DNC Chair Rips Bernie Sanders’ Election Comment: ‘Straight Up BS’

Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has denounced independent Senator Bernie Sanders for pushing what he called “straight up BS” about this week’s presidential election.

Sanders, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, said in a statement issued Wednesday that Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris “should come as no great surprise” because Democrats had “abandoned working-class people.”

On Wednesday, Harrison responded to Sanders by arguing that President Joe Biden has been “the most pro-worker” president of his lifetime while asserting that several policy proposals from Harris would have “fundamentally transformed” the country in ways that would have helped working-class people.

“This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time – saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

“From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes,” he added. “There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”

Newsweek reached out via email for comment to Sanders’ office on Thursday.

Harrison previously faced criticism for supporting Biden’s abandoned intention to run for a second term and is not expected to remain the DNC chair after the party holds a leadership vote next year, according to a Reuters report citing two sources familiar with the matter.

Sanders also pointed to a drop in support from Black and Latino voters as a reason for Trump’s win. Exit polls suggest that Harris received a far smaller share of the Latino vote this year, compared with Biden’s 2020 win, with a majority of Latino men now supporting Trump.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” Sanders wrote in his statement on Wednesday. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Sanders went on to ask whether the “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” would “learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign.”

“Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?” he wrote. “Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

At least two historians have recently argued that the Harris campaign might have had a better chance of defeating Trump if they had taken a cue from Sanders and adopted some of his populist rhetoric and progressive economic policies.

Also, a number of Sanders supporters said after Trump’s victory this week that the Vermont senator “would have won” the election if he had been the Democratic candidate instead of Harris.