Warren Confirms Sanders Told Her A Woman Could Not Win In 2020

[Cristiano]

After Bernie Sanders vehemently denied reports that he told Elizabeth Warren he did not think a woman could win in 2020, Warren stated that he did in fact say that to her:

Elizabeth Warren Says Bernie Sanders Told Her A Woman Couldn’t Win In 2020

Sanders denied the 2018 exchange, which was first reported by CNN.

www.huffpost.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Thanks but I'm not touchin it, sorry. I've been savaged on social media for saying I'm not 100% decided for Bernie yet. It's not fun.

 

[Eunoli]

I like Bernie. But, I think he loses this election if he's the nominee.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I like Bernie. But, I think he loses this election if he's the nominee.

RealClearPolitics - 2020 - Latest 2020 General Election Polls

The polling data isn't absolute at this point, but there is no objective reason to think he'd do much worse than any of the others.

I think Bernie was wrong to say that, and a woman can win in 2020. ...though Warren herself still struggles with swing voters. I think it is clear that sexism hurts her vs the other candidates. There is no good reason she should poll behind Trump when the other democrat front runners don't.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

The real question is, is Sanders a misogynist? Although I would vote for him over Trump in half a heartbeat in the general election, I would have serious reservations about choosing him over another Democrat in the primaries if this is the case. I want a president who is fully on board with women's rights issues. If he's not all in, then we need someone who is.

 

[Cristalle]

If he did say it, it's not because he doesn't think a woman shouldn't win. There is video evidence from the 80s saying how he thinks women should be able to win. I think it's a recognition that misogyny was a factor in Hillary Clinton's loss. What I don't appreciate is the obvious setup given that some random user went into his Slack and then made a news story out of guidance that wasn't from the campaign.

 

[Brenda Archer]

The thing that bothers me the most about this is that at least one of them is either misremembering or being untruthful. Also, if they’re starting to fight with each other that might be a bad thing in the long run. Either one would do better with non-Boomers than Biden.

 

[Ishina]

"I have no interest in discussing this private meeting any further because Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences on punditry."
Or because divulging more detail would reveal you're leaving out mitigating context.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I'm missing something in all this. Apparently Sanders stated what he believed is a fact of modern-day politics, "that a woman can't win in 2020." He didn't say that women don't deserve to win, that he's glad they can't win, or he doesn't want them to be able to win, just that he doesn't think they can. Warren disagreed. Since no woman has ever won the presidential election, so far Sanders is right. I hope Warren can prove him wrong, but so far it's not looking good.

Either way, I don't see anything particularly wrong with what Sanders said. It's pessimistic, but not unduly so in today's political climate.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I'm missing something in all this. Apparently Sanders stated what he believed is a fact of modern-day politics, "that a woman can't win in 2020." He didn't say that women don't deserve to win, that he's glad they can't win, or he doesn't want them to be able to win, just that he doesn't think they can. Warren disagreed. Since no woman has ever won the presidential election, so far Sanders is right. I hope Warren can prove him wrong, but so far it's not looking good.

Either way, I don't see anything particularly wrong with what Sanders said. It's pessimistic, but not unduly so in today's political climate.

On the other hand, though, I certainly recall hearing the argument back in the 1980s and 90s at Labour Party meetings that "so-and-so would be a good candidate but in this constituency, because the voters around here aren't yet ready for a woman/black/gay MP" (I heard that seriously advanced in, of all places, a selection meeting of the Tottenham Labour Party as an argument against selecting Bernie Grant as the local candidate).

Those days are long gone, fortunately, but I didn't agree with the argument then and I certainly don't agree with it now, when it would seem utterly preposterous, at least in the UK, and I'm a bit surprised to hear it coming from the US.

I mean, over here it would, in most contexts, be as unlawful to take a candidate's gender into account when considering job applications for the CEO or Managing Director of a large enterprise as it would be to take into account his or her colour or sexual orientation, and I don't see why we should not apply that standard to the selection of candidates for electoral offices too.

 

[Eunoli]

RealClearPolitics - 2020 - Latest 2020 General Election Polls

The polling data isn't absolute at this point, but there is no objective reason to think he'd do much worse than any of the others.

I think Bernie was wrong to say that, and a woman can win in 2020. ...though Warren herself still struggles with swing voters. I think it is clear that sexism hurts her vs the other candidates. There is no good reason she should poll behind Trump when the other democrat front runners don't.

I have reasons for thinking this. But, I've learned that we don't have polite debates about Bernie on this forum anymore. So. I'll just leave it at that.

I also think that this is still all a moot point. McConnell is still blocking election security legislation and we learned last night that the same exact Russian hacker group is already going after Biden. Unless we do something, other countries will decide our election results, again.

 

[Shiloh Lyric]

I don't agree with the stance that a "woman probably can't win". Yes, Donald Trump will pull out the misogyny stops, but he'll pull out any stops, no matter who the Democratic nominee is. Women HAVE been winning elections. A lot of them since 2016, actually. And only one woman has, so far, has ever been the nominee, from either major party, for President. And she DID win millions more votes. She only even lost the Electoral College by 77,000 votes, total, in 3 states. And that one nominee was Hillary Clinton, who came with far more baggage, and after years of Republican-honed attacks had already created serious doubts about her character for many voters. She STILL got 3 million more votes than Trump did.

