Sanders wants

What Bernie Sanders wants

The Vermont senator’s team has turned to the task of pulling the party platform to the left and reforming the nominating process.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Quietly acknowledging that a direct path to the Democratic nomination is all but blocked, Bernie Sanders and his advisers are zeroing in on making policy changes to the party platform and reforming the presidential nominating process.

The Vermont senator and his closest aides have been considering convention end-game scenarios for months, and they have already been in contact with the Democratic National Convention’s organizers to talk through the logistics of July’s party gathering in Philadelphia. But after Clinton’s muscular wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut and Delaware on Tuesday, Sanders’ team has turned to the task of pulling Clinton and the party platform to the left in the time before the convention.

Democrats close to Clinton’s camp saw Sanders’ post-results statement Tuesday evening as a tacit admission that his role at the convention would be in shaping the formal policy platform rather than contesting the nomination. That late-night missive specifically identified a carbon tax and opposition to “disastrous trade policies,” as well as support for a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, breaking up big banks, banning fracking and implementing tuition-free college — all points on which Clinton and Sanders have meaningful disagreements — as policies the party should adopt.

Yet the Vermont senator, who began laying off hundreds of field staffers on Wednesday in the wake of his Northeastern defeats, has also started regularly raising the specter of fundamental changes to the Democrats’ nomination process in recent appearances, including providing a greater role for independents.

He has added complaints about closed primaries — such as in New York, which doesn’t allow independents to participate — into his standard stump speech and interviews, including Tuesday, after he won the only non-closed primary of the night in Rhode Island. Making the case that Democrats need independents on their side to win general elections, Sanders has repeatedly suggested that more primaries should use an open format so the party can select the best candidate to beat Republicans in November.

Those changes — as well as a conversation about the role of super delegates in the nominating process — could come in a rules discussion in Philadelphia.

While there are no ongoing, direct conversations between the two campaigns about the platform or rules changes, Sanders is already making his opening arguments on the campaign trail — the open primary and superdelegate questions both landed at the top of his first appearance in Indiana on Wednesday.

Sanders pushed back on speculation that he would formally leave the race at any point before the final contest on June 14 at the second of his three consecutive college campus rallies Wednesday, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

“Let me make this clear, so there is no confusion: We are in this campaign to win, and become the Democratic nominee,” he told the crowd of students. “We are in this campaign to win, but if we do not win, we intend to win every delegate that we can so that when we go to Philadelphia in July, we are going to have the votes to put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.”

“Our goal, whether we win or we do not win, is to transform the Democratic Party, to open the doors to working people, to senior citizens, to young people, in a way that does not exist today,” he added.

Sanders’ brain trust maintains that even though he would need to win roughly two-thirds of pledged delegates in the remaining states to catch up to Clinton’s total — an all-but-impossible task because of the Democrats’ proportional allocation rules — the front-runner almost certainly won’t have clinched the nomination via pledged delegates alone by the convention. The Sanders strategists expect Clinton will have to rely on her support from the party’s superdelegates to get her over the 2,382-delegate threshold to claim victory.

They are also counting on Sanders to be tied or slightly ahead of Clinton in national polling by July — at the moment, he’s within 4 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

It’s possible the Sanders campaign will have momentum from the final weeks of the campaign. The May primary calendar is looking a lot friendlier to Sanders than the preceding weeks. Polls in next week’s Indiana primary show the Vermont senator is within striking distance of Clinton. Better still for Sanders, it’s an open primary format in which voters don’t need to be Democrats to participate.

With likely victories in West Virginia, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in late May and early June — capped by a potentially strong performance in California — Sanders could have additional political leverage on top of the implicit threat that his army of young supporters won’t fall in line behind Clinton come November.

“They’re misreading the convention that they’re going into. The delegates for Bernie are 45 percent of the Democratic Party [and] they don’t seem to have a recognition that 45 percent of the Democratic Party is different than them,” explained one Sanders strategist of the Clinton campaign, previewing the next three months. “She’s going to have to work.”

The most pressing question on both sides of the Clinton-Sanders split is how the underdog now plans to talk about Clinton on the campaign trail after months of escalating tensions between the two — tensions that peaked when he called her “unqualified” while campaigning for New York.

Sanders aides say there’s no specific plan to change tack, and the candidate has alternated between knocking Clinton broadly and needling her on specific policy points.

Asked about the process of unifying the party at an MSNBC town hall on Monday, for example, Sanders insisted it is incumbent on Clinton to win over his backers, noting as he often does that he cannot just demand that his fans fall in line behind her.

Clinton, however, has pointed to her own 2008 experience against Barack Obama as a guide.

“We got to the end in June and I did not put down conditions. I didn’t say, ‘You know what, if Senator Obama does X, Y and Z, maybe I’ll support him,’” Clinton said of her opponent, who did end up helping to retire her campaign debt. “I said, ‘I am supporting Sen. Obama, because no matter what our differences might be, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and the Republicans.’ That’s what I did.”

If Sanders continues inciting his supporters against her, Clinton allies worry, it could spoil the effort.

“He has all the money in the world and still has a devoted following that’s a minority, even in the Democratic Party, so it’s not surprising that he would want to keep it alive, he’s having the time of his life,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, a Clinton ally. “He’s got a couple options: He could be a Teddy Kennedy type that loses the nomination and then moves on to cement his position in the Democratic universe, or he could be Ralph Nader.”

“If he wants to be viewed as a constructive source in the Democratic Party and politics in general, he needs to be very careful with his work on the platform and his support for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton,” he added.