There’s a relatively new political adage that campaigns don’t end when they run out of votes; they end when they run out of money.

Bernie Sanders has plenty of money, but he’s running out of votes — delegates, more specifically. After losing all five races on Tuesday — including states he was expected to do well in, like Ohio and Illinois — he would need to win 66 percent of all remaining pledged delegates in order to finish with a majority. Given that all states allocate their delegates proportionally in the Democratic primary, that’s practically impossible.

This being the case, his campaign has been forced to come up with some increasingly tenuous arguments in order to justify staying in the race. Between his reaction to Tuesday night’s results and a “path forward” call with journalists yesterday, Sanders campaign manager Tad Devine has spent much of this week making these cases.

I like Bernie. I voted for Bernie. I think he should stay in the race as long as he wants. But these arguments are really quite bad.

Superdelegates will flip

From the moment Bernie Sanders won New Hampshire, his supporters have been warning that the Democratic Party’s superdelegate system could be used to pry the nomination away from Sanders — even if he got the most votes, won the most states and accrued the most pledged delegates. This claim was way premature, and never carried much weight, but it helped feed the not-entirely-off-base narrative that the Democratic National Committee has had its foot on Hillary Clinton’s side of the scales.

However, with his prospects of winning a majority of pledged delegates dwindling, Sanders’s case for winning the primary now relies on winning over superdelegates. As Devine explained on Tuesday night, “We acknowledge it’s a difficult route, we acknowledge it’s a substantial lead, but we do not believe it’s set in stone…The factors superdelegates will take into consideration include who’s won more pledged delegates … but also who’s gotten stronger, not weaker, over the course of primaries, and who matches up best against Donald Trump or whoever the Republican nominee is.”

Tad Devine on the Democratic race:

"It is not a matter of delegate arithmetic" — Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) March 16, 2016

A majority of superdelegates have already indicated that they support Hillary Clinton, and as has been noted before, the only thing that could get them to defect would be Hillary Clinton losing her lead among pledged delegates. There simply isn’t a plausible scenario in which either candidate wins the nomination without winning the majority of pledged delegates.

Besides, to argue that your path to victory hinges on superdelegates after your campaign and supporters have been raising hell about superdelegates for over a month is quite ironic.

Pledged delegates will flip, too

This is where Sanders’s campaign — Devine, specifically — runs off the rails. On his “path forward” call yesterday, Devine made the rather strange claim that some or even many of Hillary Clinton’s pledged delegates could wind up supporting Sanders.

That’s…not how it works.

On "Path Forward" call, Sanders strategist Tad Devine notes pledged delegates are not always obligated to vote as pledged… — Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) March 16, 2016

Technically, Devine is correct. There is a difference between a “pledged” delegate and a “bound” delegate in that pledged delegates are not legally required to cast their ballot for the candidate to whom they are pledged. And the Democratic Party’s delegates are pledged, not bound. As DNC Press Secretary Stacie Paxton explained in 2008:

Under the Democratic Party’s Rules, pledged delegates are not legally “bound” or required to vote according to their presidential preference on the first ballot at the Convention. Rather, these delegates are, pledged “in all good conscience [to] reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” [Rule 12.J] … Pledged delegates are not “bound” to vote for the candidate they were elected to represent. They can, and have in the past, cast a vote for the presumptive nominee when their candidate has dropped out of the race. As a sign of good faith, most former candidates will “release” their delegates from voting for them; however, this is not required, and only has a symbolic meaning to it. Delegates can vote for another presidential candidate without being “released.”

However, this distinction is not intended to allow pledged delegates to defect to another candidate who is still competing for the nomination. It is intended to allow the party to make a show of unanimity once a presumptive nominee has emerged. Devine is relying on a fair share of the delegates Hillary Clinton just won in Florida to see the light, reject “the sentiments of those who elected them,” vote for Sanders instead and dare Clinton to sue. If that’s the best you’ve got, you don’t have much:

Sanders camp now arguing that state laws binding dels can't be enforced. Not sure of the law, but not an argument you want to have to make — Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) March 16, 2016

If Bernie Sanders wants to stay in the race, that’s his prerogative. He’s got tons of supporters in states that haven’t voted yet who want the opportunity to cast a ballot for him, and he’s plenty of cash on hand to keep broadcasting his message. He’s been a net positive force on this race, and he can still do a lot of good work to energize the progressive base, and he can still call Hillary Clinton out if she tries to pivot toward the general election sooner rather than later. But his case for actually winning the nomination — a case that was always pretty shaky — has almost completely dissolved.

There’s desperate, and then there’s fantastical.