But Sanders himself knows he enters the post-voting phase of the primaries with a weak hand. This was made perfectly clear in an important exchange on CNN’s State of the Union. Questioned by Jake Tapper, Sanders first suggested the super-dels should perhaps shift the nomination to the person who trails in the pledged delegate count after the voting is over:

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TAPPER: Senator, so you’re out on the trail every day talking about your goal, which remains to secure a majority of the pledged delegates. Should we assume that that means you believe the candidate who has the majority of pledged delegates by the end of this process should be the nominee? SANDERS: This is what I believe….I understand that it is a very, very uphill fight to go from 46 percent, where we are today, to 50 percent in the nine remaining contests. I got that. But…we’re going to try….But what I also believe, it’s incumbent upon some of these superdelegates, people who came on board Clinton’s campaign before anyone else was in the race, to take an objective look at which candidate is stronger.

But, after saying that the super-delegates should decide which candidate is stronger, irrespective of the voting, Sanders equivocated on the question of whether the super-delegates should swing the nomination to him, if he is trailing in pledged delegates at the end. Pressed on whether the winner of the pledged dels should win the nomination, he said:

SANDERS: Well, I think if that was the only criteria, then you get rid of all of the super-delegates, which may not be a bad idea. But you do have super-delegates…their job is to take an objective look at reality. And I think the reality is that we are the stronger candidate. So, we will see what happens, Jake. TAPPER: So, you actually think…it would be okay for the pledged delegates, the majority of Democratic voters, to pick one candidate, and then the super-delegates to actually go with a different candidate?… SANDERS: Well, it’s very funny that you ask me that question, when you had 400 pledged delegates come on board Clinton’s campaign before anyone else was in the race. That’s called an anointment….we are fighting to win the pledged delegates. So, before I can answer your question, let’s see what’s going to happen. But if you do have if your argument is, let’s get rid of the super-delegates, that may not be a bad idea.

Sanders’s position, then, is that he should continue until the voting is over, precisely because we should know what the will of the voters is before the super-delegates make up their mind. But he isn’t yet willing to say whether he will continue arguing that the super-delegates should override the will of the voters if Clinton is leading among pledged delegates after it is all over. Sanders says, with justification, that the very existence of super-delegates is undemocratic, since they are not bound by the will of the voters, and perhaps should be done away with. But he maintains that, since this system does exist, if Sanders ends with fewer pledged delegates, then perhaps they should behave un-democratically (by Sanders’s own lights) and take into account which is the stronger general election candidate (i.e., him), even if that person didn’t win as many votes.

This argument is not sustainable. Now, to be clear, Sanders has every right to fight on until the last votes are counted, and even to demand concessions on the platform and on process as part of unity talks that take place in June. Nor is it in any way defrauding his supporters for him to continue raising money to keep up this battle, even if it looks increasingly hopeless. Plenty of Sanders supporters no doubt continue to chip in money for the express purpose of keeping his message and movement alive for as long as possible — in the full knowledge that he almost certainly won’t win — potentially building leverage for him to win concessions later and exert influence over the party going forward. That’s all fine.

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But the point is, Sanders himself plainly knows that, once the voting is over, his argument for continuing to flip the super-delegates will lose whatever remaining force and coherence it currently has. His equivocating to Tapper — his refusal under persistent questioning to take his own argument to its logical conclusion — demonstrates this clearly. And so, Sanders’s continued posture will become a lot harder to sustain once the voting concludes and there is no longer any way to argue that the voters’ will has not been fully expressed. Indeed, his top supporters have already confirmed this. Senior Sanders adviser Tad Devine has explicitly said Sanders will no longer have a good argument to super-delegates if he is trailing significantly in the pledged delegate count at the end. And his sole supporter in the Senate, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, has flatly stated that he will not support any effort by Sanders to keep up the fight under those conditions.

It is often said by Sanders skeptics that even if all this is true, there is nothing that constrains him from keeping up the fight in ways that may end up proving truly destructive to the party. Maybe. But it is also possible that Sanders may realize in mid-June that all the incentives now point the other way, since producing some actual concessions and playing a major role in unifying the party against Trump could help boost his movement’s staying power and influence over the party through the fall elections and beyond. Indeed, many senior Democrats may begin to amplify that case in the media, which could also matter. But that brings us to our next item.

