Bernie Sanders’s resolve to continue his primary campaign despite delegate math that is heavily against him has many wondering whether his supporters will ultimately fall in line behind Hillary Clinton when the time comes. Photograph by Li Muzi Xinhua / eyevine / Redux

In many hard-fought political races, there comes a time when tempers fray and emotion takes over. Right now, the Democratic Presidential primary appears to have reached such a point, with people on both sides going at each other with gusto, and some of the media getting swept up, too.

The front page of Thursday’s Times featured this headline: “Sanders Willing to Harm Hillary in Home Stretch.” Did Sanders really say that? No, he didn’t. The only quote in the Times story from anyone in the Sanders campaign came from his senior adviser, Tad Devine, who said that he didn’t think his boss’s criticisms of Clinton on the stump would hurt her in a general-election campaign against Donald Trump. The senator’s team, Devine said, was “not thinking about” the possibility that they might prevent Clinton from becoming the first woman to be elected President. Then came a long statement by Devine to the Times:

The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14th. . . . We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at the way things stand.

One way to interpret this story comes from the headline, which implies that Sanders is callously ignoring the danger that he will damage Clinton’s chances in the fall and hand the Oval Office keys to Trump. Paul Krugman tweeted a photo showing a Web version of the headline, “Sanders Willing to Harm Clinton in Homestretch.” To that, he added, “Of course he is. Fwiw, I don’t think Sanders has gone off the rails; I think this is who he always was.” Linking to the Times story on her Facebook feed, the writer and editor Anna Holmes wrote, “Seriously. Fuck this guy.”

Another possible interpretation is that the headline was inflammatory, and the story contained little that was new. After all, Sanders has been saying for weeks that he intends to campaign aggressively until the end of the primaries, in mid-June, and that he is hoping to defeat Clinton in California, on June 7th. To this end, he has continued to depict his opponent as the candidate of élites and big money, as he has been doing for many months.

Devine’s focus on the here and now was what you would expect from a campaign operative. If you read his statement carefully, it actually contradicts the notion that Sanders’s campaign is conducting a battle to the death, oblivious to the implications for the general election. When Devine said that “everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at the way things stand,” he appeared to have been raising the possibility that Sanders, if he doesn’t do as well as he hopes in the remaining contests, will drop out rather than campaign all the way to the Convention, in Philadelphia. That would clear the way for the vast majority of Democrats to come together in opposition to Trump. Despite the rising hostility between Clinton and Sanders supporters, this is still the most likely outcome.

Sanders is well aware that most Democrats and liberal independents would rather contract a terrible disease than countenance a Trump Presidency. He also knows that the delegate math is heavily against him and that, if he doesn’t manage to overtake Clinton in pledged delegates, he has virtually no chance of persuading enough superdelegates to switch sides and swing the nomination to him.

Despite this, many of Sanders’s supporters clearly want him to carry the fight into June. That’s what Clinton did eight years ago, and, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Sanders has earned the right to follow her example. But, by the end of the night on June 7th, it will probably be clear that Clinton has wrapped up the nomination. If so, Sanders will be obliged to accept reality.

Even then, he wouldn’t necessarily end his campaign right away. With another week left before the final votes are cast, in Washington, D.C., his representatives could use the prospect of a formal endorsement of Clinton to seek concessions on his role at the Convention, on the Democratic Party’s policy platform, and, perhaps, on some changes in the rules for future primaries. The details of these negotiations would give political reporters something to cover, and they would be important for the future of the party, but the focus of most Democrats would switch to defeating Trump.

If you listen to some of Sanders’s more vocal backers or read their postings on social media, you may get a different impression: anger and resentment toward the Democratic Party establishment are the leitmotifs here, together with an insistence that Clinton embodies a corrupt political system. At a campaign event in Carson, California, on Tuesday, thousands of Sanders supporters shouted “Bernie or bust”—the rallying cry of the irreconcilables. Meanwhile, allegations of fraud stemming from last weekend’s raucous Democratic convention in Nevada, where some potential Sanders delegates were ruled ineligible to be seated, are continuing, with some of his supporters threatening to disrupt the National Convention in Philadelphia.

Other Sanders supporters are already looking ahead to November, and encouraging people to write his name on the Presidential ballot rather than voting for Clinton. In a post for Salon, Peter Gaffney, an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, described the write-in option as “our last chance to call bluff on the iron fist of political realism, which Democratic leadership have raised again and again against their own constituents by playing us off against bogeymen like Trump.”

Such sentiments can’t be dismissed: the question is how widely they are shared. Clearly, some Sanders supporters will never be reconciled to supporting Clinton. Among them is a contingent who weren’t loyal Democrats to begin with: activists of various stripes and folks too disillusioned to get involved in party politics. To them, the Sanders campaign isn’t about electing a President so much as about upending the status quo in favor of a more radical, bottom-up form of politics.

But most of Sanders’s supporters will take their lead from him. And despite some bitter exchanges between his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, and the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, over what happened in Nevada, Sanders is well aware of the stakes in November. “Donald Trump represents a whole lot that I passionately hate,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow a couple of weeks ago. “If I’m not the candidate, I will do everything I can to make sure that Donald Trump does not become President of the United States.”

Those don’t sound like the words of someone intent on widening the rifts in the Democratic Party. With June 7th only a few weeks away, we will know soon how Sanders plans to proceed during the denouement of the primary season. In the meantime, don’t be surprised to see more acrimony between his camp and Hillary Clinton’s.