Bernie Sanders "feeling quite good" after Nevada loss
Bernie Sanders is unfazed by his 6-point loss to Hillary Clinton in Nevada on Saturday, saying Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation" that he's well-positioned to pick up some victories on Super Tuesday and that he's "feeling quite good."
The Vermont senator, currently in South Carolina, said he has a "major rally" in the state Sunday evening and his campaign is "not skipping over anything" there.
"But I think that after South Carolina, we have 11 states; we stand a good chance of winning a number of those states," he said. "We think we have a whole lot of momentum."
Sanders also noted that, unlike Clinton, he wasn't well-known before he entered the race last spring; as a result, he's still working to introduce himself to voters across the country.
"I am a senator from the very small and great state of Vermont. Not a lot of people know me, they don't know my experience, my 25 years in Congress, my eight years as Mayor of the City of Burlington," he said. "We've got to get that word out. I think we are making progress, but we have a long way to go."
As for minority voters, Sanders also noted that he won the Latino vote in Nevada last night. Entrance polling data taken just before the caucuses found Sanders edging Clinton among the demographic 53 percent to 45 percent. "That is a major breakthrough for us in reaching out to a diverse nation," he said.
As for his campaign's standing among African-American voters, which will be crucial in Saturday's South Carolina primary, Sanders says his campaign has made progress but that the more these voters know about his record on issues important to them, the more he'll continue to gain support.
"We are making inroads. We are doing better," he said. "Interestingly, a lot of the polling that I see is not along racial lines, but along generational lines. We are doing better and better among younger people, not so well among older people, whether they're African-American, whether they're white or whether they're Latino."
"I think when the African-American community understands my record on criminal justice, my record on economics and the agenda we're bringing forth, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, dealing with the fact that we have more people in jail, shamefully, than any other country on earth, that I am against the death penalty, Secretary Clinton is not," Sanders said. "I think as people become familiar with my ideas, we are going to do better and better."
