Clinton, Sanders in talks to host joint event: reports

by TheHill.com - 07/06/16 6:49 PM ET

The Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns are in talks to host a joint event as early as next Tuesday in New Hampshire in which an endorsement would be on the table, according to multiple reports.

{mosads}NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell reported Wednesday afternoon that the endorsement could come if there were “no more hitches” between the two sides.

Neither the Sanders campaign nor the Clinton campaign immediately returned a request for comment.

Sanders has refused to endorse Clinton despite her hold on the nomination, but he has begun to signal a softening over the past few weeks. Sanders said last month that he’d “in all likelihood” vote for Clinton and acknowledged on multiple occasions that she’d be the party’s nominee despite the continuation of his campaign as the Democratic National Convention approaches.

The news comes after a testy day on Capitol Hill, where House Democrats peppered Sanders with questions about his commitment to the Democratic Party, a party he first joined during the primary. Multiple people at the meeting told The Hill that lawmakers groaned when he said that his goal was “not to win elections” but to overhaul the political process.

But Wednesday also brought a major sign of warming between the two camps when Clinton laid out a debt-free college tuition proposal — a key issue Sanders has pushed during the primary but that Clinton had swatted away.

While the proposal wouldn’t go as far as Sanders’s plan, he said in a statement that he wanted to “take this opportunity to applaud Secretary Clinton for the very bold initiative she has just brought forth.”