Bernie Sanders has turned months of private grumbling into public accusations that the party establishment is doing everything in its power to elect Hillary Clinton president.

He’s not the first to level that charge. In fact, he’s late to that party. But by twisting his breach of Clinton’s voter files into an indictment of the Democratic Party for temporarily cutting him off from his own data, the underdog has the fight his team has been eager to wage.


Indeed, his campaign says as much.

“In an outsider year, a year of discontent, when the electorate clearly is unhappy with business as usual and politics as usual, for the DNC to try and use the thuggish politics of usual to try and muscle the Sanders campaign? It’s going to backfire on them,” said a top Sanders aide on the eve of the forum. “They couldn’t have given us a bigger favor."

Sanders will carry that embattled outsider message onto the stage tonight, and argue, as Clinton’s even lower-polling challengers have for months, that the Democratic National Committee and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have been in the tank for the Democratic front-runner all along.

Martin O’Malley, for one, has accused the DNC of planning too few debates, and scheduling them on weekends, so that Clinton’s opponents wouldn’t get the national viewership they’d need to rise in the polls. And Jim Webb, who dropped out of the race after the first debate, citing a break from the party, tweeted as Sanders fought over the voter data on Friday: “Good for Bernie. The DNC is nothing more than an arm for the Clinton campaign."

According to people familiar with his plans, Sanders' central theme tonight will be about his disagreement with the Democratic infrastructure — neatly crystalized on Friday by the DNC’s decision to block Sanders from critical voter data, threatening to cripple his campaign, before it was resolved around midnight. It’s a point Sanders’ camp sees as especially potent among his supporters, who rally around the idea of a populist “political revolution.”

It also comes at a useful moment. Sanders has appeared to plateau in recent weeks, failing to gain ground on Clinton in Iowa or national polling while maintaining a slim lead in New Hampshire. By homing in on Wasserman Schultz, a party leader whose tense relationship with the White House has already claimed headlines and who is perceived as closer with Clinton than any other candidate, his team thinks it can rekindle the spark.

It’s a strategy that hinges on the public perception of Clinton’s and Wasserman Schultz’s personal relationship, which in reality is not particularly warm. However, it is closer than the one between Wasserman Schultz and Sanders, an independent senator who caucuses with Democrats.

Even as the DNC reversed course early Saturday, a decision Sanders’ characterized as a capitulation, his aides saw the 24-hour drama as an effective tool to motivate left-leaning Democrats. The campaign blasted a fundraising email to current supporters, pegging the ask to the DNC’s freeze on Sanders’ access to his own data. And his aides touted support for Sanders in the fight with the DNC from two organizations who share his core supporters’ progressive ideology — Democracy For America and MoveOn.org.

Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign manager, Joe Trippi, says it’s an obvious play to make.

“You’re days away from Iowa and New Hampshire, you’ve got data there, and the national party is saying, ‘excuse us, but you’re not going to have any access to it?’ Regardless of facts that will come out later and should be duly punished, when you’re an insurgent campaign that’s already been saying the entire deck’s stacked against you and the establishment is working against you, the DNC plays right into that argument,” said Trippi.

The flurry of statements over the last 24 hours from Democratic leaders outside of the official party infrastructure only play into Sanders’ argument that the establishment is lined up against him.

Former Obama campaign managers David Plouffe and Jim Messina, as well as organizing officials Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, for example, responded furiously on Twitter, with Bird likening the Sanders’ aides actions to the theft of millions of dollars’ worth of research.

Sanders intends to bring up such criticisms on Saturday, aides explained, seeking to paint them as just another example of Democratic grandees backing the former secretary of state — similar to campaign manager Jeff Weaver’s Friday claim that he saw a “pattern” of actions suggesting the committee has been working to support Clinton.

Or, in the words of one angry Sanders staffer on Friday afternoon: “This notion that Wasserman Schultz and the DNC are arbitrarily going to shut down the Sanders campaign, well, it’s just not going to sit well with members of the Democratic Party."