Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into the Democratic Party in a speech Saturday night in which he said the party’s strategy is “an absolute failure.”
The comment from the 2016 Democratic primary runner-up came during an address at the annual People’s Summit in Chicago. Sanders said he gets asked frequently how the Democratic Party lost to Trump, and he told the audience, “My answer is that Trump didn’t win the election, the Democratic Party lost the election.”
CNN reported that while Sanders made these remarks members of the audience chanted, “Bernie would have won.” Sanders’ former campaign manager Jeff Weaver told The Washington Post that the Vermont senator is open to running in 2020. Sanders would be 80 years old on election day.
He has frequently made this criticism of the Democratic Party, and on Saturday referenced the recent success of the Labour Party in Britain to show what the Democrats could aim to do. Sanders said Labour didn’t move to the right, “they won those seats by standing [up] to the ruling class of the UK.”
“Unfortunately, to a large degree, the Democratic leadership has ignored the needs of working people – black workers, white workers, Latino workers, Asian American workers and Native American workers in almost half the states in our country,” Sen. Sanders said. “That has got to change. The working people of Mississippi and Wyoming, of South Carolina and Oklahoma, of Texas and Kansas, of Nebraska and Utah and many other states will support a progressive agenda – if we bring that agenda to them.”