I wake up on Saturday and stumble from my bed to my computer. There are three new RSVPs for the Bernie Sanders campaign door-knocking event. I quickly refer these volunteers to training videos. Between printing materials, setting up clipboards, and taping pens to strings, I shovel down some eggs and toast.

At 10:30 a.m., I rush off to the copy shop, stressed that I’ll be late to the meeting at the cafe. When I arrive, 10 volunteers already are gathered. After an hour of training, they’ll be off to canvass for Sanders, reaching out especially to third-party and no-party-preference voters.

I finally get home about 5 p.m., after walking a beat with one volunteer while managing the others by phone. I’m exhausted and haven’t eaten since breakfast. In most political campaigns, this would be the typical day of a paid staffer. But I’m a volunteer, and I’ve been working up to 30 hours a week for months.

Before eating, I Google “Bernie.” One of the first hits is a Washington Post opinion piece about how Bernie should drop out, lest he cause Donald Trump to win the presidency. There is a profound deafness in the recent chorus of Bernie-shaming. The root of his politics is passion for justice, and it is passion, not risk management, that moves 12 people to spend a day knocking on strangers’ doors.

Neither the supporters whose homes I visited, nor the many volunteers I have worked with, have any interest in hearing that Bernie should drop out before California votes. Yes, winning the nomination would be gratifying, but for so many people who have not participated in politics until now, what matters most is voicing our political convictions.

That impulse does not easily yield to assertions of our need to rally behind Hillary Clinton and the triangulations of the Democratic Leadership Council that she is heir to. If I lived in a battleground state, I would probably plug my nose and vote for Clinton in the general election, but I guarantee that I will not be working on her campaign. Not a single fellow volunteer has said otherwise.

Is this rational? Maybe not. Maybe we should labor tirelessly for Clinton to prevent the hypothetical coming of the Fourth Reich. But cold calculation is a pallid muse. There is something galling about the Democratic establishment trying to scare us from our principles when it has cosseted Clinton’s milquetoast candidacy from the start. Isn’t it clear that America’s mood is akilter — that independents, the young, the disenfranchised are ready for a new deal?

So don’t blame Bernie for staying true to his democratic revolution. If the party elite fear a Trump victory, then they, the superdelegates, can choose the candidate whose principles are capable of inspiring a winning populist coalition rather than one that might limp across the finish line trailing the detritus of a historic grassroots movement.

Oren Weinrib lives in Grass Valley (Nevada County).