So, whatever was said, the only part of it I would agree with is that Donald Trump is a misogynist and will use that in attacks. So? I'm pretty sure a smart person like Elizabeth Warren already knows that.

 

[Aeon Jiminy]

Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private 2018 meeting that a woman can't win, sources say

I don't see why we need unnamed sources for this story and it's also surprising how four people suddenly decided, after a year, that this story needs to be told now and not when it happened.

Sanders has denied this, but it's already being spoken as fact. He will continue to say that " A woman can win, a woman can win " and most likely our upcoming debate, brought to you by CNN, will thoroughly explore this territory at the expense of actually informing us what any of these candidates are going to do about about our world on fire.

I really wish that these four nameless people had cared to discuss this a year ago and let us discuss what we really need to be discussing today. Women, men , children, and animals can also lose.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I mean, over here it would, in most contexts, be as unlawful to take a candidate's gender into account when considering job applications for the CEO or Managing Director of a large enterprise as it would be to take into account his or her colour or sexual orientation, and I don't see why we should not apply that standard to the selection of candidates for electoral offices too.

If Sanders had made this argument in public as a reason that Warren, Harris and Klobuchar shouldn't run, then I absolutely agree that it would be shameful. Even more so if he had tried to block their right to run. But the context appears to be a private discussion about the likelihood of success. Is that really anything more than an opinionated disagreement?

There are many reasons that I prefer Warren to Sanders, and that I don't particularly want Sanders to end up as the presidential nominee, but this querulous prediction doesn't rank high as a sin in my book. On the other hand, if he were to win the presidential nomination and then the presidential race, I'd fully support hard scrutiny of his appointments to make sure his potentially antiquated attitude didn't inform those choices.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I'm missing something in all this. Apparently Sanders stated what he believed is a fact of modern-day politics, "that a woman can't win in 2020." He didn't say that women don't deserve to win, that he's glad they can't win, or he doesn't want them to be able to win, just that he doesn't think they can. Warren disagreed. Since no woman has ever won the presidential election, so far Sanders is right. I hope Warren can prove him wrong, but so far it's not looking good.

Either way, I don't see anything particularly wrong with what Sanders said. It's pessimistic, but not unduly so in today's political climate.

I'm just wondering why Bernie felt the need to tell her that. At best, it was a Captain Obvious moment.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

If Sanders had made this argument in public as a reason that Warren, Harris and Klobuchar shouldn't run, then I absolutely agree that it would be shameful. Even more so if he had tried to block their right to run. But the context appears to be a private discussion about the likelihood of success. Is that really anything more than an opinionated disagreement?

There are many reasons that I prefer Warren to Sanders, and that I don't particularly want Sanders to end up as the presidential nominee, but this querulous prediction doesn't rank high as a sin in my book. On the other hand, if he were to win the presidential nomination and then the presidential race, I'd fully support hard scrutiny of his appointments to make sure his potentially antiquated attitude didn't inform those choices.

All I can say is that it's an argument that was heard so frequently in Labour Party meetings that the party's National Executive Committee had to change the rules (and I think the law had to be changed too, to allow it, but I'm not sure) to impose all-women shortlists in a proportion of winnable seats, at least for a while.

The Conservatives, of course, mocked and criticised this, right up until David Cameron became leader and imposed a similar restriction on his party, whereby new candidates for winnable seats had to be selected from a longlist of candidates approved by Central Office from groups inadequately represented on the Conservative side (women, ethnic minorities and out GLB candidates), with the result candidates' gender, race or sexual orientation is now a non-issue in mainstream British politics.

Certainly I'd be very angry if I heard it argued in a Labour Party meeting (I don't know how private you would consider that) that we either should or shouldn't vote for Rebecca Long Bailey, one of the main candidates for the Labour leadership, because she's a woman, though I think choosing her would be a catastrophic mistake because of her policies, just as I'd be very angry if someone tried to tell me to vote either for or against the other front runner, Keir Starmer, simply because he's a man.

 

[Cristalle]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-warren-feud-takes-a-turn-onto-the-dangerous-turf-of-gender/2020/01/13/a6bf6bee-3627-11ea-bf30-ad313e4ec754_story.html

"Two people with knowledge of the conversation at the 2018 dinner at Warren’s home told The Washington Post that Warren brought up the issue by asking Sanders whether he believed a woman could win. One of the people with knowledge of the conversation said Sanders did not say a woman couldn’t win but rather that Trump would use nefarious tactics against the Democratic nominee.

“'What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could,' Sanders said in the statement. 'Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.'”

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

The polling data isn't absolute at this point, but there is no objective reason to think he'd do much worse than any of the others.

He hasn't been hit by oppositional campaigns from the actual opposition party yet. He could well pull a Corbyn.

 

[Ishina]

Is there any actual evidence that Sanders is prejudiced against women?

 

[Eunoli]

Saying he doesn't think a woman can win in current conditions doesn't make him prejudiced. It just makes it clear he thinks that the electorate is.