Bernie Sanders, enjoying new momentum from a new Iowa poll showing him inching closer to Hillary Clinton among Democrats, emphasized Sunday he’s not the anti-Clinton candidate.
"I think the gains that we are seeing, and the enthusiasm, and the huge crowds that we are seeing, this is not anti-Hillary Clinton," the U.S. senator from Vermont told ABC’s "This Week." "This is pro-Bernie Sanders and pro a message that says enough is enough."
The latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa poll, released Saturday and conducted August 23 to 26, showed Clinton, the former Secretary of State, the top choice among 37 percent of Democrats in the nation’s first caucus state. Sanders had 30 percent. Clinton has lost about one-third of her support since May.
The poll found he has more support among potential first-time caucusgoers than Clinton. He leads among this group with 43 percent, while Clinton has 31 percent. Among those under 45, he’s up by 23, and among independents, he leads by 21.
Clinton led Sanders, 57 to 16 percent in May’s Iowa poll.
Sanders told CNN’s "State of the Union" he does have several differences with Clinton.
"I think that the business model of Wall Street is a fraud. And I think these guys drove us into the worst economic downturn into the modern history of America. I think they're at it again," he said. "I believe that, when you have so few banks with so much power, you…have got to break them up. That is not Hillary Clinton's position."
He listed other differences, including his backing for an expansion of Social Security by lifting the cap on taxable income and his 2002 vote against the war in Iraq. Clinton voted to give President George W. Bush broad authority to strike Iraq, though she said last year that was a mistake.
Change, Sanders said, "can't be done within the Beltway itself. We need a mass movement, and that's what we are trying to create, and are succeeding in creating right now."
On ABC, host Martha Raddatz quizzed Sanders about a lack of foreign policy experience.
"In all fairness, we've only been in this race for three and a half months. And we've been focusing, quite correctly, as you've indicated, on the economy, on the collapse of the American middle class, on massive income and wealth inequality," he said.
"But you're absolutely right, foreign policy is a huge issue. Let me just say a word or two about that. And we are going to spend more time on that."
David Lightman: 202-383-6101, @lightmandavid