Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Sen. Bernie Sanders and his support network of being responsible for disunity within the Democratic Party.
In a Friday podcast, Clinton called the behavior of Sanders supporters “distressing,” assigning blame to them for the outcome of the 2016 election. Clinton beat Sanders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, but not after a bitter primary contest in which the Vermont independent ran a surprisingly competitive campaign.
“All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with his campaign were urging people to vote third-party, urging people not to vote,” Clinton, 72, told Emily Tisch Sussman on her podcast Your Primary Playlist. “It had an impact.”
Clinton lauded former President Barack Obama’s behavior during the 2008 election, when he defeated her for the party’s nomination, claiming he helped unify the Democratic Party in a way Sanders did not eight years later.
“That cannot happen again,” she said, alluding to the 2020 election. “I don’t care who the nominee is. I don’t care. As long as it’s somebody who can win, and as long as it’s somebody who understands politics is the art of addition, not subtraction.”
Clinton additionally categorized the first-in-the-nation caucuses in Iowa, where some polls show Sanders in the lead ahead of Monday’s event, as being “undemocratic.” She criticized how the caucuses limit voting to one evening, claiming it prevents Iowans with night shifts from voting.
“It is a very undemocratic way of picking a nominee,” she said. “It just makes no sense.”
Over the past month, Clinton has taken several shots at the liberal senator. She sided with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren after her campaign accused Sanders of saying a woman couldn’t win the presidency. Though Sanders, 78, denied Warren’s accusation, Clinton asserted that the remark was part of a “pattern.”
In a four-part documentary series, which premieres in March on Hulu, Clinton also said “nobody likes” the Vermont senator.
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to work with him. He got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” she said.
Sanders chided Clinton last week over the criticism, accusing her of using divisive rhetoric. “Secretary Clinton did indicate, and I was glad to hear this, that she would support the Democratic nominee, and if that’s me, I’ll look forward to her support,” he said.
