Biden: Sanders can’t bring out the voters like Obama

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday that fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won’t be able to drive voter turnout in 2020 like former President Obama did in 2008.

“Look, the idea that there’s going to be this revolution — Americans aren’t looking for revolution,” Biden said in an appearance on NBC’s “Today.”

“They’re looking for progress … he’s not going to come anywhere near generating the kind of participation of young folks that Barack did in 2008. There’s no evidence of that yet,” he continued.

Sanders, a longtime senator and self-described democratic socialist, is running on progressive policies that many moderates consider to be revolutionary or radical, including his “Medicare for All” health plan, which would dissolve the private health care industry.

Sanders’s campaign has argued that his policy proposals will vitalize a bloc of Americans who usually don’t vote.

Obama, the country’s first black president, did this to an extraordinary extent. In 2008, 61.6 percent of the voting-age population in the U.S. cast a presidential election ballot, a record that hasn’t been broken. The 2016 presidential election set the record for the most Americans who voted — 136.8 million people voted for a presidential candidate — but this number only accounted for 59.2 percent of the United States’ voting-eligible population.

Sanders has surged to front-runner status in the Democratic primary after virtually tying for first in Iowa and winning in New Hampshire and Nevada outright.

After fourth- and fifth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, Biden placed second behind Sanders in Nevada and is looking for his first victory of the primary season on Saturday in South Carolina.

The latest polls in the Palmetto State have Biden leading Sanders, though Sanders had appeared to cut into Biden’s lead in the Palmetto State in recent weeks.