Warren says Sanders told her no woman could beat Trump in 2020

Elizabeth Warren has said Bernie Sanders told her
during a private meeting that he did not believe a woman could beat Donald
Trump in 2020, a version of events that Sanders vehemently denies.
In a statement issued on Monday evening, Warren
offered her recollections of their conversation, a one-on-one discussion which
took place in Washington at the end of 2018, when each senator was laying the
groundwork for a presidential run.
“Among the topics that came up was what would happen
if Democrats nominated a female candidate,” Warren said in a statement Monday
evening, detailing her account of the meeting. “I thought a woman could win; he
disagreed. 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.”
The back-and-forth represents a dramatic break for
the leading progressive presidential hopefuls after a months-long truce. The
escalating bitterness comes at a pivotal moment for both candidates, just three
weeks before voting begins in Iowa and a day before Tuesday’s Democratic
debate, in Des Moines. At the debate, the candidates will almost certainly be
asked to clarify their different interpretations of the meeting.
Sanders have denied the story, reported by CNN on
Monday.
In a statement, Sanders said it would be “ludicrous
to believe” that he would have made such a comment and accused members of
Warren’s staff, who weren’t present for the one-on-one conversation, of “lying
about what happened”.
“What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is
a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could,” he said.
“Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course!
After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3m votes in 2016,” he added,
referring to Clinton’s haul of the popular vote in contrast to the electoral
college result.
Warren’s campaign remained silent for most of Monday
in the wake of the CNN report. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, had
called on Warren to address the matter publicly.
“I know what she would say: that it is not true,
that it is a lie,” Shakir told CNN.
During the December 2018 meeting, Warren told
Sanders she was planning to run for president and the senators, who consider
each other friends, agreed that they would avoid attacking one another in the
ensuing battle for the party’s nomination so as not to further divide the
progressive movement.
While friction have been building for weeks between
the campaigns and their supporters, the candidates had so far refused to go
after each other directly.
In recent months, Sanders has gained momentum as
Warren declined from her summer high. But the race remains remarkably fluid,
with Sanders and Warren locked in a tight race in Iowa. The latest Des Moines
Register and CNN poll placed Sanders and Warren atop the field in Iowa, with
the Sanders leading the pack.
Tensions built over the weekend, when Politico
reported that Sanders’ campaign was instructing volunteers to tell voters
wavering between the two progressive candidates that Warren’s popularity was limited
to “highly educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote
Democratic no matter what” and that she was “bringing no new bases into the
Democratic party”.
Responding to the leaked script, Warren told
reporters that she was “disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his
volunteers out to trash me”. In a fundraising email, her campaign asked
supporters to respond if the “Bernie campaign’s description rang false to you,
too”.
For his part, Sanders insisted he had “never said a
negative word” about Warren, who he called a friend. He added both campaigns
have hundreds of employees, who “sometimes say things that they shouldn’t”.
Sanders has long been skeptical of the Democratic
party’s emphasis on “identity politics” but the issue has been particularly
fraught in a field shaped by younger and more diverse candidates.
In the December debate, Sanders was asked to respond
to Barack Obama’s comments that the world would be a better place if there were
more female heads of state and that many problems are caused by “old men not
getting out of the way”.
Sanders quipped that he was not only old but “white,
too”. Then he joked that it might be “self-serving” but he disagreed with the
former president.
“The issue is where power resides in America,” he
said. “And it’s not white or black or male or female. We are living in a nation
increasingly becoming an oligarchy. We have a handful of billionaires who spend
hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”
What started as the most racially diverse and female
primary field in history has shifted dramatically. On Tuesday, no candidates of
color will be on the debate stage. All of the leading candidates are white, and
only one is a woman.
The field’s dissipating diversity was underscored on
Monday by the departure of Cory Booker, who is African American, just over a
week after Julián Castro, the only Latino presidential candidate, ended his
campaign.
The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, the only other
female candidate who will be on the debate stage Tuesday night, has been
increasingly vocal about the role of sexism and double standards in
presidential politics.
Last month, she wondered aloud on the debate stage
whether a female candidate with as little experience as Pete Buttigieg, the
37-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, would have qualified.
“There is a lot of talk today about if a woman can
beat Donald Trump,” Klobuchar wrote on Twitter, responding to the CNN report.
“As I said on the debate stage, Nancy Pelosi does it every day.”