Bernie Sanders’ campaign thinks the next few weeks of the campaign calendar favor him and is preparing plans to make the uphill case to the superdelegates. | Getty Bernie's longshot victory strategy After string of defeats, he looks to friendlier turf and a possible plea to superdelegates.

Bernie Sanders is falling further and further behind in pledged delegates — but even after Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday romp, his campaign says there’s a longshot strategy that lets him regain momentum and win the Democratic nomination by relying on superdelegates even if he comes into the Philadelphia convention still trailing Clinton.

Sanders’ campaign thinks the next few weeks of the campaign calendar favor him and is preparing plans to make the uphill case to the superdelegates—the 718 activists and elected officials who can vote however they please—that his late-breaking momentum would make him a stronger nominee that they should support over Clinton.


The Sanders forces have a big hill to climb: 467 of the superdelegates are currently pledged to Clinton, compared to 26 for Sanders, according to an Associated Press count. She also has at least a 324-vote lead in pledged delegates. But the Sanders campaign says that in a few weeks they will have the momentum to make their case.

“Our plan on this is we’ve got a long way to go, and we’ve got to demonstrate that Bernie’s the strongest candidate,” said Sanders strategist Tad Devine. “We believe that slowly we can win support for people who aren’t for someone, or who are softly for her, and then we can reach out more.”

Despite their heavy spending in states that voted Tuesday, Sanders aides were privately projecting for days that their realistically their best shot was in Missouri. While they were hoping for a few surprises, they were prepared for a difficult night and looking ahead to Arizona—where the Vermont senator campaigned Tuesday night without mentioning his big state losses—and upcoming caucuses in Idaho, Utah, Alaska and Washington.

But Sanders campaign aides say they’ll be able to keep Clinton from reaching the 2,383 delegate magic number she’d need to clinch the nomination at the convention and, by being close enough, convince the superdelegates to switch, as some did when they changed from Clinton to Barack Obama in 2008.

“Absent Hillary getting out of the race, I think there’s no way that this race isn’t going to be very close in pledged delegates, even if we succeed,” Devine said. “The best outcome for us, given the nature of the system, is a very close advantage at the end."

Sanders’ superdelegate pitch will likely take the shape of both direct lobbying and a more formal pitch. Sanders’ campaign will argue that voter enthusiasm and holding to the populist principles of the party are on Sanders’ side. They’ll point to their massive, low-dollar online fundraising.

Superdelegates who’ve already endorsed Sanders say they’re already in touch with their uncommitted colleagues, with plans to step up that engagement.

Devine said the campaign would also likely commission general election polling showing Sanders’ and Clinton’s comparative strength against Donald Trump in November.

“The arguments that we’re going to muster are going to be based on a series of facts,” Devine explained, projecting the best-case scenario path forward. “People will look at different measures: How many votes did you get? How many delegates did you win? How many states did you win? But it’s really about momentum."

Paul Kirk, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who served briefly in the Senate from Massachusetts after Ted Kennedy’s death, said that he’s hoping that will be convincing to other superdelegates. Kirk’s endorsed Sanders.

“Let’s say you have a horse race to Philadelphia. Over the course of this race, I would like to think that folks who have made a commitment to Hillary Clinton will be saying, ‘Wait a second now, how’s this going to look in November?’” Kirk said. “He’s getting first time voters who are young and have a passionate enthusiasm I haven’t seen in politics in years. He’s also tapped into voters who are so disgusted with the process. Then you get the independents.”

“The stakes are so high in November, the superdelegates will feel a special responsibility this time around,” Kirk added.

If Sanders looks to win the nomination with superdelegates despite being behind in pledged delegates, that will put him crosswise with some of his grassroots supporters.

MoveOn.org, for example, has endorsed Sanders, but has also already collected close to 200,000 signatures on a petition to get rid of superdelegates.

“We want him to win the primaries and caucuses, we want him to be the nominee, we want him to be the president,” said MoveOn Washington director Ben Wikler. “But we also think the nominee should be the person who wins the primaries and caucuses. If that’s Clinton, then Clinton should be the nominee, if that’s Sanders, Sanders should be the nominee.”

