US election: Sanders says he will vote for Clinton

United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has said he will vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, American cable network MSNBC reported.

In an interview with the network on Friday, Sanders said his main goal is to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and he will therefore vote for Clinton if it comes down to it. 

Asked he would vote for the former secretary of state, Sanders said: “Yes. Yes, I think the issue right here is I am going to do everything I can to defeat Donald Trump. I think Trump in so many ways will be a disaster for this country if he were to be elected president.”

Sanders has not dropped out of the race; nominally he is still in it.

Despite Clinton’s claim of victory, Sanders has vowed to take his campaign all the way to the Democrats’ July 25-28 convention in Philadelphia, when the official nomination will take place. 

READ MORE: Bernie Sanders vows to stay in Democrat nomination race

“Sanders and many of his supporters suspect that if he were to drop out, Clinton would immediately pivot back to the right wing, to the Republicans.

“All of that rhetoric we’ve heard from her – now suddenly saying she’s against the Trans-Pacific partnership trade deal and that she’s more in tune with the ideas of inequality – that would all go straight out of the window,” Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, reporting from Washington DC, explained. 

“The Sanders folks are still keeping the pressure on Clinton and still staying in the race nominally, but, when asked if he would vote for Clinton in November, he said: ‘Yes I will, because we can’t have Trump.'” 

Sanders has built his campaign on a promise of tackling economic inequality, which he says is caused by large corporations and greedy billionaires, as well as a political class that has done nothing to redress it.

He promised that he would not allow Trump to become president, condemning his “bigotry” against Mexicans, Muslims, and African Americans.