Durbin: Sanders could win Iowa and New Hampshire

For at least one Hillary Clinton supporter in the Senate, the race for the Democratic nomination is not likely to be sewn up in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“I think that Bernie [Sanders] is going to have his troops show up there. And Hillary is going to do her best to beat him,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told David Axelrod, the former adviser to President Barack Obama, on his podcast “The Axe Files.” “But it could be close, and he could end up winning that and maybe even his neighboring state of New Hampshire.”


A victory by the Vermont senator in Iowa on Feb. 1 “will give her pause,” Durbin predicted in the interview, taped Thursday and published Monday. “It probably will come back as a reminder of what happened eight years ago.”

“I said to someone that Iowa to Hillary is like Chinatown was to Jake Gittes. You know, bad memories,” Axelrod responded on the weekly University of Chicago podcast.

Durbin said Clinton will have caught her stride by March 1, adding, “I expect her to be the nominee.”

Asked whether Clinton is handling Sanders well, the Senate minority whip said that the back-and-forth between the two candidates would not work in Iowa.

“If anything, it’s going to inspire his supporters to be sure and vote and bring out some people with them,” the Illinois Democrat said. “But I know the temptation when you think, ‘For goodness sakes, if we can just turn a couple percent here, you know, we could end up being the nominal winners of this and it could make a difference.’ So on a day-to-day basis — you know this better than I do — you know, the strategists, the campaign strategists, trying to figure out all the news cycles and how to move a sliver of the electorate.”

In her exchanges with Sanders, Durbin contended, Clinton “needs to take care.”

“I’m encouraged by the fact that when I talk to the Sanders voters and say, ‘OK, if it isn’t Bernie?’ ‘Oh, we’re all for Hillary.’ I hear that. I hope she doesn’t burn any of those bridges,” Durbin continued. “We need them. We need the party unified when it’s all over.”