While Hillary Clinton's campaign has begun calling its delegate lead insurmountable, Bernie Sanders' team says it's "on to Michigan." | AP Photo Sanders campaign: What losses? There's a unified message from the Vermont senator on down: They'll fight on until the Democratic convention.

BURLINGTON, VT — Bernie Sanders isn’t going anywhere.

After a mixed Super Tuesday showing that included muscle-flexing wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma – but a stinging loss in must-win Massachusetts and wallopings across the delegate-rich southern states like Virginia, Texas, and Georgia — the Sanders campaign remains resolute. It doesn’t acknowledge his path to the Democratic nomination has dramatically narrowed, or that his voter base remains largely confined to young white liberals.


Instead, there’s a unified message from the Vermont senator on down: They'll fight an increasingly confident Hillary Clinton until the party’s July convention in Philadelphia.

Forget the arguments about uniting the party behind Clinton in the long-term war against Donald Trump, say leading members of Sanders’ deep-pocketed campaign – it’s a fiction that the former secretary of state’s delegate lead is insurmountable. The next few states scheduled to vote are favorable terrain for Sanders, they insist, and Clinton had better be prepared for an escalation from the Sanders campaign, which will make the case that her stances on trade have hurt American workers.

In the words of one senior Sanders aide standing on the sidelines of the candidate's rally in Essex Junction, Vt., last night, when asked how he was feeling about Super Tuesday: “On to Michigan."

“There’s over 4,000 delegates in this process, and if she’s ahead by 200 delegates or less, that’s nothing. California has 400-some-odd delegates,” said Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver after polls started closing on Tuesday night, insisting that it was not a complicated decision for Sanders to keep scrapping, despite Clinton’s strong stretch from Nevada to South Carolina to Super Tuesday.

With upcoming contests in Kansas, Maine and Nebraska offering a promising outlook for Sanders, the campaign plans to rachet up the pressure on the front-runner. "There’s no way we’re not going to the convention," Weaver asserted.

That message, delivered at the senator’s rally on Tuesday night and at a breakfast briefing for reporters at the campaign’s Burlington headquarters Wednesday morning, was met with serious skepticism from many Democrats who saw the latest round of results as yet another indication that Sanders’ appeal is too narrow to win the nomination — and who identified Clinton’s two-point win in Massachusetts as a dagger to Sanders, who represents neighboring Vermont.

“If the New Englander can’t win in New England, he can’t win the race,” said former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the party’s 1988 presidential nominee, referring to a state that Sanders aides long considered a vital part of their Super Tuesday strategy before Team Clinton piled in resources and visits from both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the final days ahead of voting.

Even worse, in the eyes of many party leaders, is Sanders’ continued inability to carry states with large numbers of African-American voters in the Democratic primary electorate — a phenomenon that they believe signals his disconnect from the party’s true base. He lost over three-quarters of black voters in Oklahoma despite winning that state, and more than eight-in-10 African-Americans went to Clinton in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia, according to exit polling.

Even as he touted his gains among Hispanics in the days since Nevada voted, he also lost seven-in-10 Latinos in Texas — a delegate bonanza of a state where he was hoping for a tighter margin than the final 65 to 33 percent result.

Clinton’s thumping victories across the South, fueled largely by her support among minorities, were seen in her Brooklyn, N.Y., headquarters and her evening rally in Miami as evidence that she was well on her way to the nomination, and that Sanders’ once-serious threat had diminished dramatically as the night progressed.

“These results point to a clear conclusion: with a pledged delegate lead of more than 180 and momentum on our side, we anticipate building on this lead even further making it increasingly difficult and eventually mathematically impossible for Sen. Sanders to catch up,” wrote campaign manager Robby Mook in a memo released Wednesday morning.

Back in Vermont, however, that cold mathematical calculation was greeted with shrugged shoulders.

“I know there’s a lot of number-crunchers who think they understand the way this process works,” said Sanders chief strategist Tad Devine. “I would suggest that understanding the dynamic of a modern presidential campaign requires more than the skills of arithmetic. It requires understanding of the dynamic [of the calendar]."

