He meets with President Obama at the White House later this morning, in what is seen as the highest-profile effort yet by Democrats to convince Sanders to call it quits. Sanders’s rationale for staying in the race is peculiar, to put it kindly: He says he can convince super-delegates to switch their allegiance, even as he seeks to abolish them on the grounds that they corrupt the democratic process. Still, he has a lot of young voters in his pocket, and Sanders’s supporters are warning the president not to take those voters for granted. “In some ways, even though [the president’s] numbers are good, and good with the Democratic base, he overestimates,” one Sanders ally told Politico. “Much of the activist Bernie movement—I think he overestimates his strength with those people.”
After Hillary Clinton officially clinched the nomination on Tuesday night, my guess was that Sanders would use his White House meeting to announce the end of his campaign. He was beaten fair and square, and the longer he stays in the race, the more his movement will resemble a spoiler campaign. But there’s always the possibility that Sanders and his supporters just don’t care.