Story highlights

Sanders will argue that "if Democrats want to keep the White House ... then establishment politics won't do it."

The same aide said Sanders will also do a little boasting that "few would deny he is generating excitement and that's what the party needs."

CNN  — 

Bernie Sanders will take his anti-establishment rhetoric to the most establishment Democratic meeting in the country on Friday.

According to an aide, the Vermont senator will argue during his speech at the Democratic National Committee summer meeting in Minneapolis that “if Democrats want to keep the White House and recapture Congress and make gains in statehouses, then establishment politics won’t do it.”

Sanders will call on the DNC to take on the establishment – namely Wall Street, big banks and corporations – not be beholden to them.

The same aide said Sanders will also do a little boasting that “few would deny he is generating excitement and that’s what the party needs.”

The audience on Friday will be markedly different than what Sanders is used to. Instead of counter-culture Democrats and people who don’t identify with a party, Sanders will stand before a group of people he really hasn’t identified with for much of his career.

According to a DNC aide, there is no reliable record that says Sanders has attended a DNC quarterly meeting before. And his campaign isn’t able to say that he has been involved in past years.

Sanders’ campaign also told CNN this week that Sanders has only been to one Democratic National Convention: the one held in Denver in 2008.

Sanders has long identified as an independent. He was elected mayor of Burlington, congressman and senator without being a member of the Democratic Party, but has caucused with the party in Washington.

Sanders has said that he would not run a third-party campaign were he to lose the Democratic nomination.