Bernie Sanders’ brother, Larry, has admitted to Heat Street what his younger sibling will not: Hillary Clinton is likely to be the next president of the United States.

After an extraordinary campaign during which Bernie has raised more than $200 million from individual donors and inspired legions of young voters to take an interest in politics, this member of the Sanders family is prepared to acknowledge publicly that the game is up as far as the Democratic Party nomination is concerned.

“I think he’s made it quite plain: he will campaign against Trump and therefore for Mrs Clinton,” says Larry, speaking from his home in Oxford, England. “And he will continue his campaign for an equal society.”

Why won’t Bernard say this in public? Why is he fighting on?

Most Democrats want to see Sanders treated with respect and dignity, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. But Sabato also said the nomination battle is over and Sanders "has to cooperate.” Tuesday's meeting with his Senate colleagues offers Sanders a good chance to transition to the role of “party unifier,” Sabato said.

“If he drags his feet, he will be seen as a spoilsport at a time when Democrats are horrified at the prospect of a President Trump,” Sabato wrote in an email. “Sanders will risk losing all that he has gained.”

On Sunday evening, after meeting in Burlington, Vt., with his close advisers and supporters, Sanders called for a 50-state strategy to get young people and working people to run for political office and to demand that government answers the needs of “ordinary people,” not just wealthy campaign contributors.

Asked whether he'll still consider himself a candidate after Tuesday, Sanders responded: "We are taking this campaign and our ideas for a strong platform to transform the Democratic Party away from a party which spends far too much time raising money from wealthy people into a party which represents the grassroots of this country."

You know, even as we figure out more about what happened, we need to get to work. And I have a number of proposals how to tackle this issue of self radicalization. I would set up a team exclusively dedicated to detecting and preventing lone wolf attacks. And that means providing more resources, creating more integrated intelligence use among all levels of law enforcement, strengthening the communication that we have coming from abroad, as well as internally, and working with Silicon Valley to prevent online radicalization. This killer was interviewed by the FBI three times and I'm not going to second guess what career law enforcement professionals do everyday to defend our nation. But we need to look carefully at this. Should we have a broader database? You know, someone comes to the attention of FBI not once but three times, does that suggest that local law enforcement needs to know. That people need to be more aware? Do we need to, you know, push the Congress harder to pass a law forbidding anybody on the no fly list from buying a weapon in our country? Something they have refused to do. And should people who express the kind of admiration and allegiance to terrorism be on that list? So I think we're going to have to take a hard look about what more we can do to prevent this kind of lone wolf attack.

I had an unexpected reaction last week to President Obama’s “coronation” of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic contender for president. It was unexpected, because this whole election has been so distasteful and ugly. Frankly, I have watched in such horror as a racist and xenophobe inches closer and closer to the White House that I haven’t even really weighed in on a Democrat.

I have felt, in the past and in this election, that our latent sexism and misogyny is on full display in both men and women as Hillary Clinton repeatedly has been held to different standards than her male counterparts. I have cringed at my own sexism as I’ve wished she looked more attractive and dressed younger. As I wished she were more charming.

And then last week happened, and Obama said there is no one more uniquely qualified for this job, and I felt such excitement.
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I feel as though she is me, and you, and every other smart-as-hell woman who had to scrape for what men take for granted. She should be the next president of the United States not because she is the most uniquely qualified woman, but because she is the most uniquely qualified person, period.

In forthright comments a day after the massacre at the Pulse Club, the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic party issued a call for a return to “commonsense gun safety reform” and lambasted the Republican-controlled Congress for what she called a “totally incomprehensible” refusal to address the country’s lax gun laws.

“We can’t fall into the trap set up by the gun lobby that says if you cannot stop every shooting you shouldn’t try to stop any,” she said.

Clinton’s tough stance on gun control sets up a torrid fight with her Republican rival for the White House Donald Trump, who has positioned himself as a champion of the second amendment and dismissed any calls for greater gun controls as weakness. She insisted that while she did believe that law-abiding American citizens have the right to own guns, it was also possible to see that “reasonable, commonsense measures” could be taken that would make people more safe from guns.

Rattling off all the ways that Florida allows the proliferation of guns – the state doesn’t regulate assault weapons or large capacity magazines, doesn’t require a permit to buy a gun or oblige owners of weapons to be licensed – she said: “That’s a lot of ‘nots’. I believe strongly that commonsense gun safety reform across our country would make a difference. We know the gunman used a weapon of war to shoot down at least 50 innocent Americans.”

The two things that are said perhaps most often about Janet Hill—that she is a lawyer and that she was Hillary Clinton’s roommate at Wellesley College, in the late sixties—are not true. “That legend was started by the sportscaster Dick Vitale, in 1991,” she said recently, of the Clinton story. Hill’s son Grant was then a star at Duke; he would become a star in the N.B.A. as well, and is now a basketball analyst for Turner Sports. “He focussed all the time on Calvin,” Hill continued, referring to her husband, a retired N.F.L. star. “Then, one day, his cameraman widened the shot—and there I was. Dick said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Grant’s mother! She went to Wellesley with her roommate Hillary Clinton! She’s a lawyer in Washington, in the Bush Administration!’ The only correct part is: I’m Grant’s mom and I went to Wellesley. Hillary and I were just good friends there.”

Janet Hill has known Hillary Rodham Clinton since 1965, when they were freshmen at Wellesley. “She played a big role in encouraging me not to leave that first week of college,” Hill, who serves on the boards of Dean Foods, the Carlyle Group, and Duke University, said. “It was culture shock: being in an all-female, predominantly white environment. I grew up in segregated New Orleans, and suddenly I’m at Wellesley, with only five blacks in my class. But my mother told me I couldn’t come home, and Hillary told me I couldn’t leave school.”

