Elizabeth Warren said Monday that a few weeks before the 2020 campaign started, Bernie Sanders told her that he did not believe a woman could win the presidency.
Warren's politically charged comment came hours after Sanders adamantly denied an anonymously sourced CNN report that he had made the remark during a December 2018 chat between the two senators at Warren's Washington, D.C., apartment.
"It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win," the Vermont senator said in a statement released by his campaign. "It's sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren't in the room are lying about what happened."
He added: "Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."
But Warren issued a statement Monday evening that flatly contradicted his account of the conversation.
"Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed," the Massachusetts senator said. "I have no interest in discussing this private meeting any further because Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences on punditry."
The clash between the two leading left-wing candidates in the Democratic presidential race marked a definitive end to their longstanding agreement not to attack one another. It signaled the beginning of a more aggressive phase of the race, with multiple candidates struggling to keep their candidacies alive as voters narrow down their choices.
The back-and-forth came on the eve of the party's final debate before the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses, the opening contest of the campaign. Recent polls suggests it remains a wide-open race in Iowa, with Sanders, Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg vying for the lead.
CNN's report on the conversation said it was based on the accounts of two people who spoke with Warren soon after it took place and two others who were "familiar with the meeting."
On Saturday night, Politico reported that Sanders volunteers were instructed to tell voters leaning toward Warren that "people who support her are highly educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what" and that "she's bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party."
Warren struck back on Sunday.
"I was disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me," she told reporters in Iowa.
She recalled the hostility of many Sanders voters toward Clinton after he lost the 2016 race for the Democratic presidential nomination to the former secretary of state.
"We all saw the impact of the factionalism in 2016, and we can't have a repeat of that," Warren said. "Democrats need to unite our party."
The anti-Warren script for volunteers was produced by the Sanders campaign, but the Vermont senator tried to keep his distance, saying nobody was "going to be attacking Elizabeth."
"We have hundreds of employees, Elizabeth Warren has hundreds of employees, and people sometimes say things that they shouldn't," Sanders said.
