US elections 2020

'It means you're going to lose': Bernie Sanders answers Trump on rise in polls

President ponders success of ‘Crazy Bernie’ in Democratic race

Martin Pengelly @MartinPengelly Sun 12 Jan 2020


Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at ‘The People’s Caucus: Vote Truth to Power’ in Davenport, Iowa, on Sunday. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Bernie Sanders had a curt response for Donald Trump on Sunday, after the president noted the Vermont senator’s strong showing in the Democratic primary race and asked: “So what does this all mean?”


“It means you’re going to lose,” Sanders tweeted back.

The 78-year-old democratic socialist has rebounded from a heart attack last year, climbing polls of the Democratic field as the Iowa caucuses approach. In the realclearpolitics.com average for that state, which kicks off the primary on 3 February, Sanders leads former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg by 21.3% to 21%.

In the same site’s average for New Hampshire, second to vote on 11 February, he leads former vice-president Joe Biden by 21.5% to 18.8%.

Biden leads the national average by nine points and had a boost in a Washington Post poll of African American voters released on Saturday, which put him 28 points ahead of Sanders nationally with that key voting bloc.


Changing tack after a screed of complaint about his looming impeachment trial, Trump tweeted on Sunday: “Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!”

In keeping his reply short and choosing not to tune into the abusive nickname the president has given him, Sanders had a little more success than House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who Trump earlier called “Crazy Nancy”.

Pelosi told ABC: “It’s Sunday morning. I’d like to talk about some more pleasant subjects than the erratic nature of this president ... but he has to know that every knock from him is a boost.

“I don’t like to spend too much time on his crazy tweets, because everything he says is a projection. When he calls someone crazy, he knows that he is.”

If Trump’s tweet about Sanders was a projection of his fear of defeat in November, it may be that the president’s campaign team do not share it.

Speaking to the Guardian this weekend, Republican strategist turned Trump critic Rick Wilson said Sanders was the GOP’s “dream opponent”.

Sanders, Wilson said, was “the easiest person in the world to turn into the comic opera villain Republicans love to hate, the Castro sympathiser, the socialist, the Marxist, the guy who wants to put the aristos in the tumbril as they cart them off to the guillotine”.


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Wilson also compared Sanders to Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour party leader who lost a general election in December to Boris Johnson, “a very unlikeable PM [who] was able to convince a lot of Brits his opponent was too much of a risk.”

Sanders and his supporters show little sign of such concern. On Saturday, at slightly greater length, the senator tweeted: “Recently, our campaign has been the target of attacks from Trump and the Republican party – because they are catching on that our campaign is THE campaign that can and will defeat them.”

Realclearpolitics.com also runs polling averages matching Democrats with Trump in notional general elections. On Sunday, it gave Sanders victory by 2.6 points, 47.8% to 45.2%.

In the same average, Biden leads Trump by 4.5 points while Trump nudges out Warren by 0.2% and Buttigieg by a little over a point.

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Rising in the polls, Sanders takes jabs from Trump, Warren

ALEXANDRA JAFFE,Associated Press•January 12, 2020

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa (AP) — Bernie Sanders found himself on the receiving end of attacks from both President Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren on Sunday, a reflection of his rising status in the Democratic presidential race and perceived momentum just three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses.

In a tweet, Trump declared, “Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!” Sanders responded in the same medium: “It means you’re going to lose.”

But it was Warren — who has generally avoided criticizing her fellow progressive over the course of the Democratic primary — who offered the sharpest criticism of the Vermont senator, saying she was “disappointed” by a report that the Sanders’ campaign is instructing its volunteers to speak negatively about her to win over undecided voters and suggesting he is too divisive to beat Trump.

“We cannot nominate someone who takes big chunks of the Democratic coalition for granted. We need someone who will bring our party together,” she told reporters after a campaign event in Iowa.
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“We need someone who will excite every part of the Democratic Party, someone who will be there, someone that every Democrat can believe in.”

Warren also warned against repeating “the factionalism of 2016,” during which the unexpected strength of Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy produced a drawn-out and oftentimes nasty Democratic primary fight that some Democrats say contributed to Trump’s win.

Her comments come in response to a report in Politico revealing the Sanders campaign canvassing script suggests volunteers tell voters leaning towards Warren that “people who support her are highly-educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what” and that the senator is “bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.”

The Warren campaign cited the Politico report in a fundraising appeal Sunday night.

Both Sanders and Warren, who are vying for the progressive lane in the primary and largely agree on many of the biggest issues in the race, have up until now publicly avoided attacking one another and in fact have been complimentary of each other.

In contrast, Sanders has in recent weeks been going aggressively after opponent Joe Biden for his support for the Iraq War and his trade policy.

While Biden has largely stayed mum on Sanders' attacks in recent days, Warren’s broadside sets the potential for a debate-stage clash in which he’ll likely be attacked by multiple opponents. The Vermont senator has been rising in a handful of state and national polls over the past month and is seen to have momentum heading into the final three weeks before the first nominating contest takes place in Iowa.