Sanders blames Nevada loss on turnout

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Sunday pointed to voter turnout for his loss to Hillary Clinton in the Nevada caucuses.

{mosads}“Over the last five weeks, Chuck, we came from 25 points down to 5 points down,” Sanders told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “As I understand it, we actually won the Latino vote yesterday, which is a big breakthrough for us. But the voter turnout was not as high as I had wanted.”

“And what I’ve said over and over again, we will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout,” he added.

Sanders said Clinton, who ran in Nevada in 2008, knew the state “a lot better than we did, she had the names of a lot of her supporters.”

“I am proud of the campaign that we ran,” he added. “Obviously, I wish we could have done a little bit better. But at the end of the day, I think she gets 19 delegates, we get 15 delegates, we move onto the next state.”

Sanders also said it is “hard to say” if reports that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the Culinary Union were working to increase turnout in Clinton strongholds, such as on the Las Vegas Strip, affected the race.

“What I do know is, Chuck, that our message of a rigged economy in which people in Nevada and around this country are working longer hours for low wages, why almost all new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent,” Sanders said.

“And I’ll tell you something else, there’s issue of a corrupt campaign finance system, where big money interests and Wall Street are trying to buy elections,” he added.

“Those are the issues that are resonating.”