Bernie Sanders responds to a new poll putting him behind Hillary Clinton on MSNBC. Sanders on Clinton's poll bump: I'm fine being the underdog

Hillary Clinton may be extending her lead in the polls, but once-surging Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says he enjoys his underdog status just fine.

“We are taking on the political establishment, we’re taking on the economic establishment,” Sanders told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday when asked about his lagging poll numbers in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out Tuesday. “We started as the underdog we are still the underdog. But the kind of enthusiasm that we are generating tells me that at the end of the day we are gonna win this election.”


Clinton has double Sanders’ numbers, 62 percent to his 31 percent in the poll released Tuesday. Her lead has gone up slightly from October when the former secretary of state had 58 percent and Sanders had 33 percent. Overall, Clinton's Real Clear Politics polling average lead over Sanders has jumped from 15 points on Oct. 3 to 24 points on Nov. 3. Clinton has also taken back the lead in some New Hampshire polls.

Mitchell asked Sanders what had gone wrong.

“I don’t think it’s a question of things going wrong, you know when we started this campaign we were at 3 or 4 percent in the polls. Since that point we have done extremely well in many states around this country,” Sanders replied.

He touted the large number of individual campaign contributors — Sanders has sworn off super PACs — and the large crowds who show up at his events.

In the interview, Mitchell also pointed to poll numbers that show people aren’t as concerned about the controversy regarding Clinton’s use of a private email account and server while she was secretary of state. In November, 42 percent believed it was an important factor, compared to 48 percent who didn’t see it as one. That number has decreased since October when 47 percent saw them as an issue and 44 percent saw it as unimportant.

“Are you sorry now that you basically took her off the hook — gave her a pass on that in the debate?” Mitchell asked, referring to Sanders' comment that Americans are sick of hearing about Clinton's "damn emails."

“No, I am not sorry at all,” Sanders said. “Let Hillary Clinton’s emails — let them go through that process — I want to focus on the real the issues.”

His comments come on the heels of a Yahoo Politics profile on his wife Jane O’Meara Driscoll Sanders that also alluded to an underdog role.

Yahoo’s Lisa Belkin writes “she thought the campaign would succeed in its actual goal — not necessarily winning, but pushing other candidates to talk about things like income inequality — she and Bernie were both surprised by how fast it became so big.”