Joe Trippi

The door began to close on Bernie Sanders’ chances to win the Democratic presidential nomination back in February when he lost the South Carolina primary by 46 percentage points. Eight weeks later, with losses in four of the five states that held primaries on April 26, that door slammed shut. Delegate math is a heartbreaker. There simply is no longer any realistic path to the nomination for Sanders.

The fact is that the race between Clinton and Sanders has never been as close as it seemed. In the New York primary, when Clinton defeated Sanders 58% to 42%, the press universally declared it a big win and cited the wide margin. But the fact is that across all the primaries held to date, Clinton leads Sanders in the total popular vote 58% to 42% — the same big, wide margin as her New York victory. In total Clinton leads Sanders by over 3 million popular votes and has already amassed more popular votes than any nominee in Democratic Party history but one. Only Barack Obama at the end of the 2008 primary season had received more popular votes than Clinton has now — and several states that have not yet voted, including California, will add to her total.

States that Clinton won, such as Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and New York, elect more delegates than many of the states Sanders won, including Idaho, Wyoming, New Hampshire and Vermont. That is also part of why the delegate math doesn’t add up for Sanders. Clinton leads Sanders by more than 300 pledged delegates. That is almost three times more than Obama’s pledged delegate lead over Clinton going into the convention in 2008.

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So far Clinton has won about 55% of the pledged delegates elected to the convention. The party’s superdelegates have never voted against the candidate who won the pledged delegates and the popular vote. It’s unrealistic to believe they will do that for the first time ever in 2016 and will do it for Bernie Sanders.

The toughest moment for a presidential campaign comes when reality sets in that it has fallen short. For most campaigns in the past, that reality came in the form of running out of money. There was no decision about when or how to withdraw from the race. Campaigns left the race when they ran out of cash.

After Howard Dean's losses in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2004, his money dried up and there was no way to continue. The same thing happened to Dick Gephardt in 1988 after a bad showing on Super Tuesday. The system favored establishment candidates like Walter Mondale, who was a former vice president with a reliable donor base when he won the 1984 nomination. The deck was stacked against insurgents and challengers.

Those days are gone, thanks to the changing media environment, the power of social media and online fundraising and, for some lucky candidates, the dollars flowing from billionaires and super PACs. It’s likely that in every contest going forward, the runner-up will have enough money to go all the way to the convention if he or she chooses to do so.

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Clinton was the first Democrat in over 30 years to face the decision that now confronts Sanders and that may face every runner-up moving forward. She was far more competitive in the 2008 race against Obama than Sanders has been against her in 2016. She stayed in the race through the final primaries in 2008, as Sanders has every right to do now. But Clinton withdrew from the race prior to the convention, suspended the traditional roll call vote, made the motion to nominate Obama by acclamation and urged her supporters to work just as hard for him as they had for her.

There will be those in the Sanders campaign who will urge uniting behind Clinton, as she urged uniting behind Obama.

But the inertia to continue to fight in a presidential campaign with resources is nearly unstoppable, even when it’s clear that the race is over. There will be those in the Sanders campaign who will want to fight to the end.

And in the end Bernie Sanders will either be carried by that inertia or, like Clinton in 2008, realize he is the only one who can stop it.

Joe Trippi is a Democratic strategist who managed Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign.

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