Bernie Sanders speaks to nurses during a visit to the National Nurses United office. | AP Photo/Eric Risberg Nurses union head, backing Sanders, resists call for party unity

OAKLAND — RoseAnn DeMoro, whose National Nurses United was one of the first major labor unions to back Bernie Sanders, was still enraged on Wednesday as she talked about the Associated Press announcement on Monday night that Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic primary.

DeMoro was with Sanders at a massive rally in San Francisco when the Vermont senator received the news, on the eve of the California primary.


“It was sad ... they knew they had sabotaged his campaign,’’ she told POLITICO Wednesday. “I think because of the AP and the Clinton collusion — both making the announcement subverting democracy — it really suppressed the vote in California and in other states.’’

After a surprisingly hard-fought primary, the former Secretary of State dealt Sanders a devastating blow in California, winning 51 of 53 congressional districts in the nation's most populous state, a victory that pollsters attributed to a robust lead in mail-in ballots, which are now used by more than half of California's voters.

Sanders' backers refused to accept such an explanation.

“They thought California was going to Bernie — all the polls were there, the new registrants were there,'' DeMoro said of what she called a concerted effort by the "corporate media" and the Democratic establishment to suppress the vote in California. "So they essentially subverted the California election.”

DeMoro’s anger dramatizes the challenge for Clinton as she tries to heal the party's wounds.

The loss in California comes particularly hard for supporters like DeMoro, who is based in Oakland, and her 185,000 members, who poured their energy, and their money — $4.6 million in all, according to OpenSecrets.org — into the lone candidate who strongly supported their key issue of single-payer health care.

Now, even as key Democrats urge Sanders to unify the party, DeMoro is among who steadfastly say they will continue to back Sanders.

They are planning a key gathering of progressive and Sanders forces in Chicago on June 17 and 18. And they are urging him to contest the next primary in Washington, D.C., and continue the fight to Philadelphia and the Democratic National Convention.

“I do think they’ll lean on him,’’ DeMoro said of the efforts of party leaders to heal the Democratic divide. “But what does Obama say, what does a Hillary Clinton say? Bernie is not about Bernie."

“He’s the real deal," she said. "He’s not playing by the same rules. It’s not a political campaign. It is a political revolution, in the literal sense. He came up against the coldness of the machine and that’s an odd place to be in history.”

DeMoro said she will ultimately "respect whatever Bernie’s decision is — we’re with him, however we get the issues done."

“But there’s a whole lot of reasons for Bernie to stay in there,'' she said, "because I don’t know how he gets his issues addressed if he doesn’t.”

For her part, DeMoro said she and millions of similarly impassioned Sanders supporters are not ready to endorse Hillary Clinton.

“'I’m not Trump' is not a campaign that inspires people,’’ she said.