Bernie Sanders would lose Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other swing states, Sen. Claire McCaskill told NBC News on Wednesday, escalating warnings from Hillary Clinton supporters that the senator from Vermont would be incapable of winning a general election and hurt the party in swing states.
“I think it would be absolutely impossible for a self-declared socialist to win states like Missouri,” McCaskill said Wednesday, echoing comments she made that were printed earlier in the New York Times. “And you've got to win states like Missouri if you want to win the presidency. States like Indiana, states like Ohio, states like Pennsylvania. It is very hard I think for most Americans to see how socialism would cure the problems that we are facing right now.”
She added: “The Republicans want Bernie Sanders” as the Democratic nominee.
McCaskill said it would be “unfair” to compare Trump to Sanders, but said “they are both tapping in to anger, they are both tapping in to a huge number of people in this country that have lost faith that the constitutional government we were given, which requires compromise, is working.”
She said the actual way to fix the political system requires experience and compromise. “We have to bring the country together, not nominate people that sit on the opposite ends of the spectrum because people are angry and they want to blow everything up,” she said.
McCaskill also criticized Sanders for telling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the Human Rights Campaign – who have all backed Clinton – are part of the “establishment.”
“I have fought the establishment, run primaries, my entire career,” she said. “I think that for Planned Parenthood, or NARAL, or the Human Rights Campaign to be considered the establishment, someone's not paying close attention to the way American politics works.”
