Martin O'Malley tells Howard Dean he's tried to get Bernie Sanders to do unsanctioned debates, but Sanders wasn't interested:

“I asked Sen. Sanders. Sen. Sanders didn’t want to do more debates either. He kind of liked where it is,” Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley says on MSNBC.

O’Malley responded to former DNC Chair Howard Dean, who said on the Morning Joe program that if he were O’Malley, he’d try to join with Sanders to organize more debates outside DNC-sanctioned schedule.

“You think I haven’t done that?” O’Malley says. (Sanders has asked DNC to add to its six-debate schedule.)

“We have one more debate coming up in South Carolina,” O’Malley says; that Jan. 17 debate is followed by one Feb. 11 in Wisconsin, per DNC.

John Amato:

We can all thank Debbie Wasserman Schultz for the lack of Democratic debates and the ones she's scheduled for Saturday nights, but why would Bernie bother debating O'Malley in an unsanctioned atmosphere? Martin is so far behind in the polls and is fishing for anything he can catch. Why would Sen. Sanders waste his time at all with O'Malley?

Now if Donald Trump or Ted Cruz called for an unsanctioned one on one debate with Bernie, I think he'd cheerfully jump at the chance.

Maybe Martin O'Malley can convince some of the GOP candidates that are floundering in the polls to debate him.