PHILADELPHIA — When Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren took the stage here on the first night of the Democratic National Convention to play the role of unifier, she extended a few words of thanks to her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders for reminding “us what Democrats fight for every day.”

When Sanders took the stage later in the evening, he in turn thanked “my friend Elizabeth Warren” in an almost perfunctory tone before segueing into his long-awaited prime-time endorsement of Hillary Clinton.


The little-noticed exchange was lost amid the pageantry of the moment. But, as each senator looked to claim the night’s headlines, it pried open a window to the coming struggle to determine the leadership of the American left: one that involves a man who has worked outside the party system for four decades and still refuses to officially join the Democratic Party, and the woman who burst onto the scene in her 60s agitating to reform it from within.

Sanders and Warren are legislative allies, but they aren’t particularly close friends. And the progressive movement’s ability to carry out big goals like raising the minimum wage and breaking up the big banks will largely depend on how they can work together given Warren’s new stature and Sanders’ new fame.

So far, there are few signs of new collaboration — and some warning signs for the left.

After a bruising primary season in which each played to their own strengths — Sanders by uprooting the party’s assumptions by running an unprecedented insurgency and Warren by withholding her endorsement long enough to burnish her king-making status — each has seen expectations for their own role within the progressive leadership grow.

But while Warren’s clout within the party structure has steadily increased in recent months — to the point that Clinton allies now privately concede the nominee has had to pay special attention to her wishes, potentially even when it comes to political appointments — Sanders’ future with the Democrats is far murkier, even as he commands an army of grass-roots supporters.

Far from using the past six months to consolidate his position as a power broker by gathering Senate allies, Sanders and his closest advisers are just now struggling to carve out his future role. They’re trying in particular to determine the balance between using his new stature to legislate more forcefully and focusing on carrying his “political revolution” to state and local races.

Even Sanders himself has started to sound some skeptical about his ability to do both full-time: “Because I’m a senator, I can’t do both. But my campaign will be actively bringing people into the political revolution,” he told reporters over breakfast on Tuesday. “I will come back to the Senate with a little more clout. I won 13 million votes, and I will use that."

There are already signs that the balancing act is detracting from both priorities. After promising in late June to spend the ensuing months campaigning for down-ballot candidates from New York to California, he headlined exactly one rally — for New York congressional candidate Eric Kingson, running against a party endorsee — before abruptly leaving the trail to jump into the negotiations between his team and Clinton’s over the party platform. He hasn’t campaigned or raised money for any down-ballot candidate since.

Meanwhile, people close to the Vermonter are trying to determine whether Sanders will indeed have gained clout in the Senate after winning 22 contests and picking up 13 million supporters, given his longtime resistance to engaging in the kind of interpersonal politicking that historically breeds success within the chamber — and where he’ll return still calling himself an independent, not a Democrat, and where his colleaues grew increasingly frustrated with him as he refused to concede or endorse Clinton until midsummer.

This, after all, is a man who at the zenith of his political ascendancy in early 2016 spoke with Warren about the presidential race but — because he is uncomfortable making personal appeals — didn't get around to actually asking for her endorsement, despite the expectations of the advisers of each senator.

And the worry about Sanders’ balancing act would be entirely moot, fret progressive allies who saw the fury of Sanders delegates here as the senator urged unity, if he can’t keep his supporters behind him. The senator and his closest aides were shocked earlier this month that his platform committee representatives loudly revolted at the idea of an amendment that would have put Clinton’s name on the party document — an amendment his staff had already signed off on. Their confidence didn’t grow at the convention, when a number of Sanders’ delegates refused to follow his lead and support Clinton.

To some of Sanders’ closest loyalists, therefore, a broad sense of uncertainty looms.

Sanders’ future “depends on how he operates,” said Democratic campaign veteran Bob Shrum, who served Ted Kennedy, Al Gore and John Kerry — two of whom returned to the Senate after failed presidential bids. “Unlike Teddy Kennedy, who was only 48 years old after the ’80 campaign, [Sanders, at 74] doesn’t have a three- or four-decade trajectory.”

“How does he deal with his colleagues? It is possible, as Kennedy demonstrated, to be both the liberal lion and the deal maker. We do know that on veterans’ affairs, with [John] McCain, that he was capable of making a deal. But the question is, can he escalate that deal making?” added Shrum, referring to the one piece of 2014 legislation that Sanders and his allies refer to repeatedly as evidence of his Senate chops. “That’s a tough model to aspire to. You need a certain temperament. A fine sense of when to stand and not move. Deal making skills. And, at the same time, a capacity to hold onto your base."

