Bernie Sanders says he plans to campaign until the Democratic convention in July and still claims to have a “path to victory.” He’s also been nearly mathematically eliminated from the Democratic presidential race and is unlikely to make up any ground in Tuesday night’s Northeastern primaries. Eventually, these competing realities will have to reconcile, and a report in the New York Times suggests that Sanders is about to begin the process of letting his still-ardent supporters down easy by “reassessing” his campaign on Wednesday.
“If we are sitting here and there’s no sort of mathematical way to do it, we will be upfront about that,” Tad Devine, Mr. Sanders’s senior strategist, said in an interview … Mr. Devine explained that on Wednesday, Mr. Sanders’s senior advisers will talk about a range of issues, including how to adjust their messaging about the election process, what route if any they have to winning the nomination, and where they should focus on gaining ground. He said he could still see a mathematical path to winning the nomination, but he added that if that changed with Tuesday night’s results, the campaign would have to adjust.
Devine says the reassessment will not involve any reneging on Sanders’ promise that he will contest every Democratic state nomination vote up to and including Washington D.C.’s primary on June 14.
Correction, April 26: This post originally misstated the date and location of the last Democratic nomination contest; it’s in Washington, D.C. on June 14.
