Many experienced Democrats worry not just that the party won’t unite and that Sanders will lose to Trump, but that having a democratic socialist at the top of the ticket will squash their hopes of winning new Senate seats, and perhaps even cost them a few existing ones in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Some worry that they’ll even lose the House majority. They dread the idea of Trump, already clearly feeling unshackled since his impeachment acquittal, feeling even more empowered by winning reelection.

Sanders and his aides argue that he’s the only one who can bring in new voters and win over disaffected Trump supporters. Sanders is actually the way out of the apocalypse, his supporters say. And to those fretting that this is 2016 all over again—with an iconoclastic outsider seizing control of a party—they point out that Trump carried lots of contested Senate seats with him and helped his party keep the House. They add that Democrats who are holding out on Sanders are disconnected from the direction in which younger and nonwhite voters are moving the party.

A cynical, but perhaps realistic, argument has been embedded in Sanders’s campaign from the start: He’s the most electable because he’ll get all the people who would vote against Trump no matter who the Democratic nominee is. But he’s also the only one who will be able to activate an entirely different faction of voters. This assumes that all those anti-Trump voters will turn out for him. But although right now everyone is talking party unity, the Never Sanders whispers can be heard among people who would have called themselves “good Democrats” in any other cycle.

The Sanders campaign is already suspicious of what the party has in store. Nina Turner, a campaign co-chair, expressed skepticism after all the candidates onstage at Wednesday’s debate said they would support whoever the nominee is. “Yeah, that's what they say,” Turner told me, and went on to repeatedly point out that Sanders campaigned for Clinton after losing to her in the 2016 primary race. “Actions speak louder than words,” she said.

Turner said that if Sanders is the nominee, the party will have to support his agenda on health care, economic policy, and more. “If Senator Sanders wins the primary, he did get the majority,” Turner said. What if he doesn’t get a majority? I asked her. She barely paused. “If he gets 40 and somebody else gets 15, he will get the plurality of it. So we’re going to roll.”

That very well may happen, given that most of the other candidates are still spending more time going after one another than Sanders. Former New York Mayor Bloomberg released a memo on Tuesday calling for everyone else to drop out, then, two days later, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put out a memo calling for Bloomberg to drop out.