People have always said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was unelectable — and they’ve been wrong time and time again, his wife Jane Sanders said Monday.
“That’s always been the rap on Bernie. Everybody always says, ‘He can’t win,'” Jane told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “New Day.” “He won the mayor’s race by 10 points. If 10 people had stayed home and bought the ‘He’s not electable’ (angle), we wouldn’t be here today.”
“So every vote and every caucus member counts,” she added.
But the doubt about Sanders didn’t end after Sanders became mayor.
“They said he couldn’t be a congressman. He lost his first election because the voters bought that. He lost by 3 percentage points,” Jane said. “When they woke up the next morning they said, ‘Oh he could have been elected had we not just voted because we thought he couldn’t be.'”
“The next time he won by 17%” she added.
While Jane is not surprised that people buy into her husband’s ideas, she has been surprised by how deeply some are “feeling the ‘Bern.'”
“I think we’ve been very surprised at not the resonance of his ideas, but of the fervor of the support,” she said.