U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spoke with BBC Radio 4 and said, “A lot of the people are saying, it was Joe Biden’s fault that Kamala Harris lost the election. Just Joe Biden. He should have gotten out earlier. Not true.” He added, “It was the fault of Kamala Harris and her consultants.”
Sanders, who campaigned for Harris, said that the former Vice President lost the US election because she “did not run a campaign designed to speak to the American working class.”
He added, “What the campaign was about, and I worked very hard to try to elect her, I ran all over the country trying to elect Kamala Harris, and begged them, talk to the needs of the working class. Talk about raising the minimum wage to a living wage. Talk about real healthcare reform. Talk about building the kinds of massive amounts of housing that we need and putting checks on landlords’ greed on housing.”
“A lot of the people are saying, it was Joe Biden’s fault that Kamala Harris lost the election… Not true.”
Senator Bernie Sanders says that Harris lost the US election because she ‘did not run a campaign designed to speak to the American working class’.
#R4Today— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) May 30, 2025
Sanders complained that the Harris campaign, instead, featured their “billionaire friends” — Sanders mentions Mark Cuban — and spent more time with the “very conservative Republican,” former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, than time speaking to the issues that would resonate with working class people.
While Sanders said he appreciates the courage it took for Cheney to speak out and campaign against her own party, the Senator implied that the time Harris spent with Cheney (“almost than with anyone else”) sent out the wrong message to voting Democrats and the working class people — and lost a “winnable” election.
“In my mind,” Sanders said, “that was a campaign that absolutely should have been winnable.”