A group of Bernie Sanders staffers and volunteers is circulating a draft proposal calling on the senator to get out of the presidential race after the final burst of Democratic primaries on June 7, and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.

Operating under the assumption that Sanders will win the California primary but still fall far short of amassing enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, the document calls for the Vermont senator to exit the race and launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama.


The working title for the roughly 1,600-word document: “After Winning on June 7th Bernie Sanders Should Suspend his Campaign and Launch an Independent Organization to Defeat Donald Trump."

At the same time, people closer to Sanders and his campaign team have been holding their own big-picture conversations about the shape of the post-primary Sanders machine for months, zeroing in on specific questions in recent weeks about what the goals should be, and how it would work.

Both efforts to sketch out the Sanders endgame are working under the premise that Hillary Clinton will likely be the party’s nominee — but a standard-bearer who will struggle to bring Sanders’ voters along with her. That’s led some of the discussions to focus on how best to use Sanders’ vaunted email list to energize his backers against Trump, and whether to help down-ballot candidates who share Sanders’ views.

For the moment, Sanders remains publicly focused on amassing delegates via the remaining primaries so he can reach the Democratic convention in July with a significant force that can shape the proceedings. But even as he racks up victories — most recently in Indiana and West Virginia — he’s faced repeated questions about his intentions, with some of his highest-profile supporters questioning his plan to stay in through July.

The group of over a dozen Sanders backers crafting the proposal — a collection of volunteers and current and former Sanders staff members, all veterans of other high-profile campaigns, including Barack Obama’s, who insist on anonymity — believes that leaving an imprint on the party platform is an overrated goal. They suggest that the Vermont senator should exit the race if it’s clear he cannot win — a call similar to the one made by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, his lone Senate endorser — rather than spend the five weeks before the convention in limbo.

That approach would allow Clinton to confront Trump more directly, and earlier than expected: Even Priorities USA Action, the main pro-Clinton super PAC, has signaled that it wishes to go on the offensive sooner than originally planned by revealing this week that it will move up the start time of its ads from June 8.

“Senator Sanders should proceed to lay out his plan to build an organization, completely independent of the Clinton campaign that will single-mindedly devote itself to educating Americans about the threat of right wing (some say fascist) takeover and the task of identifying and mobilizing voters to defend our democracy in November 2016 and beyond. Call it Revolution 2016 or another name that best speaks to base and message and its focused task over the next 5 months might be to mobilize voters under 30 (with likely positive impacts on Senate and Congressional races),” reads a copy of the draft proposal obtained by POLITICO.

While Sanders will likely speak at July’s official Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the document proposes that he and his aides host a ‘convention’ event of their own to spur excitement and launch this group: “The best organized independent expenditure organization in history [that will] give the vast (and deeply anti-establishment) base a vehicle into which they will whole heartedly pour their energy.”

Such an effort, they write, would help bridge the gap between Clinton and the “large cadre of young, newly political Sanders supporters [that] sees rejection of Hillary and the Democratic Party establishment as core to their identity.”

If the group at first focused primarily on combating Trump, the thinking goes, it would provide those Sanders fans with justification for eventually voting for Clinton.

“This is a populist year in American electoral politics with signs that it may mark the beginning of a populist era. It would be very unwise for the decidedly un-populist Hillary Clinton to move with too much confidence towards a full-on confrontation with Donald Trump,” they continue. “A Sanders-led (as opposed to Sanders-centered) independent entity could provide a much needed, articulate and energized economic populist voice to the anti-Trump effort without the intrinsic compromising effect posed by close association with Neoliberal Democratic elites, as well as weaning the volunteer base off total reliance on individual candidates during one-off election cycles.”

The still-circulating proposal — by far the most advanced version of a post-primary discussion to surface — acknowledges that there are significant kinks still to work out in the post-primary plan, first and foremost how to fund the proposed independent entity.

While Sanders has sustained his campaign with an online fundraising juggernaut, the pace of its donations has already slowed and it’s unlikely that he would be able to keep up a constant money flow beyond the campaign season. As a result, acknowledge the proposal drafters, he would be faced with the question of accepting big checks from individual donors — a direct contradiction with a central tenet of his current campaign.

“Bernie Sanders may either believe that it is a principle, even outside of a candidacy, or feel that he is boxed in by the rhetoric of the campaign,” they write. “Controls could easily be applied — such as an open process governed by a diverse panel of volunteers who could accept or reject large donations, e.g. in excess of $10,000 — but in the end Bernie Sanders himself would have to decide where his priorities lie."