That’s a model Warren has worked toward in her four years in the Senate, and her imprint has accordingly been felt on the presidential race, beyond the drama of her endorsement and her early refusal to run, which paved the way for Sanders’ candidacy. Warren was widely credited with a victory earlier this month when the Democrats’ platform committee agreed to include what’s effectively a pledge to keep bankers away from key Washington posts.

Many of Warren’s targeted Senate initiatives are effective because she has the buy-in from her colleagues, and by staying out of the presidential race until recently, Warren was able to keep up her practice of raising money for other senators, renewing a degree of goodwill into the next session. (Her most recent chief of staff, Mindy Myers, left her office in December to run the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s independent expenditure arm.) Even Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, Sanders’ lone Senate endorser, is seen within the Senate and by Sanders aides as more loyal to Warren, who raised money and campaigned for him in 2014, than to Sanders.

“Warren has a better political sense and has done a good job of building up allies,” said Barney Frank, the longtime liberal Massachusetts congressman and Sanders skeptic who retired in 2013. “Elizabeth has basically put herself in a position of having a veto over stuff on the financial side. But to do it, you have to do things [Sanders] hasn’t done."

“People would welcome him as an ally, but it does mean some things. For one, being a Democrat,” Frank added, nodding to a frequent topic of complaint among lawmakers who note that even Sanders’ official Twitter biography listed him as an independent throughout his campaign.

Party leaders are actively working to bring Sanders into the fold, figuring that if he’s able to bring his email list and army of young supporters along, he could be a serious boon to their efforts to retake the majority. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, expected to be the next top Democrat in the Senate, has for weeks been leaning on Sanders to get him to campaign and raise money for Senate candidates.

But Sanders is resisting turning into anything like a cog in the party machine, agreeing only reluctantly to raise money — once — for Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold and still declining to lift a finger for other candidates who didn’t endorse him. He still hasn’t agreed to entreaties from the likes of his friend Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to even talk to Iowa’s Patty Judge or North Carolina’s Deborah Ross.

To those close to him, this foot-dragging speaks to his long-standing resentment of the political game and his deep-seated wariness of party attempts to co-opt a movement that he believes Democratic honchos never respected. The examples of that posture were legion over the course of his campaign, starting with his refusal to construct a political operation for wooing party influencers back in Washington, and growing only louder when he claimed that Clinton-backing advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the Human Rights Campaign represent the “political establishment," an assertion he and his advisers considered pushing further.

That’s also why he was surprised to learn on a conference call with his inner circle shortly before the California primary that his push to swing superdelegates away from Clinton had been a bust — even though he hadn’t been making the calls to them personally.

His disdain for day-to-day political mechanics explains why his campaign ignored repeated requests to send a surrogate to the Massachusetts party convention that Warren headlined, forcing the state committee to awkwardly cancel on Clinton’s representative, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, to avoid seeming biased. And it’s why, when he occasionally made it back to Washington, he didn’t hesitate to tell his colleagues, almost none of whom endorsed him, all about his own success. Returning briefly to the Senate in the early spring as the primary raged and grew increasingly tense, the first thing he said to Reid upon running into him on the floor was, “Harry, have you seen my crowds?”"

Now, back roaming the marble hallways of the Hill after not voting at all this year until June while he was campaigning, he’s actively puzzling through his political position within the party and the chamber. Leaders have stepped in to talk him through it: In recent weeks he’s spoken with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, and over the Fourth of July weekend he went out for Chinese dinner with Schumer, with whom he's increasingly been in communication. When he returned to Washington two days after backing Clinton, he got a standing ovation from his Senate colleagues after a nod from Reid.

Sanders hasn’t given many hints about his legislative intentions other than to tell reporters last week he intendsto continue serving on his five committees while pushing against bad trade deals, for greater infrastructure spending and for a higher minimum wage.

But as far as voting goes, people surrounding Sanders hope he can start working more closely with Warren and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown to strengthen the party’s liberal wing. Warren allies, meanwhile, are content to allow Sanders to rise as long as he doesn’t step in on her Banking Committee regulatory turf.

Still, even his fellow Senate liberals aren’t quite sure what to expect from their newly famous colleague. While they don’t intend to start asking for Sanders’ blessing in the way they do from Warren on select issues, they’re watching for signals about whether he plans to continue his pattern of giving big-ticket speeches and focusing on amendments, or whether he wants to start collaborating on more legislation — which could represent a major break. (Even some people within his campaign grumbled about the task of selling his legislative achievements when an internal campaign document, eventually circulated by the campaign, listed “Dairy Farms” as one of his major areas of accomplishment.)

