While Hillary Clinton officially clinched the Democratic nomination Monday night, her supporters aren’t really celebrating yet. They’re still worried about the rebel from Vermont, the once beloved candidate who is now described as “sullen and resentful” by Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, as “maddeningly narcissistic” by New York’s Jonathan Chait, and as a “driver of toxicity” by TPM’s Josh Marshall. At least Bernie Sanders is still fun at parties. By relentlessly attacking Clinton for being beholden to Wall Street and other moneyed interests, Sanders, as Gerald F. Seib put it in The Wall Street Journal, “threatens to exacerbate Mrs. Clinton’s biggest problem, which is that many voters suspect she isn’t to be trusted.”

So what has Bernie wrought? Some of Clinton’s supporters fear that she’s been so weakened by Sanders that we’re on the path to President Trump. They’re angry. Some of Bernie’s supporters agree. But they don’t really care, because they’re angry, too. “I believe in a way [Clinton] is more dangerous [than Trump],” said Bernie supporter Susan Sarandon over the weekend.

A lot of this fight is really about risk—specifically about how much of it is acceptable in the face of Donald Trump. Many Democrats are terrified of him, and anything that even minutely increases the odds of getting him elected is, in their eyes, unacceptable. Many Bernie supporters are also terrified of Trump—but not so terrified that they’re willing to postpone their dreams for another four or eight years or more. They know they’re gambling a little more boldly, but they’re willing to risk it. Bernie has been with these gamblers. We can debate about whether that’s acceptable—and do so with plenty of misspellings and capitalizations and exclamation points!

But before we get into that, here, I expect, have been Bernie’s rationalizations.

Winning isn’t impossible.

Long, close competitions are excruciating to lose, so some of Sanders’s thinking has to do with the simple pain of giving up. The split of pledged delegates is only 56 percent to 44 percent in Clinton’s favor, roughly. To make it worse, Sanders undoubtedly feels—legitimately—that the race was slanted against him. No, it wasn’t “rigged” in the sense of stuffed ballot boxes. But the Democratic National Committee scheduled only a small number of primary debates at odd times, preventing other candidates from breaking through.

It also made a cozy fund-raising agreement with Clinton that has tilted eyebrows. And the super-delegates long ago lined up with the candidate, too. Sanders supporters must wonder where things would be if the D.N.C. thumb hadn’t been so heavily on the scale.

Moreover, long shots are integral to politics. Unlikely wins happen all the time. No one expected Barry Goldwater to win the Republican nomination in 1964 or Jimmy Carter to win the Democratic nomination in 1976. Everyone thought Sanders was just in the race to make a few quick points, not to run away with the whole thing. But if he’s got the money to keep going, even if his odds are just 1 in 20, or lower, why not see if a miracle strikes? Plus, quietly, Sanders probably considers an indictment over Clinton’s e-mail mishandling to be a real (if very unlikely) possibility, and wants to be positioned well to take up the baton.

Sticking around has maximized his influence over the party’s platform.

Bernie didn’t expect to win when he launched his hat into the ring. (We can’t read his mind, but we sort of can, at least in this case.) He wanted to send a message and, ideally, pull the debate and the party in a more left and populist direction. He succeeded to a degree that almost no one expected, and he therefore believes he has a mandate to reshape the platform of the Democratic Party accordingly. Every increase in delegates gives Bernie a stronger claim to being heard and appeased when it comes to what happens at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. He has already been granted the privilege of selecting 5 of the 15 members on the national convention drafting committee (not that it’s mollifying anyone at the moment). Among them is Cornel West, who represents a hostile rebuke to much of what the Democratic Party, including its White House occupant, represents these days.