Just three weeks after offering a conciliatory statement suggesting he was winding down his campaign, Bernie Sanders’s race for the White House has taken on a renewed urgency that has shocked the Democratic establishment with its newly belligerent tone. Despite the fact that it is practically impossible for the Vermont senator to catch up to Hillary Clinton, party leaders are now grappling with the prospect of an ugly, drawn-out fight that could roil the Democratic National Convention in July.
The trouble began at the Nevada state convention on Saturday, which turned violent after Sanders’s supporters rebelled against party rules they perceived as unfair by throwing chairs and screaming at Democratic officials they accused of favoritism toward Clinton. Sanders barely apologized, instead launching into a verbal assault against the D.N.C., infuriating party figures eager to move on to the general-election fight against Donald Trump. Suddenly, it seems the anti-Establishment rage that until recently threatened to tear apart the G.O.P. is at the Democratic Party’s doorstep. What changed?
According to advisers who spoke to The New York Times, Sanders was re-energized by several polls that suggested he would beat Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, by wider margins than Clinton in several key states. And while his campaign previously signaled that they are aware he can’t win, Sanders is now willing to harm the Democratic front-runner in order to gain maximum political leverage at the convention in Philadelphia. “We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states,” strategist Tad Devine said. “If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention.”
That closing argument, increasingly, is taking the form of a concerted attack on the D.N.C. itself—exactly at the moment when Democratic leaders were preparing to shift their energies toward Trump. Now, they face a two-front battle, with Republicans bashing Clinton on one side, and Sanders’s surrogates condemning their own party system on the other. In the wake of the Nevada-convention debacle, the Sanders campaign has doubled down on its critique of the D.N.C., which they accuse of favoring Clinton, refusing to hold additional debates, and helping the former secretary of state fundraise. Animosity toward the front-runner has reached a fever pitch in recent days. On Wednesday, campaign manager Jeff Weaver accused D.N.C. chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign from the very beginning.” And Devine, Sanders’s senior adviser, told the Times that his team was “not thinking about” whether their efforts might help Trump in the long run. “The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14,” he said.
Party leaders who once dismissed the Vermont senator now have more reasons to worry, too: Sanders has won several more states in the weeks since the loss in New York—which dealt a severe blow to his campaign and temporarily subdued him—and he’s closing the gap with Clinton in California, which has more than 400 delegates at stake. According to the Times, Sanders sees his ability to pick up lost ground in the Golden State as the decisive factor that will allow him to force sweeping changes to the Democratic platform at the convention. But the newly pugnacious tone of his campaign is fast burning many of the bridges he may need to convert his primary wins into lasting changes to the party agenda. “He will be judged as whether or not he has leadership qualities by the way he handles this,” Senator Barbara Boxer, who attended the Nevada convention, told the Times. Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and a high-profile Clinton supporter, said he is “hopeful that the two candidates will come together, and soon. . . . But you look at what happened in Nevada, and you worry.”
Several officials noted that Sanders seemed to regret the actions of his voters in Nevada. But as his colleague and supporter Senator Jeff Merkley pointed out to the Times, the ferocity of Sanders’s base leaves the D.N.C. with few options. Sanders has unleashed a fury at his adopted party that will be difficult to contain, and the self-styled socialist may struggle to appease the party when he is forced to make peace in Philadelphia. “You can’t say to [his supporters], ‘Hey we don’t want to hear your views,’ and shut the door on them,” Merkley observed, “and then a month later open the door and say, ‘Hey, can you come in and help us out?’”
Update (5:40 P.M.): In a statement Thursday, the Sanders campaign further ratcheted up their attacks against Clinton, after the former secretary of state said there is “no way” that she will not be the Democratic presidential nominee.
“In the past three weeks voters in Indiana, West Virginia and Oregon respectfully disagreed with Secretary Clinton. We expect voters in the remaining eight contests also will disagree,” spokesman Michael Briggs said. “And with almost every national and state poll showing Sen. Sanders doing much, much better than Secretary Clinton against Donald Trump, it is clear that millions of Americans have growing doubts about the Clinton campaign.”
