Weeks after voting in the primaries ended, Bernie Sanders hasn’t conceded defeat and hasn’t officially endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (though he has said he’ll vote for her against Donald Trump).
Biden: I’ve talked with Bernie Sanders, and he’s going to endorse Hillary Clinton
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
But according to Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders isn’t going to keep holding out. Biden told NPR’s Rachel Martin in an interview Thursday that he’s “talked to” Sanders and “Bernie is going to endorse her”:
VP Biden in sit down interview with us just now: "I've talked to Bernie. Bernie is going to endorse her." @NPRWeekend
— Rachel Martin (@rachelnpr) June 30, 2016
Now, we’ll have to wait for NPR to release more context to get a better idea of what, exactly, the vice president meant. Did Sanders outright tell Biden that he’s going to endorse Clinton, or is that simply Biden’s impression based on their conversation?
The timing also isn’t clear — Democrats have hoped Sanders would endorse Clinton before the convention to unify the party, and it’s not clear at this point whether he intends to do so.
Regardless, it’s clear that Biden’s takeaway was that Sanders isn’t going to withhold his endorsement out of bitterness, as some have suspected he would.
And this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Sanders has long been pretty clear that he will back Clinton in the end, and reiterated in a recent TV interview that “I’m gonna do everything I can to defeat Donald Trump.” But, he continued, for the time being he views his “job” as fighting “for the strongest possible platform in the Democratic convention.”