Speaking with reporters hours earlier, Weaver insisted Sanders would “reassert the lead at some point,” blaming the perception of Clinton’s momentum on a nominating calendar that front-loads southern states: “If you look at national polls that show us even, if we’re down in the south that means we’re up in other places."

Devine also sought to downplay Tuesday’s results by noting that the first multi-state primary played to Clinton’s strengths.

“Super Tuesday was perhaps the single best day on the calendar for Hillary Clinton,” said chief strategist Tad Devine on Wednesday morning. “You will not win the nomination in the Democratic Party unless you consistently win throughout the calendar."

Sanders himself at times sounded like a political science professor during his 12-minute election-night speech, the shortest he’s delivered in months.

“This is not a general election, it’s not winner-take-all. If you get 52 percent, if you get 48 percent, you roughly end up with the same amount of delegates … by the end of tonight we are going to win many hundreds of delegates,” he told an adoring crowd of nearly 4,000 in Essex Junction. “At the end of tonight, 15 states will have voted. Thirty-five states will remain. And let me assure you that we are going to take our fight … to every one of those states."

While Sanders won’t exclusively camp out there for the next week, Michigan — which votes on March 8 — has long been the crown jewel in his calendar for this month. A delegate-rich and racially diverse target that’s hosting a Democratic debate on Sunday, the organized labor-heavy state provides Sanders with a chance to chip at Clinton’s establishment support — even though the RealClearPolitics polling average has her up by 20 points there.

“Michigan is such an important state because it offers such a sharp contrast between the two candidates on such an important issue — about whether you stood with working families or whether you chose to side with corporate interests who are shipping jobs overseas,” Weaver explained, adding that Sanders’ economic message could appeal to black voters living in cities like Detroit and Flint. “The African-American middle class in Michigan has been destroyed by the job-crushing trade deals that Secretary Clinton has consistently supported over the years. And if you look at what’s going on with the schools, the dilapidated schools of Detroit, and funding problems in places like Flint, Michigan, that is all directly tied to her economic policies. So she’s going to have to bear her responsibility for her role over the last 20 years in decimating the economy in Michigan, including the African-American middle class, which was once the pride of this country."

And once Michigan votes, that message will spread, Weaver projected, outlining what some Sanders operatives describe as the best-case scenario: wins in the heavily-white caucus states of Nebraska, Kansas, and Maine in the coming days, followed by a strong performance in Michigan and other big industrial states.

“We’re going to do very well in Pennsylvania, a place where his message on trade is going to do extremely well. Western Pennsylvania is a place where, again, another place that’s been decimated by Hillary Clinton’s failed economic policies,” said Weaver. “The auto industry in Ohio? Decimated by Hillary Clinton’s economic policies. Michigan? Auto industry and the rest of the industrial capacity in Michigan, destroyed by Hillary Clinton’s economic policies. Illinois has lost tens of thousands of jobs due to Hillary Clinton’s economic policies. So I think she’s going to have to answer, as we go into the industrial Midwest, why she has not stood with working families and middle class people. Why she has instead stood with corporate interests who have shipped our jobs overseas and are now funding our campaign."

That amped-up intensity didn’t extend on Tuesday to the candidate himself, whose election night event was more of a warm-and-fuzzy homecoming than a defiant political rally.

“It does say something — it means so much to me — that the people who know me best, the people who knew me before I ran for anything, who voted for me as congressman and senator, have voted so strongly to put me in the White House. Thank you so much,” he said, adapting his stump speech while standing on stage with his wife, kids, and grandchildren. “On a personal note, I want to thank all of you for the love and the friendship that you have given our family."

And, using a line that he occasionally whips out for his campaign trail stem-winders, but which had a different feel in the context of Clinton’s sweeping victories by that point in the evening, he added: “This campaign is not just about electing a president."

For Sanders, it was part concession, and part campaign manifesto. He continued: "It is about making a political revolution."