ICYMI: Sanders: Democratic Party Has Been A “Failure” For The Last 15 Years

Last night at an event in Mississippi, Senator Bernie Sanders stoked the fires of the ongoing Democratic civil war by calling the national party a “failure” for the last 15 years. With outside groups already warning the Democrats against mixed messaging in the midterms and heading into a 2020 nomination fight, comments like these won’t help unite the party.

SENATOR SANDERS: “The business model for the Democratic Party for the last fifteen years or so has been a failure. Now what happened—people sometimes don’t see that because of the charismatic individual named Barack Obama who won the presidency in 2008 and 2012. He was obviously an extraordinary candidate, brilliant man, but behind that reality over the last ten years Democrats have lost about 1,000 seats in state legislatures all across this country. And you’ve got significant numbers of states like Mississippi where the government, the legislature, the senators, are all Republicans. Now how does this happen at a time when the Republican agenda is the agenda of the billionaire class and is at war with working people? How does it happen that a party that wants to give tax breaks to billionaires and throw millions of people off their health insurance actually win elections? So one of the things we have got to do, as I mentioned earlier, is make sur that the Democrats—you don’t win elections unless you show up. It’s not just in Mississippi, although we’ve seen lately Democrats beginning to show up in Alabama. But it’s also showing up in Kansas and that is what is beginning to happen. So what we are doing is trying against a whole lot of opposition. You know, the establishment doesn’t go quietly into the twilight. But we are trying to open the doors of the Democratic Party to young people, to the millennials.”