Bernie Sanders: 'I'm deeply humiliated' Democrats lost white working-class voters
CBS
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday lamented Hillary Clinton's failure to appeal to the white working-class voters who helped propel President-elect Donald Trump to the White House.
The Vermont senator and former 2016 presidential candidate told "CBS This Morning" that "a lot of people think the Democratic Party is not standing with them."
"I think that there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business," Sanders said. "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 where I came from."
Sanders did say Trump shouldn't overestimate his mandate, given that Clinton won the popular vote.
Yet the Vermont senator acknowledged that Trump was successfully able to appeal to white working-class voters by tapping into a deeper frustration with economic stagnation that many voters blame on elected officials.
"What he did is tap the angst and anger and hurt and pain that millions of working-class people are feeling," Sanders said.
Some figures on the left, such as Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have offered an olive branch to Trump since his upset victory last week, noting the deep dissatisfaction with Washington's leaders that boosted Trump's candidacy.
"It is no shock to me that millions of people who voted for Mr. Trump did so because they are sick and tired of the economic, political and media status quo," Sanders wrote in a The New York Times op-ed article on Friday.
But he has also cautioned Trump over the real-estate mogul's inflammatory rhetoric, writing that he was "deeply distressed to hear stories of Americans being intimidated and harassed in the wake of Mr. Trump's victory."
"There is no compromise on racism, bigotry, xenophobia and sexism," Sanders wrote. "We will fight it in all its forms, whenever and wherever it re-emerges."