For months, Clinton’s campaign has publicly set their goal as reaching the convention with a lead in pledged delegates, and counting on the superdelegates, who make up about 15 percent of the total delegates, to provide the difference needed to hit the nomination mark, if that’s what it’ll take.

Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters bristles at what aides say would be Sanders upending the process at the convention—while at the same time scoffing at the idea that the Vermont senator could flip a sufficient number of Clinton-aligned superdelegates.

"There's no history from prior cycles of superdelegates switching their commitments other than an isolated handful. It's just so rare," added Jeff Berman, a senior adviser and delegate strategist for Clinton who played a similar role for Obama. "And it's surprising that the Sanders campaign would be pushing a strategy that would have them lose among the pledged delegates elected by the voters and then overturn that with superdelegates."

“We have never seen superdelegates skew an outcome. I don’t expect it to happen this time either. We’re democrats with a small ‘d’ and a big ‘D,’” said Jake Thompson, a North Carolina superdelegate, who predicted that some of the superdelegates will switch from Clinton if Sanders starts showing more strength.

Thompson said that with his state’s primary now behind him, he’ll step up his outreach to other superdelegates, urging them to feel the Bern too.

Sanders supporters are divided, though, about what should guide the superdelegates. Some say they think each state’s superdelegates should vote for whichever candidate won the state. Some say they think the superdelegates should divide proportionally according to vote counts in the state. Some say they should just subscribe to the overall Sanders argument about momentum.

“The way I look at it, if we started picking up some of these states, then hopefully you’d have to embarrass a bunch of these superdelegates into going the way the electorate is going,” said Troy Jackson, the sole superdelegate from Maine who’s for Sanders.

Sanders crushed Clinton in Maine at the beginning of the month, picking up 64 percent to her 35 percent. Jackson said with that result and Sanders big win in the New Hampshire primary, all the superdelegates from both states should be backing Sanders.

“Let’s say the superdelegates put Hillary over the top. In Maine and New Hampshire, what the hell do you think the people in these two states are going to think?” Jackson said. “This country’s founded on one man one vote, one woman one vote. In this case, it’s two votes.”

Jackson is trying to get Democratic county committees to send resolutions to the state Democratic Party that would bind the state’s superdelegates to vote for the caucus winner.

Nevada superdelegate Erin Bilbray, meanwhile, says she’s sticking with the senator even though he lost the state’s caucuses, and warned superdelegates to think about the consequences of not backing Sanders.

“If it’s overwhelmingly that superdelegates are making the decision, I think that’s a very bad thing for democracy, it’s a bad thing for millennials who are getting involved in this year’s election—it would disenfranchise them,” said Bilbray, who said her conversations with superdelegates have reflected a similar generational divide between support for Clinton and Sanders as has come out in the primaries so far.

That’s part of why Bilbray, like other Sanders supporters and superdelegates, thinks the whole superdelegate system needs to be changed.

Leading that charge is Larry Cohen, a superdelegate from Washington, D.C. and former Communication Workers of America president who’s now advising Sanders’ campaign. (Sanders himself is also a superdelegate, from Vermont.)

“I will be organizing into Philadelphia to get rid of superdelegates, to get them out of the nominating process,” Cohen said. “I think there’s going to be a groundswell toward that position.”

Ironically, one of the architects of the superdelegate system is Devine, who’s now counting on it to make his candidate the nominee. But he also acknowledges there are likely some changes that need to be made once this year’s nomination process is done.

Potential changes range from eliminating superdelegates entirely to putting more restrictions on their votes to cutting back a total count of superdelegates.

Previous reforms intended to open up the process, they argue, created a bloated system of superdelegates without clear rationale about why some were chosen and to whom they’re accountable.

Even as some push for more such reforms or to dismantle the system entirely, others urge caution about unintended consequences.

“You want to know who really wishes they had superdelegates this year? The GOP,” said Thompson. “They say, ‘We have no control over this.’ Hey man, if you allocate 15 percent of your delegates to be the ballast for your party, you’re doing yourself a favor.”

Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this article.