Hill and the other four African-American women who graduated from Wellesley’s four-hundred-and-twenty-person class of 1969 remember Clinton, with whom many of them still communicate, fondly. (A sixth African-American student in the class transferred after her sophomore year, and has since passed away. There were also two black students from outside the United States.) “What I liked about her was that we did not seem to be novelties to her,” Nancy Gist, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., said recently. “There were a lot of white women at Wellesley who hadn’t really had much contact with black people, especially people like us. They didn’t quite know what to make of us. Hillary did not communicate any of that. I don’t know that she had spent time around black people, but for whatever reason she did not seem to be so mystified.”

“I remember us correcting each other’s art-history essays in her room,” Alvia Wardlaw, a leading expert on African-American art, who lives in Houston, recalled. “It was me, Hillary, and Lillian Miller. I remember I had used a phrase that Lillian tried to correct, and Hillary said, ‘No, that sounds good.’ She was a very approachable and positive classmate. That’s what I appreciated about her. She was very open. And you could hear that big laugh of hers all through the dining hall.” Freshmen were required to carry heavy trays of milk, water, and food to tables where students ate together, family-style. “It was some heavy lifting,” Wardlaw added. “But Hillary would joke about it being good exercise.”

RICHMOND, Va. -- Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, issued a new warning to President Obama on Friday as he went after old enemies like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren at his first campaign rally since the end of the Republican and Democratic primary contests in Richmond, Virginia.

Back to his teleprompter-free self after enduring over a week of criticism from his own party over his attacks against a Hispanic judge, Trump assailed the president's plans to campaign alongside Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, on Wednesday in Wisconsin.

"We have a president that doesn't know what the hell he's doing, folks," Trump said. "I hear he's going to take a lot of time, during our time, when he's supposed to be looking at trade and the military and all of these things, and he's going to campaign for Crooked Hillary."

"You know what? That's OK. That's OK," Trump said before then issuing a veiled threat to the president. "Because if he does that, we're allowed to say things about him that normally we wouldn't bring up. Remember when Bill started campaigning?"

In January of 1937, the Gallup Poll, then in its second year of existence, posed this question: “Would you vote for a woman for president if she was qualified in every other respect?”

Sixty-four percent of Americans said no, 33 percent said yes, and 3 percent had no opinion on the matter.

Some variation of the question would be asked by pollsters for the next eight decades, including during the 2016 campaign cycle, which saw Hillary Clinton become the first woman nominated for president by a major party. Harkening back to the women of Seneca Falls and their Declaration of Sentiments along with the struggles and triumphs of her own mother, Clinton made history this week in a country where women are paid less than men for the same jobs and spousal rape wasn’t illegal in all 50 states until 1993.

The American people’s ideas about a woman’s fitness for office have fluctuated over time. In 1940, three years after Gallup’s initial survey, the question was asked again, this time by People’s Research Center. Respondents were less inclined to vote for a woman — 73 percent said no. Something in the public’s mood, perhaps the specter of world war, seems to have played to the great disadvantage of the hypothetical female president.

"You all know it is more than Bernie,” Senator Bernie Sanders said late on Tuesday night, in Santa Monica, to thousands of supporters who were shouting his name. It would be unfair to suggest that they didn’t know that: for one thing, they cheered even louder when Sanders thanked them for taking part in a “political revolution.” And nobody could really know, at that point, if Sanders had lost California, the state that had seemed essential to the idea that the race against Hillary Clinton would undergo a late-life alchemical transformation. (Clinton won by a significant margin, but those votes were counted hours later.) Still, it was common knowledge, in this crowd and across the country, that Clinton, after winning the New Jersey primary earlier in the evening, had declared victory in the race for the Democratic nomination, a day after the Associated Press did it for her. As Sanders’s speech began, the people in the crowd didn’t know if he would agree with her, and with the inescapable delegate math. Many of them clearly hoped that he wouldn’t. And he didn’t. Sanders wasn’t ready to say that the campaign against Donald Trump, at least, was now more about Hillary Clinton than about him.
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... The Sanders scenario goes like this: Clinton has only reached the “magic number” of twenty-three hundred and eighty-three if one counts superdelegates (this is hard to avoid, since the Democrats have more than seven hundred superdelegates), who, though they say they are voting for her now, can change their vote at any time up until the roll call at the Convention. The question is why they would do such a thing. Clinton has a majority of the pledged delegates as well, so there isn’t really an argument based on electoral returns. The superdelegates are elected officials and Party functionaries, who overwhelmingly back her and seem unmoved by polls that show Sanders doing better in matchups with Trump. Sanders argues that they could, nonetheless, be talked into it. (“We are on the phone right now,” he told Lester Holt, of NBC, on Tuesday.) Sanders alluded to this exercise in his Santa Monica speech by saying that he was “pretty good at arithmetic” and knew the road was “steep.” It is so steep, at this point, that it requires not a climb but a rocket. What is the potential fuel that the Sanders campaign is looking for—an indictment or some disqualifying scandal? It would be hard to see that as an outcome worth celebrating for any campaign.

*Bernie Sanders Vows to Compete in Washington, D.C., Primary on Tuesday, Last of Cycle

*Sanders Says He Will Do Whatever He Can to Keep Trump From Getting Elected

*Sanders Calls for Statehood for Washington, D.C.

*Sanders Says He Will Meet With Hillary Clinton to Discuss How They Can Work Together to Defeat Trump