senator elizabeth warren slamming mayor pete buttigieg for his private high-dollar fundraisers. americans are just sick of the typical politician who says one thing out in public and then goes behind closed doors and doesn t want anyone to know what they re saying to the millionaires and billionaires that are funding this campaign. he should release who is bundling for him and make clear who is on his finance team. this is about the conflicts that he s creating every single day right now. obviously buttigieg is doing better, he s getting more attention. he says he will think about opening his fundraisers and he had a tart response on friday to reporters who asked when he ll make that decision. again, i don t have a timeline for you. as the candidate, can t you just direct your campaign to open those fundraisers? yes. then why haven t you done
moderate pushback. it was defined by the green new deal and that was the ticket to admission, basically, you must support some of these policies. now that s not the case. i m hearing a lot of moderate pushback. all of that, electability, that s what democrats care about. there s no easy answer to what electability means. it means different things to different people. and people will make the argument that at some point the path to electability is about reframing what the progressive values are in the country that will propel voters to come back to the democratic party and not just to beat trump. the idea that you have to be for something as a democrat. right. and so this is the case we have right now where a lot of the newer candidates, like someone like mayor pete buttigieg, is trying to bring something pressure to the party, while at the same time staying to the moderate orthodoxy of the democratic party versus people like bernie sanders and elizabeth warren, who are trying
say. i would identify as a democratic socialist. but i also understand that i am not representative of the whole electorate and we need to be sure to select a candidate that can defeat donald trump. as i was watching mayor pete speak actually, i thought this guy is going to appeal to someone in a deer stand that is out with his family or friends hunting. purity, can they beat trump. that s a social studies teacher who i met earlier this summer and she was leaning toward elizabeth warren. she said this is the moment for progressive politics. now she is not sure about that. so what is happening here, senator warren is trying to make some shine off of pete buttigieg. why? because he s rising, particularly in iowa. and they didn t do it at the debate stage a couple of weeks ago in atlanta. this is a preview to the debate likely next week in los angeles. but she s trying to find him, slow his rise a little bit. but it s also saying a lot about
put up a presidential candidate who isn t the antithesis. elizabeth warren sounds a lot like donald trump in a lot of areas. and so if you think about where the economic pain is in the country, those are the voters that they want to reach and that is what is smart about the orthodoxy of warren. this is the argument that warren and sanders campaigns are making where they say you re misreading the general election electorate where you think we are too far left but we could win over the voters because of the populism argument. i think there s a question about the ideology of the majority of democrats. if you talk to biden advisers, klobuchar advisers, buttigieg advisers, they make points that the liberal voices in the party are loud, they are aggressive, and yet if you look at who votes in democratic primaries, it tends to be a lot of older voters who tend to be more moderate. so i think we are still very much working through what the actual ideology of the majority of the votes are.
that. there are a lot of considerations and i m thinking about it. can you give us an example of those considerations? no. love for the traveling press corps. buttigieg has his own purity test for warren, demanding she release more information about the money she made doing legal work for big companies in the 1990s. i certainly think it would be a good idea for her to release tax returns, as i have, covering her entire career in the private sector. i think that s one way to show your transparency. i ve already put out 11 years of my tax returns. that s exactly 11 years more than trump. jeff, you ve been out in iowa and i think this is such a big issue, which is the future of the democratic party and this purity test on the left, versus the electability argument. you spoke on wednesday with a voter let me show you that exchange and we ll talk about it. i agree with nearly everything that warren has to