“A lot of people pick their path in terms of being an insider or an outsider, or being a communicator versus a legislator. Workhorse, show horse,” said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, who supported Clinton in the primary while sitting with Sanders in the progressive wing of the party. “We are talking about making significant changes to the way our economy works, and that’s going to be a team effort. So you’re going to need inside legislative players. You’re going to need people working on the election side. You’re going to need outside communicators. So everybody plays a role. My instinct is that Bernie is best suited to continue to lead his [campaign organization]. But there are a lot of individual progressive leaders in the Senate who like to do the blocking and tackling to get bills through.”

Yet Sanders’ insistence that he will seek to elect more progressive insurgents to Congress has fellow lawmakers wary of the effort's shape: When Sanders met with House Democrats in early July, he was showered with boos by officials who pressed him on running as a Democrat rather than as an independent, and who felt insulted by his insistence that “the goal isn’t to win elections, the goal is to transform America.”

“The notion that Bernie has — that there needs to be not just a progressive movement that transcends this election — is right,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a long-standing Clinton ally. “But the goal has to be how you take people who have been progressives for 10 years, and people who have found that energy in the last year, and not divide them. And not dismiss those who have been soldiers in the field for a long time as not as passionate and focused as those who have recently exhibited it.”

Added Schatz: “I think he will play a larger role, but it’s got to be reciprocal. And I think it will be, but there’s got to be a feeling-out period where he’'s not Bernie from a year-and-a-half ago. He’'s now Bernie Sanders, leader of a movement. So we have to adjust to that. And he has to adjust to going from the old Bernie to Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate, to Bernie Sanders, former presidential candidate.”

After weeks of focusing on the platform, Sanders has now become a full participant in conversations among campaign aides and allies to establish the structure of his movement in the months and years ahead. The senator is working the phones, talking to advisers in Washington and Burlington, and his wife Jane is also closely involved. The planning is still in the early stages, but some details are emerging.

An educational organization, the Sanders Institute, is likely to be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, according to people familiar with the planning. Sanders has already started raising money for Our Revolution — a 501(c)(4) to be run by his body man Shannon Jackson — that’s designed to recruit and train candidates. But the senator has said he intends to back dozens of candidates this cycle in races as local as school board, including Tim Canova, the long-shot professor challenging ousted Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Another group being discussed would serve as a political arm intended to harness the grass-roots energy that fueled his campaign at the door-to-door level.

Sanders’ top political and media advisers, Tad Devine and Mark Longabaugh, along with partner Julian Mulvey, took one step toward spreading the revolution last week, signing on to help Canova themselves.

Already, people close to both Clinton and the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm are sketching out a way for him to potentially be useful in the 2018 cycle, when a number of moderate party members in conservative states are up for reelection. If he can act as a liberal stamp of approval, it could prove beneficial in his own quest for Senate allies.

Yet the second-guessing within Sanders’ world about his future as an electoral kingmaker has already begun, before the groups even truly started their work. Skeptical aides watched while Sanders-backed candidates like Kingson and Nevada’s Lucy Flores lost their primaries — and as the few hundred down-ballot races that Sanders had already identified as targets have been waiting in the wind for help ever since he put out the broader call for his backers to run for office. (“Kingson is a very decent guy and a good candidate. We’re going to lose a lot of races,” Sanders told journalists in Philadelphia, answering questions about his record so far. “When you take on the system, you’re going to lose. It takes time.”)

Meanwhile Zephyr Teachout, a leading liberal reformer and House candidate who was one of Sanders’ first endorsees, even turned down his offer to campaign for her in June, preferring to see how his negotiations and eventual endorsement of Clinton shook out first.

And Sanders has also hesitated to commit to supporting only party members, drawing the ire of Democratic leaders by leaving open the door to supporting non-Democrats. So as the details remain to be ironed out, the 2018 cycle is increasingly looking like a more realistic timeframe for Sanders’ machine to get up and running.

Thus, whether he can have any concrete effect on races for the rest of 2016 may indeed prove to be the biggest indicator of whether his revolution can live on, particularly after his aides were shocked to see how quickly public polling showed his supporters flocking to Clinton. Already this summer, Sanders has lost not only races but legislative fights: He fell short on his high-profile push to reject a Puerto Rico debt deal in June.

For the moment, though, even high-ranking Clinton-aligned Democrats are holding out hope that Sanders’ plan to stay relevant works.

“I hope so, because I think if not, a lot of the people he brought to the table will get frustrated,” said Weingarten. “He became, just like Gene McCarthy, just like Robert Kennedy, the messenger of change. And that creates tremendous responsibility.”