Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee made a weird claim in attacking socialist Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, arguing that he was a Washington-insider and that the Vermont senator had been in Congress longer than Starbucks had existed.
The claim does not hold up to scrutiny.
"Right now, the most unlikely idol of American youth is Bernie Sanders a 74-year-old self-avowed socialist who's such a Washington outsider he's been in Congress for nearly quarter of a century," Huckabee said on his "Huckabee Exclusive" podcast on Monday.
"To help you Bernie maniacs grasp how long that is, the year Bernie first arrived in Washington there was only one Starbucks in the entire world, and it opened five months after Bernie entered Congress," he added.
The first Starbucks opened in 1971, a decade before Bernie Sanders was even elected to office. Sanders didn't join Congress until 1991, after serving as mayor of Burlington, Vermont for nearly a decade in the 1980s.
Similarly, Starbucks didn't have just one store in 1991, they had 116. Starbucks did, however, open its first licensed airport store that year.
Take a listen to the audio:
