Bernie Sanders said Sunday that he is populist candidate that Donald Trump supporters should back.
The Vermont senator claimed Republican front-runner is worried about flagging working-class support.
Sanders, who relentlessly sticks to his economic talking points, suggested Democrats can capture pro-Trump voters by emphasizing middle-class pocket book proposals and soft-pedaling social issues.
“Mr. Trump is getting nervous that working families are catching on that his policies represent the interests of the billionaire class against almost everyone else,” Sanders said Sunday in a statement.
Sanders, who often avoids sharp critiques of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has of late opted instead to attack Trump, who Sanders says uses racist appeals to court working-class voters the senator says should back Democrats on economic grounds.
“The real issue is not Donal Trump’s vulgarity,” Sanders said Sunday. “It is that Donald Turmp thinks we should not be raising the minimum wage.”
“He believes wages are too high,” Sanders said in his statement, reiterating comments he made on “Meet the Press.”
“He wants to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very richest families in America. That’s not an agenda that that ‘makes America great,'” Sanders said.
“It’s just another Republican billionaire wanting to make the rich richer at the expense of working families,” he added.
Many commentators have compared the populist appeal of Trump and Sanders as both drew enthusiastic backers this year.
A former Trump advisor said the two aren’t all that different in August. “The same anger and frustration by the voters that’s propelling Trump is also propelling Sanders,” longtime Republican operative Roger Stone said.
Trump has pledged to curb executive pay earlier in the campaign, and go after “the hedge fund guys.”
Writer David Frum recently wrote an autopsy of the 2015 political year that rattled the political establishment, particularly on the Republican side, comparing the two: “A narrow focus on immigration populism alone seems insufficient to raise Republican hopes. Trump shrewdly joins his immigration populism to trade populism. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’s opposition to open borders is logically connected to his hopes for a democratic socialist future: His admired Denmark upholds high labor standards along with some of the world’s toughest immigration rules.”
Frum argues that Trump backers “aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them — and they want that older country back.”
