"You all know it is more than Bernie,” Senator Bernie Sanders said late on Tuesday night, in Santa Monica, to thousands of supporters who were shouting his name. It would be unfair to suggest that they didn’t know that: for one thing, they cheered even louder when Sanders thanked them for taking part in a “political revolution.” And nobody could really know, at that point, if Sanders had lost California, the state that had seemed essential to the idea that the race against Hillary Clinton would undergo a late-life alchemical transformation. (Clinton won by a significant margin, but those votes were counted hours later.) Still, it was common knowledge, in this crowd and across the country, that Clinton, after winning the New Jersey primary earlier in the evening, had declared victory in the race for the Democratic nomination, a day after the Associated Press did it for her. As Sanders’s speech began, the people in the crowd didn’t know if he would agree with her, and with the inescapable delegate math. Many of them clearly hoped that he wouldn’t. And he didn’t. Sanders wasn’t ready to say that the campaign against Donald Trump, at least, was now more about Hillary Clinton than about him.
...
... The Sanders scenario goes like this: Clinton has only reached the “magic number” of twenty-three hundred and eighty-three if one counts superdelegates (this is hard to avoid, since the Democrats have more than seven hundred superdelegates), who, though they say they are voting for her now, can change their vote at any time up until the roll call at the Convention. The question is why they would do such a thing. Clinton has a majority of the pledged delegates as well, so there isn’t really an argument based on electoral returns. The superdelegates are elected officials and Party functionaries, who overwhelmingly back her and seem unmoved by polls that show Sanders doing better in matchups with Trump. Sanders argues that they could, nonetheless, be talked into it. (“We are on the phone right now,” he told Lester Holt, of NBC, on Tuesday.) Sanders alluded to this exercise in his Santa Monica speech by saying that he was “pretty good at arithmetic” and knew the road was “steep.” It is so steep, at this point, that it requires not a climb but a rocket. What is the potential fuel that the Sanders campaign is looking for—an indictment or some disqualifying scandal? It would be hard to see that as an outcome worth celebrating for any campaign.

*Bernie Sanders Vows to Compete in Washington, D.C., Primary on Tuesday, Last of Cycle

*Sanders Says He Will Do Whatever He Can to Keep Trump From Getting Elected

*Sanders Calls for Statehood for Washington, D.C.

*Sanders Says He Will Meet With Hillary Clinton to Discuss How They Can Work Together to Defeat Trump