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Bernie Sanders’s Defiance Strains Ties With Top Democrats Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch
(about 3 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Senator Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the leadership of the Democratic Party and his colleagues on Capitol Hill was strained further on Wednesday as he and his campaign remained defiant over the way they say his success is being belittled and undermined by people in the party who are loyal to Hillary Clinton. Defiant and determined to transform the Democratic Party, Senator Bernie Sanders is opening a two-month phase of his presidential campaign aimed at inflicting a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton in California and amassing enough leverage to advance his agenda at the convention in July — or even wrest the nomination from her.
Whatever tolerance Democrats have for Mr. Sanders’s continuing his increasingly long-shot presidential bid was quickly evaporating, with some of his closest allies in the party suggesting his efforts to rein in his most unruly supporters was half-hearted. Advisers to Mr. Sanders said on Wednesday that he was newly resolved to remain in the race, seeing an aggressive campaign as his only chance to pressure Democrats into making fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future. They said he also held out hope of capitalizing on any late stumbles by Mrs. Clinton or any damage to her candidacy, whether by scandal or by the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.
“Bernie and I have known each other for a long time,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader and one of Mr. Sanders’ best friends in the Senate. “And I believe he is better than this.” After sounding subdued if not downbeat about the race for weeks, Mr. Sanders resumed a combative posture against Mrs. Clinton, demanding on Wednesday that she debate him before the June 7 primary in California and highlighting anew what he asserted were her weaknesses against Mr. Trump.
Vice President Joe Biden also weighed in, saying that while Mr. Sanders is “a good guy,” he needed “to be more aggressive in speaking out.” Mr. Sanders, his advisers said, has been buoyed by a stream of polls showing him beating Mr. Trump by larger margins than Mrs. Clinton in some battleground states, and by his belief that an upset victory in California could have a psychological impact on convention delegates who already have doubts about Mrs. Clinton.
The dispute centered around the Democratic state convention in Nevada over the weekend in which Mr. Sanders was denied the delegates he thought he had earned, a development that infuriated his supporters there and led some to throw chairs and later threaten the state party chairwoman. But his newly resolute attitude is also the cumulative result of months of anger at the national Democratic Party over a debate schedule that his campaign said favored Mrs. Clinton; a fund-raising arrangement between the party and the Clinton campaign; the appointment of fierce Clinton partisans as leaders of important convention committees; and the party’s rebuke of Mr. Sanders on Tuesday for not clearly condemning a melee at the Nevada Democratic convention on Saturday.
The Democratic Party of Nevada pushed back against the Sanders campaign’s criticism that the process wrongly deprived him of delegates, saying that “simple math” dictated the outcome and that Mr. Sanders was simply outnumbered. “Bernie Sanders’s campaign was not organized,” the party said in a statement, noting that nearly 500 of his seats at the convention were vacant because his supporters had failed to show up. While Mr. Sanders says he does not want Mr. Trump to win in November, his advisers and allies say he is willing to do some harm to Mrs. Clinton in the shorter term if it means he can capture a majority of the 475 pledged delegates at stake in California and arrive at the Philadelphia convention with maximum political power.
National party leaders, such as the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have also criticized how Mr. Sanders has handled the unrest in Nevada, adding to the frustration within his campaign. Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the campaign did not think its attacks would help Mr. Trump in the long run, but added that the senator’s team was “not thinking about” the possibility that they could help derail Mrs. Clinton from becoming the first woman elected president.
Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager took to cable news on Wednesday to assail the party and Ms. Schultz. “The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14,” Mr. Devine said, referring to the final Democratic primary, in the District of Columbia. “We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at where things stand.”
“The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, it is clear almost from the get-go she has been working against Bernie Sanders — there’s no doubt about it, for personal reasons,” Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, said of Ms. Wasserman Schultz on MSNBC. “She has been the divider and not really provided leadership that the Democratic Party needs,” Mr. Weaver added. The prospect of a drawn-out Democratic fight is deeply troubling to party leaders who are eager for Mrs. Clinton and House and Senate candidates to turn to attacking Mr. Trump without being diverted by Democratic strife. Mr. Sanders has won nearly 10 million votes, compared to Mrs. Clinton’s 13 million, and Democratic leaders say she needs time to begin courting the young voters, liberals and other Sanders supporters who view her as an ally of corporate and big-money interests.
Nowhere has the strain in the Democratic Party been more evident lately than in Mr. Sanders’s relationship with Mr. Reid. Few members of the Senate are closer to Mr. Sanders than Mr. Reid, who had tried to head off any confrontation by speaking personally with Mr. Sanders on Friday to stress the importance of not letting the state convention devolve into a messy fight over a handful of delegates. But Mr. Sanders has sharpened his language of late, saying Tuesday night that the party faced a choice to remain “dependent on big-money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy” or “welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change.”
“If you want the two damn delegates, you can have them,” Mr. Reid told Mr. Sanders, according to someone with firsthand knowledge of the discussions between the two senators. Though Mr. Reid has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, he has said that he believes Mr. Sanders has earned a right to remain in the race. Mr. Sanders’s street-fighting instincts have been encouraged by his like-minded campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, who has been blistering against the Clinton camp and the party establishment. On Wednesday, he took to CNN to accuse Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the Democratic national chairwoman, of “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign from the very beginning.”
