The long-shot Bernie Sanders campaign suffered a serious setback Tuesday night, as Hillary Clinton won the New York Democratic primary by roughly 16 points, making it nearly impossible for the Vermont senator to overtake her in the delegate count, and adding to her decisive lead in the popular vote. But that doesn’t mean that the Sanders campaign will drop out. To the contrary, shortly after Sanders admitted defeat in the Empire State, his campaign manager Jeff Weaver suggested that they would press on even if Clinton ultimately clinched both the delegate race and the popular vote.

“We're going to go to the convention,” Weaver vowed to MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki. “It is extremely unlikely either candidate will have the requisite number of pledged delegates” to reach the magic number of 2,383 needed for the nomination. “So it's going to be an election determined by the super-delegates,” he said.

Kornacki pointed out that Sanders’s strategy hinges, rather precariously, on his convincing super-delegates—by and large already pledged to Clinton—that he has the popular will behind him. “If you can’t come to them and say, we won the popular vote, you have to honor the will of the people . . . how can you flip them after the primaries?” he asked.

“Well, because they are going to want to win in November,” Weaver insisted, arguing that even if Sanders wasn’t a winning candidate among the Democrats, he would perform better against Trump in the general election. And uniting with Clinton now, in order to prevent deeper discord within the Democratic Party, was not an option for him. When asked whether he planned on running the Bern Train until July, Weaver’s answer was firm: “At this point, yes, absolutely.”

Curiously, Sanders’s chief strategist, Tad Devine, offered a significantly different prognosis, suggesting the campaign would reassess its viability after the next series of primaries:

Sanders’s strategy, as formulated by Weaver, seems rather Ted Cruz-ian in his insistence on convention-hall maneuvering to overcome the popular vote. Even though he enjoyed an unbroken streak of seven primary victories before the New York primary, Sanders boasted that he could have won the Empire State outright—a claim that did not come to pass, despite his record-breaking rallies throughout the state. To lose that badly to Clinton, especially after predicting an upset, definitely puts a damper on the Vermont senator’s presidential ambitions, making Weaver’s plan to stay in the race seem unrealistic. It certainly doesn’t help that Clinton leads him comfortably in Pennsylvania and Maryland, two of the four states voting next week. (Or that her delegate lead is unbeatable overall.)

Then again, Sanders only registered as a Democrat for the first time in 2015, having spent the vast majority of his career as a political independent. He’s not particularly inclined to party loyalty as a result, a point that has won him support from fellow independents and bolsters his claim that he could count on their support to win a general election. (He was also infuriated that they could not vote for him in New York’s closed primary, which prevented many Sanders supporters from voting.) If he continues to run in an attempt to reflect the general will of the people, it will be at the expense of the Democratic Party, but better, his campaign argues, for liberals who want the best chance to beat Donald Trump in November.