Bernie Sanders Campaign Is Split Over Whether to Fight on Past Tuesday
The senator has vowed to press his case, but some urge him to unite behind Clinton
Sen. Bernie Sanders met and shook hands with voters in Los Angeles on Saturday. Photo: Mariel Calloway/Zuma PressA split is emerging inside the Bernie Sanders campaign over whether the senator should stand down after Tuesday’s election contests and unite behind Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, or take the fight all the way to the July party convention and try to pry the nomination from her.
One camp might be dubbed the Sandersistas, the loyalists who helped guide Mr. Sanders’s political ascent in Vermont and the U.S. Congress and are loath to give up a fight that has far surpassed expectations. Another has ties not only to Mr. Sanders but to the broader interests of a Democratic Party pining to beat back the challenge from Republican Donald Trump and make gains in congressional elections.
For now, Democratic officials, fund-raisers and operatives are getting impatient, calling on Mr. Sanders to quit the race and begin the work of unifying the party for the showdown with the Republican presumptive nominee.
Orin Kramer, a New York hedge-fund manager who has raised campaign funds for both President Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton, said with respect to Mr. Sanders’s future plans: “I would hope people would understand what a Trump presidency would mean and act accordingly—and ‘accordingly’ means quickly.”
A strong showing in New Jersey on Tuesday, before California results even come in, could help Mrs. Clinton reach the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. Her total includes hundreds of superdelegates—party leaders and elected officials who can back either candidate. Mr. Sanders is hoping that defeating Mrs. Clinton in the most populous state later Tuesday might give superdelegates reason to drop her and get behind his candidacy. Those superdelegates have given no indication they will shift allegiances.
Even so, Mr. Sanders isn’t backing off. In an interview that aired Sunday on CNN, he stepped up an attack on Mrs. Clinton involving the Clinton Foundation. Echoing a critique made by Republicans, Mr. Sanders said he has “a problem” with the foundation accepting money from foreign sources during her service as secretary of state.
In a news conference Saturday in California, Mr. Sanders indicated he would battle for superdelegates all the way to the convention.
“The Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention,” he said.
Mrs. Clinton, who won Puerto Rico’s Democratic primary on Sunday, seems to be running out of patience with Mr. Sanders. Having shifted her focus to Mr. Trump, she told CNN that after Tuesday, “I’m going to do everything I can to reach out to try to unify the Democratic Party, and I expect Sen. Sanders to do the same.”
When she ran against Mr. Obama in 2008, Mrs. Clinton stayed in the race until the end. As late as the final week of voting, she was talking hopefully of wooing super-delegates and capturing the nomination. But on June 7 of that year—four days after the primary season ended—she gave a speech bowing out and immediately threw her support to Mr. Obama.
Later that month, the two chose the town of Unity, N.H., to make a high-profile joint appearance aimed at persuading Clinton voters to get behind Mr. Obama.
Mr. Sanders is at a similar crossroads. The final contest of the primary season is June 14, when Washington D.C. votes.
Tad Devine, a senior Sanders strategist who advised Democratic nominees Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, among others, suggested the “path forward” is uncertain, hinging on the outcome in California and other states that have yet to vote. He voiced a conciliatory note, describing how the two campaigns might set aside differences that have grown more pronounced in the heat of the year-long campaign.
“What will happen hopefully when the voting is done, our two campaigns will begin to talk once more to one another and figure out where the common ground is,” he said.
Campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who has worked in Mr. Sanders’s congressional offices and Vermont-based campaigns dating to the mid-1980s, takes a more aggressive approach.
Mr. Weaver has long been one of the more tenacious loyalists on Team Sanders, having sparred repeatedly with Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz over the party’s treatment of the Sanders campaign.
A victory in California and elsewhere on Tuesday would “strengthen” the argument for the nomination, Mr. Weaver said, but it isn’t necessary to keep the candidacy alive through the convention.
“The plan is as the senator has described it: to go forward after Tuesday and keep the campaign going to the convention and make the case to superdelegates that Sen. Sanders is the best chance that Democrats have to beat Trump,” Mr. Weaver said. “The trajectory is the same regardless of the outcome in California.”
That is what worries Democratic leaders. Pointing to polls indicating a tightening race in November, they say Mr. Sanders, if he is sincere about beating back Mr. Trump, must quickly join forces with the party front-runner.
“Democrats will need as much unity as early as we can get it as possible,” said Tom Daschle, a former senate Democratic leader. “It would be a huge mistake to underestimate [Mr. Trump]. We’ve done that the entire election season.”
Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid has concluded Mr. Sanders has no path to the nomination, an aide said, and that he should shift focus to helping Democrats pick up Senate seats. Doing so would help Mr. Sanders return to the chamber with more power than he wielded before the presidential race began a year ago, the aide said.
William Daley, who chaired Mr. Gore’s presidential campaign and served as a White House chief of staff for Mr. Obama, said in an interview the “damage” Mr. Sanders could do is “overwhelming if he doesn’t give [Mrs. Clinton] the breather she needs in the run-up to the convention to take on Trump.”
At a minimum, some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters would like to see Mr. Sanders lay off the attacks. Alan Kessler, a longtime Democratic fundraiser, said Mr. Sanders’s tone is “a little disappointing.”
“There’s no reason why he shouldn’t fight for the things that he’s talking about, but there’s no need to continually make it personal,” he added.