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UPDATE: Some folks on Twitter have argued that Sanders did not explicitly agree at any point that the super-delegates should side with the pledged delegates. That’s a fair criticism, so I’ve tweaked the above to take account of it. However, Sanders did repeatedly say that the fact that the super-delegates are not bound by the voting is undemocratic, and refused to say whether he will actually continue arguing that they should shift the nomination to the person with fewer pledged delegates if and when it has become Clinton has won more of them. The point is that, once the voting is all over, and it is unequivocally clear who won more votes and pledged delegates, Sanders’s argument will become less and less sustainable.

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* BERNIE-WORLD DEBATES WHAT’S NEXT: Buzzfeed has an interesting look at the debates underway among top Bernie supporters over how to sustain his movement once the primaries are over. This, from Howard Dean, who led his own progressive insurgency in 2004, is interesting:

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Dean…warned that the Sanders legacy now depends on how well the senator steers his millions of supporters and shapes his next move….“If this ends up as a pitchfork fight, he’s basically going to have a relatively small group of deeply entrenched supporters who nobody will pay any attention to…He could become a major force in the Democratic Party. But you can’t do that by basically spitting at them. And I think he knows that.”

Other top Democrats have said similar things, and it is likely that this idea will get more and more currency once the voting is over.

* CLINTON-TRUMP BATTLE TIGHTENS NATIONALLY: A new WaPo/ABC poll finds Trump up 46-44. And a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll puts Clinton up by 46-43. This, from NBC, is key:

Republicans are now supporting Trump over Clinton by an 86 percent-to-6 percent margin, which is up from 72 percent to 13 percent a month ago, suggesting that GOP voters are consolidating around their presumptive nominee. While Democrats are backing Clinton by an 83 percent-to-9 percent clip, just 66 percent of Democratic primary voters preferring Sanders support Clinton in a matchup against Trump (compared with 88 percent of Clinton primary voters who favor Sanders in a hypothetical general-election contest).

So Clinton is weighed down by the reluctance of Sanders backers to support her. Let’s see where these Trump-Clinton numbers are after Sanders concedes and helps unify the party.

* TIGHT RACES IN SWING STATES: New CBS News polls find Clinton leading Trump by 44-39 in Ohio and by 43-42 in Florida. The polling averages have Clinton up by three points in Ohio and by two points in Florida. Keep an eye on the averages of state polls, folks.

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* THE LESSONS OF THE BILL CLINTON ECONOMY: With the chatter continuing about the role Bill Clinton would play in a Hillary administration, Paul Krugman takes stock of the boom of the Clinton years, which compares favorably to the Reagan years in every dimension, and notes:

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In 1993, when Mr. Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy, Republicans uniformly predicted disaster ….the conclusion conservatives want you to draw from their incessant Reaganolatry — that lavishing tax cuts on the rich is the key to prosperity, and that any rise in top tax rates will bring retribution from the invisible hand — is utterly false. Mrs. Clinton is currently proposing roughly a trillion dollars in additional taxes on the top 1 percent, to pay for new programs. If she takes office, and tries to implement that policy, the usual suspects will issue the usual dire warnings, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that her agenda would hurt the economy.

Also, look for Dems to make the broader argument that the economy does better under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones.

* A TEST FOR TRUMP’S ‘POPULISM’: E.J. Dionne says Donald Trump should be pressed on Obama’s new overtime rule, which could benefit millions of workers:

Whenever government acts to increase the bargaining power or pay of workers, free-market fundamentalists insist that terrible things are bound to happen. On cue, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan declared that the overtime rule was yet another Obama regulation that would be “an absolute disaster for our economy” and pledged to fight it. I truly hope he tries…perhaps a big debate would force more coverage of this issue — and get the media to press Trump about where he stands.

I agree, and would only add that this will show once and for all that Trump’s supposed openness to government action to raise the minimum wage is all a ruse.

* AND TRUMP THINKS CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL — ON HIS GOLF COURSE: Trump says climate change is a “hoax,” but Politico reports that he is taking steps to defend one of his golf courses from its effects:

The New York billionaire is applying for permission to erect a coastal protection works to prevent erosion at his seaside golf resort, Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland, in County Clare. A permit application for the wall, filed by Trump International Golf Links Ireland and reviewed by POLITICO, explicitly cites global warming and its consequences — increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century — as a chief justification for building the structure.