Sanders: Harris campaign lack of focus on working class ‘allowed Trump to win’

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says he thinks former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election because she didn’t focus enough on working class voters.

In a Tuesday interview on “The Tim Dillon Show,” the podcast host expressed frustration about the “cover-up with Biden’s mental decline” and the fact that there was “no primary” and “no transparency” around Harris’s ascension to the nomination.

Dillon suggested that could have hurt the Democratic nominee in the general election.

But Sanders disagreed. He noted how hard he worked to get Harris elected but said he thinks her campaign was the reason she lost.

“Let me just say this: You know, I ran against Kamala back in 2020 and know her — not close — but I know her well, and she’s an incredibly intelligent, focused person,” Sanders said. “And I worked as hard as I could — I ran all over the country to try to get her elected.”

“I think the reason that she lost that election… is money in politics,” Sanders continued. “Kamala did not run a campaign focused on the needs of the working class, didn’t run a campaign focused on health care, on economics, and raising the minimum wage, or on paid family and medical leave, on housing, on all of the issues that working people are struggling with right now.”

“And I think her not focusing on those issues allowed Trump to win, in my view,” he added.

Former President Biden dropped his reelection bid in late July 2024 after his disastrous debate against President Trump, leaving Harris only a few months to pull together a campaign to challenge Trump. 

In an interview on ABC’s “The View” last month, she attributed her loss to not having “enough time” to campaign, when asked for the “primary reason” for her defeat.

“There are many factors, I think that — that played into the outcome of that election, but, I think probably one of the biggest in my mind is we just didn’t have enough time,” Harris said.