When Hillary Clinton travels to Capitol Hill on Tuesday as part of her lawmaker charm offensive, she could be in for a slightly awkward encounter.

Bernie Sanders — the Independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats — will be sitting there at the weekly lunchtime meeting, as he always does, while the front-runner talks to her former colleagues.


It’s hardly unusual for rival presidential candidates to gather together on the Hill — four Republican senators are currently running against each other, and other candidates occasionally visit — but in Clinton and Sanders’ situation, the tension is a tad thicker.

That’s because Clinton has the support of 30 Democratic senators already — including Sanders’ Vermont colleague, Patrick Leahy — in her latest White House bid, while her opponent has the backing of none. Clinton has yet to even acknowledge her main rival by name on the campaign trail — despite recent polling that shows Sanders nipping at her heels in Iowa and New Hampshire, and despite being asked about him directly twice in a CNN interview this week.

“As far as Senate caucus politics go, this is probably as awkward as it’s going to get. There’s nothing he can do about it. It is what it is,” said Jim Manley, a former veteran aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy.

Beyond Sanders, however, the room Clinton addresses will also likely contain a handful of influential unaffiliated liberal senators — including progressive icon Elizabeth Warren and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Sanders recently said that he’d “love to have” Warren campaign with him, while the Massachusetts senator has said multiple times that it’s premature to say whether she will.

But the meeting will also provide another reminder that, despite Sanders’ huge crowds and scores of small-dollar donations, his candidacy remains mostly an afterthought at his place of business. Twenty-one members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — Congress’ leading caucus on liberal issues, in which Sanders is the lone senator — have endorsed Clinton, while none has endorsed Sanders. And Clinton’s Tuesday swing across the Hill will include a meeting with that very group.

Sanders has had a similarly awkward reception with the party establishment back home in Vermont. In addition to Leahy, Gov. Peter Shumlin and Miro Weinberger, the mayor of Burlington — the city where Sanders served four terms as mayor and held his campaign kickoff — have also endorsed Clinton.

Clinton and Sanders have rarely crossed paths since they each announced their candidacies in April, save a chance run-in at New York’s Penn Station last month. But Tuesday’s encounter in Washington will likely be the second of at least three next week: they’ll both appear in Kansas City at the National Council of La Raza conference on Monday, and they’re both scheduled to speak at the Democrats’ first cattle call of the cycle on Friday, the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame ceremony.

Clinton and Sanders overlapped for two years in the Senate before she left the Hill for Foggy Bottom, and they have a cordial relationship. But as the pair has emerged as the two leading candidates in the Democratic field, the apparent distance between them has grown: Sanders does not shy away from implicitly criticizing the front-runner on the stump, though he rarely goes after her by name.

Clinton, meanwhile, has started pressing harder on issues where Sanders is perceived as weak by the liberal base, such as gun control.

Nonetheless, tensions between the two aren’t anything like the strained relations between Republican candidates, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul, who frequently clash. Sanders sat in on a meeting of the Senate Democrats with Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and political director Amanda Renteria in late April, and his spokesman told POLITICO that the candidate “of course” planned to attend the event with Clinton herself. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment for this story.

(Two other Democrats running for president — Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb — are former senators, but they are not expected to attend the Senate caucus meeting.)

The former New York senator’s Capitol Hill trip will also include meetings with the House Democrats and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

And while the meeting will come days after Sanders attends a weekend retreat with Senate Democrats in Martha’s Vineyard, the timing is unlikely to soften the impact of Clinton’s appearance.

“She’s going to be walking down that hallway with her vast entourage, people are going to be screaming out questions, and she’s going to walk into that room to a rock star reception,” Manley said.