I agree with [Donald] Trump: These trade agreements have not been good deals for America, and they need to be fixed.

I've tried to maintain my independence in Congress. Sometimes that has meant opposing my own party leaders.

I don't know how you change that. There's hardly anybody left like me in the Democratic Party in Congress. These districts have been so gerrymandered that, in most of them, a Democrat can't win. Somebody like me trying to start off today, he'd never get endorsed. Because I'm too conservative.

Republicans have spent a lot of money redistricting and everything, getting control of these governorships and statehouses.

A lot of it is backlash against all this political correctness that's going on.

We [Democrats] have become a party of assembling all these different groups, the women's caucus and the black caucus and the Hispanic caucus and the lesbian-gay-transgender caucus and so forth, and that doesn't relate to people out in rural America.

If everybody in our caucus had a 50/50 [Democrat/Republican] district, we'd have a lot different discussion. But if they have a 90 percent Democratic district, they don't ever talk to a Republican, they don't have to and they don't want to.