His team is stepping up its behind-the-scenes conversations with Hillary Clinton’s camp. He hasn’t sent a fundraising email for his own campaign in six days. He’s also not holding a rally tonight, making it the first Tuesday with voting that he hasn’t held one this year.

In other words, Bernie Sanders isn’t really running for president anymore.


But he hasn’t officially given up either. He still has a skeleton staff, a Secret Service detail, a charter plane contract, and the firmly held belief that by formally staying in the race he has the leverage to exact platform and party rules concessions from Clinton.

So while he and his staff — no longer aiming to poach superdelegates — go out of their way to assure fellow senators and leading Democrats that he is committed to defeating Donald Trump above all else, the Sanders campaign is mapping out a soft, extended landing that could take a few weeks.

The Vermont senator is struggling to put a consistent face on the balancing act. He continues to insist that he will fight on to the July Democratic convention and refuses to answer questions about whether he remains an active candidate. At the same time, he is meeting with Clinton in private, being greeted with warm, sustained applause by his Clinton-backing Senate colleagues, and swinging by the Clinton-endorsing White House for a picnic on Tuesday night.

With the campaign staff dramatically downsized in recent days, senior aides have been holding more frequent calls with their counterparts at Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn than ever before, starting conversations about what exactly Sanders wants in the convention platform or the Democratic Party’s rules before he throws his support to Clinton or formally bows out.

Neither of those concrete steps is expected anytime soon, but they’re both on the table over the longer term. The animating question for people close to the Sanders operation now is not whether he slides out of the race before the convention — that won’t happen, they believe — but how he finds a comfortable position campaigning against Trump while still agitating for his desired changes within the Democratic Party.

His one-on-one meeting with Clinton in neutral territory in Washington on Tuesday night is an important step: It’s a rare get-together that the candidates themselves agreed to hold when they spoke on the phone after California’s polls closed last week. They were connected, respectively, by campaign managers Jeff Weaver and Robby Mook — a pair of Vermonters who have spoken periodically throughout the contest.

Sanders has made no secret of the policy points he hopes to see on the party platform in Philadelphia — from a $15 federal minimum wage to a nationwide ban on fracking — and some of his trusted aides were dispatched to Washington over the past week, and to Phoenix for the coming weekend, to begin negotiating. Those negotiations took place at initial party platform hearings and meetings while Sanders was in California and Vermont.

But Sanders also laid out a political reform agenda at a surprise news conference Tuesday outside his Capitol Hill campaign office right after meeting with the rest of the Senate Democratic caucus at Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s invitation, and just hours before his meeting with Clinton. The list of wishes was widely known, but the candidate had never before so plainly articulated them in public.

“The time is long overdue for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic Party,” Sanders insisted to the gathered cameras, with Weaver standing behind him as he urged the party to ax its superdelegate system, replace the Democratic National Committee's current leadership, open up same-day registration in primaries, and make its contests open to registered Democrats and independents alike.

That message almost exactly mirrored the one he had just delivered to his Senate colleagues, right down to his criticism of the DNC, according to a Democrat familiar with his afternoon remarks.

At the same time, Sanders and his top aides have peppered their regular conversations with other Democrats with consistent reminders that he will do what it takes to stop Trump from reaching 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s implied that he won’t stand in Clinton’s way — thereby all but ensuring that the chorus of detractors calling for him to drop out quiets down.

“Let me make it very clear, if I haven’t 10,000 times previously, that Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States,” he asserted to reporters on Tuesday, repeating the assurance that earned him a friendly greeting from the Senate colleagues whose tone toward him had soured in the final days of the primary.

Sanders’ allies have been eager to ensure that he lands back in Washington more influential than before his race, and a key part of that is rebuilding a friendly relationship with his colleagues. He earned some goodwill by raising money for Wisconsin Senate candidate Russ Feingold, and on the House side, he paid back two of his supporters on Saturday, Minnesota Rep. Rick Nolan and Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, with endorsements designed to spur their fundraising and expand his “political revolution” beyond himself.

For his most ardent backers, that’s a sign of things to come for the senator who never played a major Capitol Hill role before launching his presidential campaign.

“Before his race, he was the only senator who was part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and he’s one of the few senators who does national conference calls with progressive activists and goes to progressive conferences all around the country,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn.org. “That’s going to happen now, at a whole new level."

Within Sanders’ inner circle, conversations about Sanders’ post-presidential-primary role in Congress have been ongoing for months, but the first attempts to branch out beyond the staff and advisers came on Sunday, as the senator convened top surrogates (including former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and actress Shailene Woodley), activists, and sympathetic operatives and officials (like former Texas Agriculture Secretary Jim Hightower and the executive director of MoveOn) in Burlington, Vermont, to reminisce and puzzle through options for keeping his movement afloat even without the White House.

To Sanders, his aides and those in attendance, there’s no sense of urgency in the shift toward a new set of goals. His leverage, they believe, isn’t going anywhere, and most don’t expect him to back Clinton when he speaks to supporters nationwide via video on Thursday night.

“He sees the platform as incredibly important, and I hope he will remain oriented to not just winning a good platform at the convention — which I think we are in a position to do — but to try to get some wind behind those positions,” said Dan Cantor, the national director of the Sanders-supporting Working Families Party, eyeing the coming weeks. “[But] it’s not that complicated. He has made it very clear that he is going to be onboard the stopping-Trump train."