Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A liberal insurgent from New England challenges a dominant centrist opponent with ties to the South, accumulates delegates in primaries around the country and presses his losing campaign all the way to the first day of the Democratic convention. Finally he drops out, but not before delivering a stirring prime-time speech in which he vows to keep his cause alive. Then he returns to the Senate, never to run for president again.

The candidate was Ted Kennedy, not Bernie Sanders, and his adversary was Jimmy Carter, not Hillary Clinton, but their epic battle of 36 years ago is still fresh in the minds of those who lived through it. It is also an object lesson in how a divided Democratic Party should not behave if it wants to win in November, right down to the bitter ending, when Kennedy failed to raise his former rival’s hand aloft in his as a sign of party unity. Carter, fatally damaged by Kennedy’s challenge—plus a minor crisis at the American Embassy in Iran and his own pessimistic posture about the country— lost his bid for reelection to a Republican candidate that the smart Democratic money had dismissed: Ronald Reagan.


With Sanders now having won a total of seven primary or caucus contests to Clinton’s 12 (he lost even liberal Massachusetts, his neighboring state)—he is sailing into ever-more challenging electoral waters ahead. Party operatives have begun gaming out just how and when Bernie should say “when.” He doesn’t want to give up too easily. Nor should he stay on so long that he severely harms Clinton—now more than ever the likely nominee—in the fall.

In his election night rally in Vermont on Tuesday, Sanders declared that his campaign was, among other things, “about dealing with some unpleasant truths that exist in America today and having the guts to confront those truths.”

The big unpleasant truth is this: Sanders may have already changed things in this campaign as much as he ever will. By credibly challenging Clinton in the early days of the race, Sanders moved the needle—and Clinton herself—on the issues he cares most about, from trade to Wall Street regulation to expanded access to health care. If history is any judge, there is only so much more that Sanders could expect from a victorious Clinton, or that she would be willing to give him. It seems all but inconceivable that she’d choose him as her running mate ( he is too old, and too unpalatable to too much of the country). She would not offer him the one Cabinet post he might covet (say, Treasury Secretary?) and it’s unlikely he would trade his perch in the Senate for one she might proffer (say Labor or Health and Human Services).

Sanders might press for his economic ally Elizabeth Warren in the No.2 spot, which could unify Democratic women but divide minorities, and would have next to no appeal for Clinton herself.

So what is the incentive for him to to drop out sooner, rather than later? Not so obvious.

Sanders’ official position is that he’s still in the race to win it. Or as he put it on Tuesday night in Vermont, “Let me assure you,” that he will take his fight to the 35 states that have not yet voted. He will keep accumulating delegates in the Democrats’ proportional primaries and caucuses as long as he can keep raising the money to campaign—perhaps all the way to the California primary on June 7, if not to the convention in Philadelphia on July 25.

It's still possible—if not especially likely considering the limited demographic appeal he’s so far exhibited—that Sanders could pull off an upset in a big industrial state, like Michigan or Ohio, or a win in Wisconsin, where he has been running strong. But he would still face a formidable disadvantage against Clinton in the fight for superdelegates, party leaders and elected officials who favor her overwhelmingly.

At 74, Sanders knows this is it for him. He’s too old to run for president again, and his small-donor fundraising base makes him immune to the sort of establishment pressures that might induce a more typical candidate to drop out. (On Tuesday morning, his campaign announced he had raised $42 million from 1.4 million contributions, averaging $30, in February alone.)

“At the end of the day, what does he care if he alienates Hillary Clinton?” asks Anita Dunn, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Bill Bradley’s ill-fated challenge to Al Gore in 2000. “He’s got an 80 percent approval rating in Vermont. He’s still going to be a senator, in a closely divided Senate, and if he walks out on the Democratic Caucus, he could cost them control, so he is pretty untouchable. But the real thing to think about is why he is running to begin with—which is his message, his belief that the progressive wing of the party was not going to be represented in the process if he didn’t run, and all that speaks to me of the place he may really want to use his accumulated delegates—that is, the platform.”

Party platforms have become largely pro-forma documents, routinely ignored in practice. But it’s not unreasonable to imagine that Sanders might threaten a messy floor fight at the convention to enshrine some of his pet causes in the party’s official manifesto, as Jesse Jackson did in 1988. And then insist on a major speech slot to drive the point home, as Kennedy did with his famous “The dream shall never die” speech in 1980.

“People laugh at the platform, but it is a stake in the ground,” says Harold Ickes, a veteran of both losing (Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy, Jackson) and winning (Bill Clinton) nomination battles and convention fights. Working for Jackson on the eve of the Atlanta convention in 1988, Ickes warned the Dukakis forces that Jackson who had 1,075 delegates to Dukakis’ plurality of 1,790—was prepared force roll-call votes on any number of minority reports from the platform committee, and generally tie up convention business into the wee hours, if Jackson was not granted a prominent speaking spot.

