Sen. Bernie Sanders attributes Hillary Clinton’s lead over him in the Democratic primary to lack of turnout among what should be his core constituency.
“Poor people don’t vote,” Sanders says on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “I mean, that’s just a fact.”
“That’s a sad reality of American society,” Sanders tells Chuck Todd, the show’s host. “And that’s what we have to transform. We have one, as you know, one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major country on Earth.”
Sanders is coming off a near twenty-point loss in New York state, his birthplace. The New York loss compounded Sanders’ earlier struggles in large population states with significant racial and ethnic diversity.
Sanders argued that if turnout among poor Americans could be increased, he would win.
“In America today, the last election in 2014, 80 percent of poor people did not vote,” Sanders says.
“If we can significantly increase voter turnout so that low income people and working people and young people participated in the political process, if we got a voter turnout of 75 percent, this country would be radically transformed,” Sanders says.
