In general, the Southern states that Sanders says “distort reality” have some of the highest percentages of African-Americans in the country. The recent states he’s won, and on which he bases his claim of momentum, have some of the lowest percentages of African-Americans in the country. In each of the Deep South states for which there was exit poll data, black voters were the majority of Democratic primary voters. (There were no exit polls in Louisiana. The only state that had exit polls of the seven Sanders recently won was Wisconsin, where black voters represented 10 percent of primary voters in the state.)

Furthermore, as Nate Silver put it Friday, “Clinton has won or is favored to win almost every state where the turnout demographics strongly resemble those of Democrats as a whole.”

Now as for Sanders’s claim that the Deep South is the most conservative part of the country, one could argue that many of the other Southern states, as well as many of the states recently won by Sanders, are conservative in their own right.

It is true that blacks in general can be just as conservative as Republicans on some moral issues. But blacks tend to be quite liberal on the question of the size and role of the government. For instance, a 2012 Pew Research Center report found that “78 percent of blacks support government guarantees of food and shelter, compared with 52 percent of whites.” That position should have meshed well with Sanders’s expansive ideas.

As for the seven states Sanders won, four haven’t voted for the Democratic candidate in a general election since they went for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

The only Southern state that has had that long of a drought for Democrats is Oklahoma — yes, the one southern state that Sanders won.

Furthermore, in 2012 The New York Times listed three of those southern states Clinton won — Florida, Virginia and North Carolina — as swing states, and only one of the recent states Sanders has won — Wisconsin.