At one point, Ickes excused himself from a meeting with his counterpart in the Dukakis camp to make a phone call that was in fact a pretend conversation with a vendor in which he seemed to be ordering 1,500 whistles to get the attention of the convention chair if needed. The Dukakis aide in question—one Tad Devine, now Sanders’ campaign strategist—overheard the message and Jackson got his moment in the spotlight.

But in the end even that was a meager consolation prize. “The bottom line is you don’t get anything,” says Dan Schnur, who worked on John McCain’s losing race against George W. Bush in 2000, when McCain dropped out after winning just four of 13 races on Super Tuesday. “You don’t get anything, except for a little face-saving.” In the days of brokered conventions—the JFK and LBJ in Los Angeles in 1960—Schnur’s edict might not have held true, but in modern times it hard to fault.

Much will depend on just how many delegates Sanders brings with him to Philadelphia. In 1976, Ronald Reagan arrived at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City just a handful of delegates behind President Gerald Ford—and then spent days torturing the Ford team with platform debates over abortion and détente, and a bitter rules fight that attempted to require Ford to name his preferred vice presidential nominee in advance (as Reagan already had).

In 1980, Kennedy stayed in the race through the last of the primaries in June, winning California and New Jersey and three smaller states, for a one-day delegate advantage over Carter of 372 to 321, though Carter still had more than the 1,666 needed for the nomination at Madison Square Garden that summer. Kennedy demanded a one-on-one televised debate with Carter on the economy, and pledged to release his delegates if the president agreed.

Weeks of delegate and fruitless negotiations ensued, led on Carter’s behalf by Richard Moe, then chief of staff to Vice President Walter Mondale.

Moe now says that deciding when to get out of a race “is a very tough question to answer, but in my view Ted Kennedy did not answer it appropriately at the time. It’s debatable whether he affected the ultimate outcome, but he certainly did President Carter no favors. He showed the president no respect, and this was after a long history of disagreements, especially on health care. There was disrespect there and you could see that.”

Twelve years later, Jerry Brown arrived at the Democratic convention in New York with 614 pledged delegates, though Bill Clinton had locked up the nomination some two months earlier. Brown had effectively stopped campaigning after the Pennsylvania primary (an adviser, Mike Ford, had warned him that he’d be “out there yelling and there’s no cameras anymore”), but had refused to endorse Clinton and angled until the last possible moment for a convention speaking slot. (He wound up speaking by seconding his own nomination, as his supporters clanged cowbells in the hall.)

That same year, Pat Buchanan’s renegade challenge to George H.W. Bush had given the president enough heartburn that a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican convention was the price that Buchanan extracted for endorsing Bush. He declared that there was a religious and cultural war underway in America and declared, “In that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.”

Buchanan’s speech struck a note of intolerance from which that convention arguably never recovered (the liberal columnist Molly Ivins cracked that it “probably sounded better in the original German.”) But such a speaking slot may be about the best thing the Clinton camp could offer Sanders this year.

“They can promise him a piece of legislation, but there’s no guarantee that’s going to happen,” says Schnur. “The one thing they can offer him that they can’t take back is a prime-time speaking position at the convention. And then they hold their breath and hope he doesn’t turn into Pat Buchanan. Now that’s not enough to get him to withdraw early. It might not even be enough to placate him, but it might be enough to appease him to a degree that wouldn’t alienate his supporters in the fall.”

In the end, a decision about when to end a race is a deeply personal one, campaign managers agree.

“We lost every primary, so it became kind of obvious we should drop out,” says Gina Glantz, who ran Bill Bradley’s 2000 campaign (which ended after Super Tuesday) and now heads Genderavenger, an online activist group that advocates on behalf of women’s voices in political and public dialogue. “But in the end, I think it’s a very personal decision. In 2000, we didn’t have 24-hour media, and social media. When Bradley lost New Hampshire by a very small margin, nobody noticed, because McCain beat Bush there. We were wiped off the map in the media. We couldn’t say, ‘Hey, we almost beat a sitting vice president.’ There was just no coverage anymore. A Sanders can keep going, because he’s going to be in the news, and on social media, and raising money from small donors.”

Even some strong Clinton supporters say there is little additional harm that can come from Sanders pressing on through the big industrial states that vote later this month. After all, Clinton herself stayed in the primary race till the bitter end in 2008, winning such big states as Pennsylvania, long after it seemed statistically possible for her to ever get enough delegates to win. It would be hard for her to deny Sanders a similar right, unless his campaign somehow completely collapses.

“He can press too far,” Ickes allows. “And both he and she will have this exquisite political minuet or ballet going down to the convention. His people will press him to press her harder, and at some point he'll probably just have to say, 'I've made my mark and if I overreach, I’m going to hurt our cause.’’’

That’s especially true if both Sanders and Clinton agree that the stakes of disunity are high, because they’re both running against none other than Donald J. Trump.