An adviser to Bernie Sanders has been quietly urging the candidate to hone in even more on getting big money out of politics. Now, he’s aggravated some in the Vermont senator’s inner circle by announcing he will explore his own White House bid.

Larry Lessig, founder of the pro-campaign finance reform group Mayday PAC, announced in a video Tuesday he is exploring a bid centered on campaign finance and voting rights reforms — a month after he wrote a detailed memo to the Sanders campaign, explaining how to more effectively talk about getting money out of politics and making the senator’s bid more credible.


“Citizen equality can’t just be one issue on a list. It has to be the first issue — the one change that makes all other changes believable,” Lessig wrote in the memo, obtained by POLITICO. “For the first time in forever, the Wall Street Journal reports this issue is at the top of voters’ mind. You need to be the leader who makes it top of your platform as well.”

Lessig had been informally advising the Vermont independent on campaign finance, corruption and voting rights reform. The two have been discussing these issues in recent months, including a July call that was followed up with the memo. The Harvard professor’s entry into the presidential race would mean more competition for the small-dollar Democratic donors whom Sanders has tapped to fuel his campaign.

In an interview, Lessig said his announcement isn’t a direct result of his “set of quibbles” with the Sanders campaign. He said he mulled continuing to work with Sanders on the issue but ultimately decided against it. “I considered continuing to try to push people inside the Sanders campaign on policy prescriptions, but it wouldn’t have changed the probability of the problem getting solved.”

Lessig added that he reached out to the Sanders campaign before releasing the video announcing his exploratory committee, but he had yet to speak to the senator. Sanders’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Lessig exploring a presidential bid.

In the video, Lessig used many of the suggestions he had outlined in the memo to Sanders’ campaign. Comparing his potential candidacy to that of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 run and “citizen equality” to the Vietnam War, he said the success of the rest of the progressive agenda, including gun control and climate change, depends on passage of a reform package called Citizen Equality Act of 2017, which would change the way elections are funded and districts are drawn.

When asked about his potential candidacy taking away donations and eventually votes from Sanders, who has been gaining momentum in the past few months, Lessig stressed that because — if elected — he plans to resign and leave the presidency to his vice president as soon as the Citizen Equality Act is passed, Sanders could still end up as president.

“What I would argue is that a regular candidate is an either-or proposal, what I’m talking about is an and — Lessig and Hillary or Lessig and Bernie. One would break up the corrupted system, and the other would benefit from it.

“Ideally, I would resign in a day,” he said.

In the July memo, Lessig urged Sanders to focus more on campaign finance reform as a way of bringing more credibility to his campaign and critiqued how he has handled the issue to that point. “…[A]fter the surge of support for you, the single strongest attack is going to be the ‘reality argument,’” Lessig wrote. “You’re talking about a string of reforms that simply cannot happen in the Washington of today. The ‘system is rigged.’ If that rigging is good for anything, it is good for blocking basically everything you’re talking about.”

“The only response I’ve heard you give to that is that you’re beginning a revolution — making it sound like the mechanism of change is a bunch of people in the streets of DC. Whether you believe that is possible or not, other people won’t. Indeed, talking like that only weakens your credibility.”

Lessig plans to crowdsource funds for his campaign and said he had previously asked others to take on this effort — including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, and comedian Jon Stewart — before deciding to run himself. He’s set a goal of raising $1 million by Labor Day before kicking off his bid in earnest.

He also won’t discourage supporters from starting a super PAC on his behalf, as Sanders has — a mistake, in Lessig’s opinion. “I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament. I wasn’t convinced of [the Sanders campaign’s] strategic judgment there.”

The super PAC Lessig founded last year, Mayday PAC, spent $10 million in the 2014 election cycle, with little success. Lessig has resigned from the group, which brought in contributions from top donors including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Napster co-founder Sean Parker. A spokesman for the super PAC said it has not yet determined plans for 2016.

Although Sanders’ campaign did not respond, Ben Cohen, a top Sanders supporter and advocate of campaign finance reform, said the senator had a “tremendous amount of respect” for Lessig and stressed that the “more candidates there are talking about money in politics, the more mainstream the issue will become.”

But Cohen, a co-founder of ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s, rejected the notion that Sanders wasn’t focused enough on getting money out of politics.

“I think this has been a core part of Sanders’ campaign,” Cohen added. “He’s wanted to get money out of politics before it was in vogue.”