Is there any defense for Bernie Sanders’s decision to continue to campaign?

The Sanders campaign sent out an email this morning, announcing it was ramping up for the scheduled April 28th New York primary with thousands of phone bank volunteers and a full-time paid staff.

I’m trying to come up with some sort of defense for this and I can’t. By my math Sanders would need to win 64.4% of the remaining delegates to get to 1,991. This is obviously impossible (There are still large numbers of delegates to be awarded in places like Georgia and Louisiana, where he is certain to lose by huge margins. He can’t possibly make up the deficit in the states where he might still be competitive with Biden going forward).

So a justification for the continuance of the campaign has to be on some basis other than the possibility of still winning. Under normal circumstances, you could make an argument that refusing to concede would be a way to pressure Biden on various substantive issues. I’m not saying that would be a very good argument, but you could make it.

Under these circumstances, I can’t imagine how this decision is in any way defensible.

Maybe I need a better imagination.