Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally at the Fitzgerald Field House on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh on April 25, 2016, in Pittsburgh. | Getty Sanders: It’s Clinton’s job to ask my backers to support her

Hillary Clinton suggested during a town hall event Monday that she expects Bernie Sanders to urge his supporters to vote for her in the general election, but Sanders wouldn’t commit — instead saying “it is incumbent upon Secretary Clinton” to make the case to his backers that she should be elected.

But when faced with a follow-up question about the political implications of not supporting Clinton, Sanders immediately suggested he wasn’t ruling anything out.


“I will do everything in my power to make sure that no Republican gets into the White House in this election,” he told moderator Chris Hayes at an MSNBC town hall event in Philadelphia.

Speaking to Rachel Maddow in a segment that aired after Sanders’, Clinton recalled her experience losing to Barack Obama in 2008 and how she didn’t hesitate to support him after she withdrew from the race.

“Then-Senator Obama and I ran a really hard race; it was so much closer than the race right now between me and Senator Sanders,” Clinton said, adding that this time around she is far ahead of Sanders in the delegate count and total number of votes. “We got to the end in June, and I did not put down conditions. I didn’t say, ‘You know what, if Senator Obama does X, Y and Z, maybe I’ll support him. I said, ‘I am supporting Senator Obama because no matter what our differences might be, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and the Republicans.’ That’s what I did.”

At the time, Clinton said, 40 percent of her supporters said they wouldn’t support Obama.

“So from the time I withdrew until the time I nominated him … I spent an enormous amount of time convincing my supporters to support him,” Clinton said. “And I’m happy to say the vast majority did. That is what I think one does. That is certainly what I did, and I hope that we will see the same this year.”

In the earlier segment, Sanders said he hoped Clinton would come further toward him and his supporters on certain policy points including college tuition, fossil fuels and health care.

“If we end up losing, and I hope we do not, and Secretary Clinton wins, it is incumbent upon her to tell millions of people who right now do not believe in establishment politics or establishment economics, who have serious misgivings about a candidate who has received millions of dollars from Wall Street and other special interests, she has got to go out to you and to millions of other people and say, you know, ‘I think the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world and take on the private insurance companies and the greed of the drug companies and pass a Medicare for all,’” Sanders said.

Seeing his path to the nomination narrow dramatically in recent weeks, Sanders has been faced with questions about how he intends to finish out the race — including how he will speak about front-runner Clinton.

While he continues to go after Clinton for her ties to Wall Street and her super PACs, he has modulated his approach since the New York primary last week. Clinton, meanwhile, has focused almost entirely on GOP contenders Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in her recent public events, all but ignoring Sanders, who is expected to lose most of Tuesday’s primaries.