Sanders scoffs at Clinton's claim he didn't do enough to help her

Bernie Sanders scoffed at Hillary Clinton's claim that he didn't do as much to mobilize his supporters on her behalf as she did for Barack Obama in 2008.

"I worked as hard as I could to see that Hillary Clinton would be elected president," Sanders told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" on Sunday.


Clinton has expressed frustration in interviews promoting her new book, "What Happened," that she "didn't get that same respect and reciprocity" from Sanders that she showed toward Obama after losing a much more closely fought primary in 2008.

"The political sin he committed was the failure to move quickly to unify the party and his supporters," Clinton told CNN's Anderson Cooper last week.

But Sanders, who was Clinton's strongest rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, dismissed the idea that he could have persuaded any more of his supporters to swallow their disappointment and vote for Clinton.

"People say, 'Well, not everybody who voted for Bernie ended up voting for Hillary,'" Sanders said. "No kidding. That's what happens in politics. If my memory is correct, in 2008, something like 24 percent of the people who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries ended up voting for John McCain."

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Sanders appeared to be referring to a YouGov survey that found that 24 percent of those who voted for Clinton during the 2008 primary backed McCain over Democratic nominee Obama in the general election. Another analysis estimated a similar percentage of Clinton supporters voted for McCain. However, exit polling conducted in 2008 found fewer Clinton supporters who voted for McCain, with 16 percent of “Clinton Democrats” voting for McCain and 83 percent voting for Obama.

Clinton also dinged Sanders in her newly released book. "He certainly," she wrote of Sanders, "shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciated that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat — that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party.”