Hillary Clinton said Bernie Sanders supporters are lucah inenglish"children of the Great Recession" who live "in their parents’ basement," according to hacked audio from a private conversation with donors in February.
The reveal comes during the homestretch of the 2016 presidential election, with Clinton struggling to connect with young voters in a close race with Republican nominee Donald Trump.
SEE ALSO: 2 Years Ago Sandra Fluke Was Called a Whore. Now She Wants Your Vote.Clinton told donors at a private fundraiser in Virginia that some Sanders supporters are "new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession and they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel that they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at allwhat they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future."
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The hacked audio was first revealed by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online news outlet, and subsequently picked up by The Intercept.
Clinton's comments aren't necessarily wrong -- supporters of Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator who challenged her for the Democratic nomination, frequently expressed great frustration with an economy that they feel offers few economic opportunities and upward mobility for young people. But the hacked audio nonetheless comes at a delicate time for Clinton.
She is very widely acknowledged to have beaten Trump in the first presidential debate last Monday, but the race for the White House is still a close one, analysts say. Meanwhile, The New York Timesreported this week that young voters "are shunning the two major political parties on a scale not seen since Ross Perot’s third-party bid for the presidency in 1992, a striking swing in public opinion that is slicing into Hillary Clinton's thin margin for error."
In the hacked audio, Clinton says "we all should be really understanding" of the position many Sanders supporter see themselves as being in.
"If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have much of a ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing," she says.
Contrasting the nationalist outlook of many Trump supporters with the progressive idealism of Sanders supporters, however, Clinton does appear to take something of a dismissive tone toward the latter.
"There is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates," she says. "And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means. And half the people don’t know what that means, but it is something that they deeply feel."
But it's best to listen for yourself. Via The Intercept, here's the clip in which Clinton says Sanders supporters are "children of the Great Recession."
And here's the clip in which she talks about the "deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we've done hasn't gone far enough." She also says she's occupying "the center-left to the center-right" of the political spectrum.
Just the latest plot twist in this through-the-looking glass election season.