LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, a prominent outside adviser to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, gave a dire prediction if Bernie Sanders ends up as the Democratic nominee.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner following Wednesday evening’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Richmond, a Biden campaign co-chair, said Sanders could cost Democrats the White House in November.
“I’ll talk to you as somebody who worked hard to get 40 seats and take the [House] majority back. Someone who begged Vice President Biden to go down and campaign, and so if you ask me whether Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, at the top of the ticket would hurt, yes,” Richmond said. “We would lose seats in the House, and we would not win the presidency.”
Richmond’s warnings were some of the harshest to come from the Biden camp, which has previously said that Sanders’s socialist bona fides would only potentially hurt down-ballot races on Election Day.
“And at the end of the day, no matter how important our policies are as Democrats, we should always understand that you cannot govern if you can’t win. And so that’s the important part of where were are,” he said.
Biden himself spent much of the evening attacking Michael Bloomberg, whom he sees as his main threat for the centrist lane of Democratic voters.
“He didn’t get a whole lot done. He had stop and frisk, throwing close to 5 million young black men up against a wall,” Biden said of the former New York City mayor. “And when we came along in our administration, President Obama, and said we’re going to send in a moderator to — a mediator, stop it, he said that’s unnecessary.”
In only a handful of instances did Biden directly target Sanders, knocking him for his previous votes on gun regulation and immigration reform.
“And it’s a little bit like — look, this is the industry we should be able to sue. We should go after — just like we did the drug companies, just like we did with the tobacco companies. The only company we can’t go after are gun manufacturers — because of my buddy here. But that’s a different story,” he said, referencing Sanders’s votes in Congress.
Numerous polls show Sanders remaining competitive against Trump in a hypothetical matchup. A RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys shows Sanders leading the president by 4.6 points.
[Also read: The Republicans’ 2020 plan to turn every Democrat into a ‘Bernie Bro’]
