Sanders aides pin blame for his loss on Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders is reportedly not going to drop out of the Democratic presidential race on Tuesday, even if he loses California, but before he even spoke at his election night rally in California, Sanders aides had assisted Politico's Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel DeBenedetti in an autopsy of the Bernie Sanders revolution. The central cause of death, aides say, is the patient himself. "At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders."

Sanders made the choice to blame the Democratic Party for the melee at the Nevada Democratic convention and personally go after DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Dovere and DeBenedietti say, and Sanders "chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around." They add later: "Every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing. But they could never stop Sanders when he got his back up."

"Sanders owns nearly every major decision, right down to the bills," Politico says, and he has "demanded that the campaign bank account never go under $10 million," even when his top strategists Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine begged him to spend on TV ads. Politico even got hold of an internal email about Sanders' decision to rewrite the post-Nevada statement to be more combative:

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"Top Sanders aides admit that it's been weeks, if not months, since they themselves realized he wasn't going to be win," Politico says, but regardless of what Sanders believes, he's in it until July. "He wants to be in the race until the end, until the roll call vote," Weaver said. Read the entire postmortem at Politico.