Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) decided not to press the issue Tuesday night after Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) denied her claim that he expressed doubt that a woman could be elected president.
CNN reported this week that the Vermont senator told Warren during a private meeting in 2018 that he did not think a woman could win a general election against President Trump.
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t say it,” Sanders said from the debate stage when asked about his alleged remark. “Anybody knows me knows that it is incomprehensible that I think that a woman couldn’t be president of the United States.”
“There’s a video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States,” Sanders continued, adding that in 2015 he deferred to Warren when it looked as if she might run for president.
“Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes,” said the progressive independent, who lost the Democratic nomination to Clinton in 2016. “How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become president of the United States?”
Despite Sanders’s denials, the moderator then asserted that he had in fact said a woman couldn’t best Trump and asked how Warren how she responded when she heard the comment.
“I disagreed,” Warren stood by her previous confirmation of the CNN report but then pivoted to expressing solidarity with Sanders. “Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie.”
In the course of his answer, Sanders said that he plans to do “everything in my power” to make support the eventual Democratic nominee regardless of gender “in order to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country.”
Warren also made an electability argument on behalf of herself and the other female candidate on stage, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
“The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women, Amy [Klobuchar] and me,” she said.“And the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the past 30 years is me.”