He also said that unless Sanders starts winning more primaries, it might be time for him to wrap up his run.

“It’s already a divisive party—if things continue the way they are, it’ll only get worse,” Sherlock said as the rain began to dribble down. “I don’t want further disruption of the party this time around.”

Sanders and his aides know that the race slipped out of their fingers in the past 10 days. It’s hard for them to believe that the race seemed so close just last week, when Sanders woke up on Super Tuesday thinking that he was on track to be the nominee, and scheduled a big Super Tuesday rally in his hometown of Burlington, Vermont, expecting a celebration. Now, after a dismal showing tonight, Sanders has virtually no path to the nomination.

Rallies for both Biden and Sanders are canceled for the foreseeable future—starting with competing events Tuesday night in Cleveland that the candidates scrapped on short notice. The Democratic debate scheduled for Sunday night in Phoenix won’t have a live audience. The Tuesdays are getting less super. Biden’s delegate lead is mounting. The Sanders campaign has failed to get any new momentum, and the Biden campaign has been rubbing it in that Sanders is on record saying he thinks the nomination should go to whichever candidate shows up at the summer convention with a plurality of delegates.

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The campaign isn’t where it was expecting to be at this point, but Representative Ro Khanna of California, one of Sanders’s national co-chairs, is trying to hang on to hope.

Sanders, Khanna told me on Tuesday afternoon, is “going to be running strong in the way of the millions of votes. He’s going to continue to get hundreds of delegates ... The point is that he still has a chance. There’s still going to be scrutiny on Biden’s record and Biden’s vision in a way he hasn’t really had.” He added, “Biden hasn’t faced real scrutiny since the beginning of the race—shouldn’t he have at least the same length of scrutiny that Bernie or [Elizabeth] Warren or [Michael] Bloomberg went through?”

Optimism has collapsed into retrenchment. “Win or lose tonight, Bernie should stay in the race until the March 15th debate at the earliest” was the most that Maria Langholz, the press secretary for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, could muster in an email sent to reporters Tuesday afternoon. Her group had been all in for Warren and making the case against Sanders until a week ago, when it began urging members to vote “strategically” for him, to extend the race.

Sanders’s expectation that he could win with a split field, and could take the nomination with just 30 percent of the vote—an idea that top aides to the senator gleefully spelled out for me in the spring, when the race looked very different—seems almost impossible now. His supporters’ attacks on other candidates have left him few friends—at the Biden rally on Monday night, I saw people sporting hats, buttons, and shirts from the campaigns of Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Andrew Yang. And Sanders’s continued attacks on “the establishment” annoyed some voters I talked with.