Bernie Sanders 'Deeply Humiliated' by Democrats' Failure to Reach Working Class Voters

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Monday that he is "deeply humiliated" by the Democratic Party's inability to connect with white working class voters — a hallmark of his political platform for decades that was at the root of his popularity throughout the 2016 election cycle.

“I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business,” Sanders, who was promoting his new book — "Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In" — told "CBS This Morning." “It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”

However, President-elect Donald Trump successfully did exactly just that, tapping into the anger and anxiety of white working class voters — a strategy that helped drive him to an Election Day win over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Sanders suggested that Clinton should have won the election by 10 percentage points but declined to say whether he thought he could have defeated Trump in the general election had he defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Sanders. “Maybe. Maybe not. But this is what I do know: I know that the Democratic Party has got to stand with the working people of this country, feel their pain and take on the billionaire class, take on Wall Street, take on the drug companies.”

However, when his wife, Jane Sanders, was asked a similar question on CNN last week, she answered more definitively.

"Do you think your husband would have had a better chance at beating Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton did?" asked CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

"Absolutely," she replied, "but it doesn't matter now."

Following the July Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Sanders frequently campaigned for Clinton, making the case against a Trump White House and attempting to push Clinton to adopt more working class-centered policies.

In a September appearance on "Late Night with Seth Meyers," Sanders was expressing his concern about the lack of attention the Democratic Party was paying to working class voters and what it could mean for the election.

“To be frank with you, I don’t think the Democratic Party has been anywhere as strong as it should be,” Sanders said. “It has got to stand up with the working people of this country who are hurting, have the guts to take on the billionaire class. These guys at Wells Fargo — what they did is an outrage. How many of them are gonna go to jail? But if you smoke marijuana in this country, you get a criminal record. That’s pretty crazy stuff.”

In his Monday interview, he reiterated that sentiment: “I think a lot of people do not think the Democratic Party is standing with them. That has got to change.”

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons