Before the second day of the Democratic National Convention was gaveled in, Bernie Sanders once again had to wade into a crowd of supporters angry at him for supporting Hillary Clinton the night before. This time, he appeared in front of the California delegation, and as they greeted him with a mix of cheers and jeers, Sanders decided to make a new argument.

“It’s easy to boo,” he told them. “But it is harder to look your kids in the face who would be living under a Donald Trump presidency.”

His statement echoed the words of Michelle Obama’s wildly popular speech the night before, where her passionate argument that Trump would corrupt America’s children was universally loved and virtually unimpeachable to all liberals. But on Tuesday, the legions of Bernie Sanders delegates in the hall kept up their fight.

It was a reprise of their response to Sanders’ speech last night, when they booed his enthusiastic support of Clinton. (Or, at least, they perceived any sort of support as enthusiastic.) Trump, ever the opportunist, jumped on Sanders’ seeming inability to corral his own supporters, several of whom continued to chant “Never Hillary” (and the more disturbing refrain of “Lock her up!”). Dubbing him “exhausted”, Trump argued that he seemed to cave to Clinton, even after the D.N.C. email leak proved what he’d long alleged, that the party establishment had quietly worked against him during his insurgent campaign.

But as Sanders repeatedly told his followers throughout the week, Trump could not be president, and he seemed willing to do whatever it took to make that a reality—endorsing Clinton with as much gusto as he could summon, to the echo of jeers throughout the Wells Fargo arena, and even orchestrating an ornate bit of political theater.

Backstage, Politico reported that the Clinton and Sanders camps were trying to negotiate a way for Sanders to take a bigger role in the roll call, where the delegates would formally cast their votes for the nomination, with a huge percentage still pledged to the Vermont Senator.

High drama pervaded the entire roll call, a showy proceeding even when party leaders aren’t desperately trying to lacquer on a sheen of unity. Several states praised Sanders’ revolution and promised it would continue, and Larry Sanders, a virtual carbon copy of Bernie but with darker, neater hair, cried as he cast his vote for his brother.

Vermont, his home state, passed on voting when they were reached in the roll call. It was a symbolic gesture that would allow them to vote last, allowing the party to address and praise Sanders—“who has changed the trajectory of this country in a way that will make the lives of working Americans better for generations to come.”

Never before had parliamentary procedure been so dramatically utilized as it did in the next few minutes. The crowd stood up with wild applause when they cast 22 votes for Sanders, but roared when Sanders stood up and asked the chair to suspend the convention rules, and moved that Clinton become the nominee. It grew, and grew, as Donna Brazile asked for the movement to be seconded (though a small chorus of “nays” still chimed in). And as Sanders symbolically ceded the nomination to Clinton, the deafening noise echoed seemed to close his campaign for good.

But as Sanders left the floor, so did hundreds of his delegates, marching out the arena and mobbing the media tent outside. Their seats were left unfilled in the arena. While some attempted to come back for a speech given by Mothers of the Movement, a group of African-American women whose children were killed by police officers and gang violence, the diehards seemed to signal that their Bern would not, and perhaps never, be extinguished.