Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, but her opponent for the nomination, Bernie Sanders, has not yet suspended his campaign. Many of his supporters have yet to declare their support for Clinton as well, a point that CNN’s Jake Tapper grilled Sanders on in an interview that you can watch above.
Citing a Bloomberg poll that says only 55 percent of Sanders supporters will vote Clinton, Tapper asked Sanders about whether Clinton could win if so many of Sanders’ fans won’t back her. He even questions Sanders’ own support of Clinton, playing a clip where he says he’ll “likely” vote for her. Sanders replies that “media focuses on politics as a game,” but that he’s focused on social transformation, to prevent a catastrophe on a similar scale as Friday’s Brexit vote. Tapper replies:
“With all due respect, Senator, I’m not viewing this as a game. I’m looking at the fact that I talk to your supporters all the time and many of them do not want to vote for Hillary Clinton. They feel very negatively towards her. And if it is important to you, as you say it is, to defeat Donald Trump, I wonder if you are truly doing everything you can do to defeat Donald Trump.”
Indeed, the Democratic National Convention is in a month, and then November is coming up fast. Now would be the time for the Democratic Party to unite around a candidate in order to defeat Trump. Sanders insists that he’s doing all he can to help Clinton, but that she will have to meet him and his supporters halfway:
“I am going to do everything that I can do to defeat Donald Trump. But a lot of that responsibility, about winning the American people over to her side, is going to rest with Secretary Clinton. Is she going to address the issues – we got something like 12 or 13 million votes.”
Sanders continues by saying that he’s still loyal to those voters who want a president who will truly carry out progressive change on a variety of issues. According to this interview’s writeup on CNN, this is why Sanders is working to get his policy proposals in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, both at an upcoming meeting in Orlando, and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. So far, the party has adopted proposals that he favors like a $15 an hour minimum wage, but not other reforms like single-payer healthcare. Sanders doesn’t think that goes far enough.
Sanders says that if Clinton adopts more progressive policies, then he’s sure that his supporters will vote for her. What happens then if the Democratic National Convention roles around, and Sanders doesn’t get everything he wants? Maybe he will unite with Clinton for the sake of getting her to the White House, anyway, and then continue to influence change as a senator. It remains to be seen.
(via CNN)