At the end of the Democratic presidential debate, while candidates exchanged pleasantries, Bernie Sanders reached out to shake Elizabeth Warren’s hand.
The Massachusetts senator declined, keeping her hands to her chest.
The two exchanged some words for about 15 seconds until Sanders, a Vermont senator, put his hands up and turned away. Videos of the moment, captured after the last Democratic presidential debate before the first votes are cast in the Democratic presidential primary, did not include sound of what the candidates said.
Businessman Tom Steyer was caught in the middle of the conversation.
“I don’t know what they were saying,” Steyer said in the spin room later. “Whatever they were going on between each other, I was trying to get out of the way as fast as possible.”
The post-debate moment came after the two left-wing firebrands were forced to confront, in person, Warren’s allegation that Sanders told her in a 2018 private meeting that he did not think a woman could win the presidency in 2020.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it. Anybody who knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I do not believe a woman could not become president of the United States,” Sanders, 78, said on the debate stage. “This is what Donald Trump and some of the media want.”
Warren, 70, gave a different version of events.
“I disagreed,” she said. “Can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women. Amy and me,” she said, referring to Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, 59.
