Former Vice President Joe Biden ripped into supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaign, calling them “vicious” and “misogynistic” in an interview with MSNBC, trying to connect the movement behind the Vermont socialist to an outpouring of anger towards a Nevada union that refused to endorse Sanders directly.
Looking to land a truly low blow, Biden even compared Sanders’ online army to President Donald Trump.
WATCH:
“I know you’ve seen what’s been online,” Biden said in an interview Monday night. “The vicious, vicious threats and things they’ve said, the misogynistic things they’ve said, referring to the women who are leaders of the Culinary Union and the things that they’ve said about them. And, actually, they’ve received death threats.”
“I mean, this is way, way — this is Trump-like — way over the line,” Biden continued, calling on Sanders to disavow his online supporters directly. “And I think Bernie has to be — he has to disavow this. He has to say, ‘I disassociate, I don’t want any of those people being with me.’ Can you imagine if my supporters did that what should be expected of me? I’m not saying Bernie won’t do it, he hasn’t done it yet.”
Sanders, indeed, has not condemned the incidents in Nevada directly, instead distancing himself from his supporters on social media, suggesting that his campaign has also been the target of violence ahead of the February 22nd Nevada caucuses, and calling the demands for an apology, “nonsense.”
“Within the last few days, there have been a number of criticisms made against my campaign organization,” Sanders said in a statement released late last week. “Party leaders in Nevada, for example, claim that the Sanders campaign has a ‘penchant for violence’. That is nonsense.”
“[W]hen we speak of violence,” Sanders continued, “I should add here that months ago, during the Nevada campaign, shots were fired into my campaign office in Nevada and an apartment housing complex my campaign staff lived in was broken into and ransacked.”
Biden, though, is referring to a torrent of abusive — and even threatening — emails, social media messages, and phone calls, directed at the Nevada Culinary Workers Union which, last week, refused to endorse a candidate in the upcoming primary, and released a statement in both English and Spanish chastizing Sanders for his “Medicare for All” plan. The statement noted that such a “universal” health care plan would supercede any union-endorsed private healthcare plan and lay waste to union contracts.
The New York Times reports, though, that Sanders’ vicious army of supporters has been “directing its ire” at the Nevada Democratic party, as well as “its chairwoman, Roberta Lange — over a state convention on Saturday that they think was emblematic of a rigged political system” — and not just online.
Apparently, “60 of Mr. Sanders’s potential delegates were deemed ineligible amid a dispute over the rules,” and it triggered a fierce backlash: “[t]he convention concluded abruptly after security staff no longer felt it could ensure the safety of the participants, many of whom were yelling and throwing things.”
Sanders recently took the lead over Joe Biden in Nevada poll but the pair remain within most polls’ margins of error and Nevada is a notoriously difficult state to assess, given how distant many caucus-goers are from major cities and how skeptical many Nevada voters are of media.