I do not find small donors or a reliance on small donors to be “criminal” as Mr. Eller asserts; I merely point out the facts that when candidates rely on rational actors for funding (and that’s a political science term of art; it does not paint others as “irrational” in any normal sense of the word), candidates who are losing are forced to drop out. That is why Marco Rubio and John Kasich left the Republican race.

And yes, rational actors are self-interested, but that hardly makes them villains. Democracy is supposed to function when people organize to promote a mutual self-interest, which applies to labor unions and Planned Parenthood as much as it does to “the 1%.” And note that Sanders has received the endorsement of only a couple of labor unions, as opposed to the many unions supporting Clinton, not to mention the other groups dependant on millions of grass roots donors such as the LGBT rights group The Human Rights Campaign Fund, NARAL, and many more who are not supporting Bernie. These groups are acting rationally to support the candidate most likely to be successful against Donald Trump, and a self-identified life-long Socialist is not that candidate, no matter how robust his support seems in a poll taken before the majority of voters are tuning in to the race.

Because, no matter that Eller reminds us that “Sanders has hardly hidden his Socialism,” the media has rarely even whispered it. And decades of public opinion research show that if voters are made to understand that a candidate is a self-identified Socialist, the support for that candidate goes down to single digits. Rational actors such as Planned Parenthood, and perhaps also the African American community, understand this in ways the Bernistas do not.

Small donors are a good thing, but when they become swept up in campaign psychosis, believing every small drop of good news is the moment the campaign will convince hundreds of superdelegates to switch sides, then those donors are not responding to facts or probabilities. They have been swept away by enthusiasm. They are politically in love with a candidate. And we all know that love can make us blind to the faults of our beloved.

As to the Sanders campaign exaggerating the chances of the coming “revolution” by pointing to victories in low-turnout caucuses … here again, the facts are on my side. Eller asserts: “Dr. Bauer’s sour grapes perspective on low-turnout caucuses (empowered by the Democratic Party, of course) and their ‘fanatical’ attendees, fails to address the obvious question: If the turnout required to win is so low, what wasn’t the formidable Clinton campaign unable to overcome such low numbers of ‘fanatics?’”

This is incredibly easy to refute. Anybody who’s ever taken Intro to American Government should know that caucuses are the least democratic method of making political choices, for the very reason that they are biased against the working class! Because caucuses require attendees to give up four or five hours of their time as the price of participation, working mothers, tired minimum-wage workers, and other members of Sanders’s beloved “working class” are far less likely to show up than the small percentage of voters who are fanatically attached to a candidate. Mere supporters stay home, activists show up. This has been proven so many times it is a political science axiom.

And this year was no exception. Sanders biggest percentage win on June 7th came in North Dakota, where he had a whopping percentage of the vote in a caucus where fewer than 600 people participated! The irony of a campaign that’s supposed to be about empowering the masses, where the largest margins of victory have come in very low turn-out caucuses, is lost on those in the throes of campaign psychosis.

The irony of a campaign that at first lashed out against superdelegates as the perverted child of the Establishment meant to coronate Hillary, is now turning to superdelegates with an illogical pitch to turn against the will of the majority of voters, and the majority of pledged delegates, because Bernie is ahead in a few polls, well … that’s a heaping load of irony that is also lost on the Bernie-or- Busters. If that’s not the very definition of “campaign psychosis,” I don’t know what would be a better one.

If one needed further proof of that argument, one needs look no further than Sanders speech on June 7th. After saying for weeks that he would win California, and that would be a powerful argument to the superdelegates, you would not have known that he had lost California, and lost decisively, by listening to his speech, which exhorted his supporters to fight on, fight on, to the D.C. primary, where he knows he will lose by a huge margin.

Political science seeks to explain reality. To deal with facts. The Framers thought it was extremely important for democratic politics to remain reality based, because the minute it becomes all about emotions, voters can lose sight of what is possible, and not possible, in a large nation with many different points of view. Democracy requires compromise. Ideological purity requires putting an end to compromise.

The heart of Mr. Eller’s response is a defense of Sanders as the better candidate because he wants a revolution. That the real difference between the two campaigns is one favoring incremental positive change and the other sweeping, and most likely impossible-to-pass-through-Congress, revolutionary reforms.

Here Eller is absolutely correct! And that is the real reason the Sanders campaign has lost. Most voters are wary of “revolution.” They don’t know what the outcome would be of eliminating the Affordable Care Act in favor of a single-payer system, or how the country could possibly afford free college for all. There will be no “revolution” of the masses because the masses do not want it! They’ve been offered the choice between revolution and incremental, but real, progressive change. And they have spoken.