After the convention went awry, Mr. Reid and Mr. Sanders spoke again on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Reid expressed dismay that Mr. Sanders’s supporters had acted so belligerently. A member of his own staff was at the convention and feared for her own safety, Mr. Reid said. He also said that the way Sanders supporters had been harassing Roberta Lange, the state party chairwoman — filling her voice mail with threatening, obscene messages and showing up at her Las Vegas restaurant in protest — was over the line. For weeks, some current and former Sanders campaign workers have privately acknowledged feeling disheartened about Mr. Weaver’s determination to go after the Democratic National Committee, fearing a pitched battle with the party they hope to support in the general election. The intraparty fighting has affected morale, they say, and raised concerns that Mr. Weaver, a longtime Sanders aide who more recently ran a comic book store, was not devoted to achieving Democratic unity. Several described the campaign’s message as having devolved into a near-obsession with perceived conspiracies on the part of Mrs. Clinton’s allies.
Mr. Sanders said he agreed and believed that the violence should be condemned. But when he released his statement on Tuesday night, which made only a passing reference to the violence at the convention, a perplexed Mr. Reid told his staff that he thought the gesture was “silly” and beneath Mr. Sanders, according to the person who spoke with Mr. Reid. Democratic leaders said they wanted to do everything possible to avoid having Clinton-Sanders tensions send the Philadelphia convention into the sort of chaos they had expected to mar the Republican convention. So far, though, Mr. Sanders has not indicated that he would ask his delegates to support Mrs. Clinton, as she did in 2008 for Barack Obama.
The two senators have not spoken since. “I’m hopeful that the two candidates will come together, and soon, which could blunt the possibility of real trouble at our convention,” said Edward G. Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a Clinton supporter who is chairman of the Philadelphia host committee for the convention. “But you look at what happened in Nevada, and you worry.”
Mr. Sanders appeared to be taken somewhat by surprise at the way the Nevada melee was being portrayed, and how negatively it was reflecting on his campaign. The melee there, at which Sanders supporters revolted and threatened the state Democratic chairwoman in a fight over delegates, intensified concerns among Clinton allies. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who attended the convention, said she spoke with Mr. Sanders late Tuesday and said he was “distressed” by the Nevada episode.
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, Mr. Sanders’s lone endorser in the Senate, said in an interview that he had spoken with Mr. Sanders on Wednesday and that Mr. Sanders was forceful in his condemnation of the violence. “He will be judged as whether or not he has leadership qualities by the way he handles this,” she said.
“He wants to make sure that everyone who asks the question knows the answer: that he 100 percent rejects that type of conduct,” Mr. Merkley said. “We have to step forward and say, totally unacceptable,” he added. “That is the exact opposite of what Trump did. Trump basically embraced violence, encouraged violence. That is a different story. That is the Republican story.” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is close to Mr. Sanders, spoke with Mr. Sanders on Friday about not letting the state convention devolve into a messy fight. They spoke again on Tuesday afternoon, and Mr. Reid complained that a staff member who had attended feared for her safety. But Mr. Sanders’s subsequent statement condemning the violence, which mostly dwelled on how dismissively he felt the party was treating him, did little to soothe Mr. Reid’s unease.
Mr. Merkley said Mr. Sanders remained committed to staying in the race. Turning the pleas of party unity that some Democrats are making around, Mr. Merkley said that the rift in the party would only deepen if Mr. Sanders was driven from the race now. “Bernie and I have known each other for a long time, and I believe he is better than this,” Mr. Reid said Wednesday.
“One of the reasons it is so important for him to stay in this race is that when we go to the convention and we’re building the bridge that brings everyone together, people have to feel like they were heard, that they were respected,” Mr. Merkley said. But some Sanders supporters said that Democrats were ignoring an undercurrent of anger among those who fear that Mrs. Clinton, if elected, would lack the courage to challenge her friends and political contributors.
“You can’t say to them, ‘Hey, we don’t want to hear your views,’ and shut the door on them, and then a month later open the door and say, ‘Hey, can you come in and help us out?’” he added. “He fully intends to go forward.” “We want to have progressive values and socialism on the convention’s agenda, rather than slip back into centrist Democratic thinking if she gets elected,” said Tick Segerblom, a state senator in Nevada and a Sanders supporter. “I think there could be some chaos at the convention – at least outside, with a lot of anarchists, socialists, young people.”
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has largely taken Mr. Sanders’s latest broadsides in stride. In soliciting donations Wednesday, it said that the two-front battle against Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump was “one of the toughest parts of our campaign so far.” A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment about Mr. Sanders’s debate proposal in California.
Privately, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said Mr. Sanders could win California but emphasized their confidence that Mrs. Clinton would still win the nomination. She now has a total of 2,293 pledged delegates and superdelegates; she needs 90 more to win the nomination, although superdelegates can shift their support up to the convention. Mr. Sanders has 1,533 pledged delegates and superdelegates.
Mr. Sanders is now running slightly behind Mrs. Clinton in California in public polls. Ben Tulchin, Mr. Sanders’s pollster, pointed to signs of rising voter registration in California among young people and independents — two core Sanders constituencies — as evidence that he could win the state. But Hispanic registration is also rising, which could benefit Mrs. Clinton. With Mr. Sanders expected to campaign aggressively over the next three weeks, his supporters in the state said they were focused on winning the primary, not on November.
“If you want to talk about historic, let’s talk about the record turnout numbers at his rallies,” said Mayor Bao Nguyen of Garden Grove, Calif., a Sanders supporter. “Senator Sanders isn’t obliged to help Secretary Clinton if she wins. That’s a decision his team can make if they face that choice.”
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, Mr. Sanders’s lone endorser in the Senate, said that the party’s divisions would only deepen if Mr. Sanders was driven from the race now.
“You can’t say to them, ‘Hey we don’t want to hear your views,’ and shut the door on them,” Mr. Merkley said, “and then a month later open the door and say, ‘Hey, can you come in and help us out?’