Bernie Sanders plans to rejuvenate his campaign by focusing even more on Medicare-for-all

Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) campaign had been sputtering, but his team says it has a plan to get it back on track. They're going back to basics, Politico reports.

Sanders is planning to go all in on his "signature issue," Medicare-for-all. "It could be the winning issue for me in the primary, it will be the winning issue for me in the general election," he said. "I'm campaigning on the legislation that I wrote. As you know, I wrote the damn bill."

Sanders' camp is banking on the idea that health care is the "defining issue" of the election cycle, and his staffers say that, so far, the strategy seems to be working. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight showed that the senator received the biggest polling bump following the second Democratic primary debate when he homed in on the topic.

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But there are risks. For starters, some recent polls show that a public option remains more popular among Americans than Medicare-for-all, but the greater challenge might be that Sanders has too many ideological cousins in the race, especially among the serious contenders. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) both have said they support similar plans. "If everybody's using the same rhetoric, do people actually dive down into the weeds to understand the difference?," a delegate for Sanders in 2016 said. Read more at Politico.