Bernie Sanders Says VP Pick Will Be a Woman…Hours After Saying People Shouldn’t Consider Gender

Independent Vermont Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says he’d like to select a woman who is younger than he is as his running mate, just hours after he said voters should not consider race, age, or gender in a presidential candidate.

Sanders sat for a lengthy interview with The Young Turks‘ Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian on Tuesday, hours after announcing his candidacy for president. The subject of what Sanders often refers to as “identity politics” came up in a few surprising ways.

Kasparian told Sanders that “what concerns me is some of what we saw during the 2016 election,” and asked “were their specific lessons that you learned during that election that you’re going to really look out for moving forward, and what are those lessons?”

“Yes, yes, we have been criticized, correctly so, for running a campaign that was too white and too male-oriented, and that is going to change,” Sanders said. “We are going to have a very very diverse campaign staff, and we’re going to do a better job of reaching out to every community in this country.”

It was a significant admission from a campaign that hasn’t always acknowledged flaws in its outreach efforts.

Later in the interview, Uygur asked Sanders  “What are the attributes you would look for in a vice president?”

“I think we would look for somebody who is maybe not of the same gender that I am, and maybe somebody might be a couple of years younger than me,” Sanders replied, adding “and somebody who can take the progressive banner as vice-president and carry it all over this country to help us with our agenda, and help us to rally the American people.”

Sanders’ pledge to select a younger woman came just hours after he said, in an interview with Vermont Public Radio, that considering race, gender, or age in a candidate amounts to discrimination.

“We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age,” Sanders said. “I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”

Watch the full interview above, from TYT.

[Image via screengrab]