Is the Democratic presidential race over?

For Bernie Sanders, the answer is emphatically yes. The Vermont senator began a winning streak in Utah and Idaho that he extended with landslide wins over the weekend in Washington state, Alaska and Hawaii.

Why, Sanders often asks, should Democrats crown a nominee before the voters in such big states as California and New York have even voted?

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is ready to start shutting things down and turn her attention toward the general election.

The latest example is the Clinton campaign’s declaration that if Sanders wants any future debates with the Democratic front-runner, is he going to have to watch his “tone.”

Among the Clintonite complaints is that Sanders is running negative ads against the former secretary of state and spending millions of dollars.

Considering that Sanders has hesitated to attack Clinton on many issues and agreed that voters are tired of hearing about her “damn emails,” this amounts to saying she will pretend to debate him if he goes back to only pretending to run against her.

Yet there is a little something to the argument: if Sanders has no realistic path to the Democratic nomination, anything negative he says or does from this point on can only hurt Clinton without helping him.

That’s why Sanders’ team is working hard to come up with arguments for why Bernie can still win. Some of these arguments are… less than compelling.

Campaign strategist Tad Devine argued Monday that Sanders was ahead in pledged delegates from states where he chose to compete. But the eight states they wrote off were places Sanders didn’t stand a chance.

The Sanders campaign is suggesting that they could have tried to maximize their delegate haul by upping vote totals in states that they were going to lose, but they decided instead to focus their resources on states they believed they could win.

But this means Sanders wasn’t well positioned to win a number of states or his campaign hasn’t been focused on accumulating the delegates who will actually decide the nominee at the Democratic National Convention.

For his part, Sanders likes to slyly imply that he is losing because of conservative white voters in the Deep South. “The Deep South is a very conservative part of the country,” he often says.

In fact, the biggest reason Sanders kept losing Southern primaries was that black Democratic primary voters rejected his candidacy by huge margins. His share of the black vote in those states were similar to what a conservative white person from the Deep South might win.

Sanders is running out of caucuses. The Democrats don’t do winner-take-all states that would allow him to close his delegate deficit more easily. Superdelegates are overwhelmingly in favor of Clinton and aren’t going to switch en masse to the septuagenarian socialist unless the email controversy puts Clinton in actual legal jeopardy or there is a fundamental change in the voters’ preferences.

What Sanders is running out of his money. If a candidate won’t take a clear-eyed view of their path to victory, usually their donors eventually will. Sanders small donors are still ponying up and they aren’t the kind of contributors who are going to abandon a lost cause or pressure their candidate to give up.

So the Democratic establishment doesn’t have much leverage over Sanders even as his campaign team has been reduced to fantasizing about how they could capture the nomination if the Democrats have a contested convention of their own.

That’s why this weekend’s caucuses weren’t helpful to Clinton even if they ultimately didn’t change the trajectory of the race. They provided psychological ammunition for Sanders to continue as if the Democratic nomination is still actually in play. Clinton would prefer to move on. For now, she can’t.