Sen. Bernie Sanders has run for the White House two straight times.
But the 78-year old populist lawmaker from Vermont is making it clear that the odds of a launching a third campaign for president -- when he'd be in his 80's -- are extremely low.
“I think it’s very, very unlikely that I will be running for president ever again,” Sanders said Monday in an interview with the Washington Post.
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Sanders – who describes himself as a Democratic socialist -- added that, “I think next time around, you're going to see another candidate carrying the progressive banner.”
In 2015, Sanders launched a longshot bid for the Democratic nomination. But his campaign caught fire and he ended up battling Hillary Clinton to the end of the primary and caucus calendar before backing the eventual nominee in the summer of 2016.
Sanders announced his second bid for the White House in February of last year, and was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in February thanks to winning the New Hampshire primary and a landslide victory in the Nevada caucuses. But former Vice President Joe Biden rebounded with a rout of Sanders and the rest of the remaining Democratic White House hopefuls in the South Carolina primary at the end of February, followed by a series of sweeping victories in March.
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Sanders suspended his campaign last month and endorsed Biden. The senator told the Washington Post on Monday that even on his worst day, Biden “will be 1,000 times better than Trump on his best day.”
But he once again pointed out that he and the presumptive nominee “have very serious disagreements on policy.”
And taking aim at Biden’s push for a public option to bolster ObamaCare rather than support Sanders’ signature push for a government-run, Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system, the senator said: “It's just hard for me to imagine how anybody can defend the current structure of our health care system.”