Hillary Clinton has had aides lined up to run her debate prep for months. A Washington super lawyer is mimicking Bernie Sanders, and her top policy staffer is acting as Martin O’Malley.

Sanders started studying for next Tuesday’s event not even a full week ago. And that’s because his two top aides sat him down in Burlington on Friday and asked whether he had a plan.


Sanders has briefing books, a couple of meetings with policy experts and an abiding aversion to the idea of acting out a debate before it happens. He knows the stakes are high, his staff says. But the candidate, whose New Hampshire polling and fundraising prowess have put a scare into Clinton, is uninterested in going through the motions of typical debate practice.

The Vemont senator’s debate preparations, in other words, don’t look a ton like debate preparations.

While CNN is billing the event as a showdown, Sanders’ team sees the first Democratic debate as a chance to introduce a fairly niche candidate to a national audience. So his team intends to let him do what he’s been doing. Far from preparing lines to deploy against Clinton — let alone O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee or Jim Webb — Sanders plans to dish policy details, learned through a handful of briefings with experts brought in by his campaign.

He won’t attack Clinton personally but will instead identify where their positions differ — on foreign policy, for example — and try to leave an impression with viewers of the substantive differences between the party’s two front-runners.

“You’re looking at a candidate who has run in many, many elections who has never run a negative political ad in my life — and hopes never to have to run one. You’re looking at a candidate who does not go about attacking personally, I just don’t do that,” Sanders said Wednesday.

He’s working to be prepared to stand his ground if Clinton — or O’Malley — comes after him. His team contends, though, that those defenses won’t come through as pre-written one-liners.

“The one thing Bernie’s not going to do is be a politician that delivers canned soundbites. That would be a disaster,” said Tad Devine, the campaign’s chief strategist, who met with Sanders and campaign manager Jeff Weaver last week to kick off the debate planning. “And one of the reasons to not do formal debate prep sessions is it gets rehearsed."

Far from landing a knockout blow to Clinton or any of his competitors, Sanders aims to broaden his name recognition among the large portion of the Democratic electorate that knows little about him. A senator from a small state, Sanders has been holding sizable rallies across the country, but it is still a largely white, educated and liberal crowd that supports him.

“His problem still remains that he hasn’t really broken out beyond white progressives, period. It could be easy to come into that debate with the goal of firing up white progressives; he clearly does a great job of that. But if that’s what he comes in armed to do, it will be a failure,” explained Joe Trippi, who managed the 2004 campaign of Sanders’ fellow Vermonter Howard Dean.

Furthermore, having never participated in a national debate, Sanders has no interest in antagonizing Clinton’s voters — especially given his stated goal of proving to Democrats that he could succeed against a Republican nominee.

And since the race could still drastically change with the potential entry of Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders’ team sees little advantage in going out on a limb.

“He’s got to use that time not to pound on Hillary Clinton or anybody else in the race, but to bridge out to more moderate blue-collar Democrats,” Trippi added. "All those people like her. You’re not going to get in there, make any inroads, by going negative or pounding away."

Sanders plans a busy schedule of rallies in Arizona and Colorado in the days leading up to the debate, speaking with policy advisers when he has time. While a number of his questions have been on foreign and military policy — an area where he breaks with Clinton, and where he has far less hands-on experience — he has also kept asking for specifics on social and economic policy, Devine said.

That kind of policy detail could come in handy if Sanders were to bring up specific platform disagreements with Clinton — such as over college affordability, gun control or a no-fly zone in Syria. His team doesn’t expect an all-out brawl, but the candidate is prepping specifically for the chance to draw such contrasts.

Staffers have been discussing possible questions from CNN host Anderson Cooper when meeting around a table, but Sanders told Devine and Weaver not to bother putting together any mock sessions, which are common for other candidates.

Still, Devine conceded, Sanders might at the very least practice standing behind a podium and delivering his message once he lands in Nevada.