Hillary Clinton suggested in February that many of the young people who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic primary were unemployed political neophytes who still lived with their parents, according to new audio released this week.

"Some are new to politics completely. They're children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents' basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don't see much of a future," the now-Democratic nominee said at a private fundraiser held in Maclean, Va.

Clinton's remarks came in response to a question about why younger voters tend to be so cynical about government.

She continued, saying, "I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, 'You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don't believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.'"

Audio from the February fundraiser, which was held at the Virginia home of former U.S. ambassador Beatrice Welters, was released Friday by the Washington Free Beacon.

Clinton said, "So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so 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 some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing."

"So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals," she added, contrasting her campaign to the Vermont senator's.

Clinton also spoke on the broader issues of the 2016 election.

"It is important to recognize what's going on in this election. Everybody who's ever been in an election that I'm aware of is quite bewildered because 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 said in reference to GOP nominee Donald Trump.

She added in reference to Sanders, "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 that 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's something that they deeply feel.



"So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there. Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is — I don't want to overpromise. I don't want to tell people things that I know we cannot do," Clinton said.

Sanders, who performed particularly well with young voters during the Democratic primary, joined the Clinton campaign recently as a surrogate. The senator has already spoken at a number of events aimed directly at courting millennials.