working-class people and say you know what? You need a government that represents our interests, not one that divides us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our sexual orientation or whatever. And it’s going to have to be an enormous amount of work done by the Democratic party to get into grassroots America.
I can tell you I have been talking to a number of folks recently in West Virginia, and Kentucky, in Pennsylvania, in Indiana, people who are involved in this campaign. I want to get their feelings as to why certain rural parts of the country, Democrats are so detested. And it was very interesting hearing from them. So the Democratic Party is going to have to do an enormous amount of work, really transform itself, and talk about ways to bring working class people on board, and what that means is you’ve got to represent honestly their interests.
Sanders has a long history of obsessing about “white working-class voters,” and while he didn’t specify white voters here, Trump’s voters were overwhelmingly white, and Joe Biden won voters making less than $100,000 a year by double digits.
Watch the clip above, via SiriusXM.
