Bernie Sanders: Lots of 'Not Necessarily Racist' Whites 'Uncomfortable' Voting For African Americans [View all]

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Gillum, Abrams.

“I think you know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,” said Sanders. He was referring specifically to Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams, both of whom lost their bids for Governor, in Florida and Georgia respectively. The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick explained that Sanders specifically referenced attacks the senator termed racist in ads run against the two candidates.

Sanders also attributed the less than blue wave-y results from Tuesday to the fact that some Democrats ran on a less left or more conservative Democratic platform. “Conservative Democrats” didn’t excite voters or “bring the kind of new people, new energy that they needed and ended up doing quite poorly.”

Among the Democrats who lost their races was the Democratic candidate in the Vermont gubernatorial race, Christine Hallquist, the nation's first transgender candidate for governor. She ran on a platform that included a $15 an hour minimum wage, the creation of a paid family medical leave program, working with like-minded states to implement universal healthcare cooperatives, and protecting collective bargaining and workers rights.

Voters in the Green Mountain State returned Republican Phil Scott for his second term. Scott made news this year when he vetoed both a raise in the minimum wage and the establishment of a paid family leave program and revealed that Vermont had contracted with a for-profit prison to house some of the state's incarcerated population in a facility in Mississippi.

Apparently, there's a lot of work to be done in many states, including Vermont.

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/bernie-sanders-lots-of-not-necessarily-racist-whites-uncomfortable-voting-for-african-americans-gillum-abrams/