Clinton’s D.C. Win & Why You Need To Be With Her

The primary season is over, like, really over. Every state, every territory, and now the federal district have all had their say in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton won the Washington, D.C. primary, the last primary of the season, making it clear that it's time to accept that Clinton won the race for the nomination.

And yet Twitter is filled with feel-the-Berners applauding the Vermont Senator (and second-place finisher) for not conceding. They pledge he will never give up, they use hashtags like #SeeYouInPhilly (a reference to the Democratic National Convention in July), and they spew Hillary haterade in spouts of 140 characters. To them, it's Bernie or bust, but at this point — in reality — the only options are Hillary or bust.

So how do we convince the Twitterverse of such clear facts? Maybe math will work? You'd like to think so. According to the Associated Press, Clinton has 2,219 pledged delegates to her name. Sanders has just 1,832. That would seem like a majority to me, but then, of course, it was the AP-Clinton nomination conspiracy that tried to use math to call the race for Clinton. So, looks like that won't work either.

Maybe, then, popular vote count will do. The whole point of a democracy, after all, is giving the people a say. Here we see that Clinton is ahead by nearly 3.8 million votes. Opposers, however, would probably say that we (the media and, more generally, Clinton supporters) commonly disregard the popular vote. Look at 2000: Al Gore would have won if we took the popular vote into consideration. Also, by some counts Clinton won the 2008 primaries' popular vote, and Obama became president. So, that's out, too.

Perhaps then it's time to consider the superdelegates. Clinton has won the support of 581 of them, according to the Associated Press; Sanders has just 49 committed to voting for the Bern. So if they don't respect the popular vote, or the outcome of the pledged delegate race, or the FiveThirtyEight analysis that shows Sanders losing even if every state had an open caucus (Sanders' ideal race conditions), then maybe they will respect the superdelegates.

They've been saying all along that the party elite's superdelegates — driven in concert by Debbie Wasserman Schultz — were going to win the race for Clinton. Well, now they have, along with the nearly 16 million voters who are being represented by 2,219 pledged delegates. That is, after all, how the rules of the game were written. And then, as Ezra Klein wrote for Vox, Clinton won in a way we're not accustomed:

She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies.

So, it's about time Sanders' holdouts at least recognize that the choice is no longer Bernie or bust. It's Hillary or bust. And if they opt for "bust," they need to be aware that that's just a euphemism for Trump, because at this point, Clinton is the only option to beat him.