Sanders campaign should heed the pastrami principle

about 20 million. Meanwhile, Florida alone also has about 20 million people — and Clinton won it by a 30-point margin.

To overtake her, Sanders would have to win the remaining contests by an average 13-point margin, a number that will almost surely go up after the New York primary, even if he does better than current polls suggest. That margin is highly unlikely.

So the Sanders campaign is arguing that superdelegates — mainly party insiders not selected through primaries and caucuses who get to serve as delegates under Democratic nomination rules — should give him the nomination even if he loses the popular vote.

But how can the Sanders campaign make the case that the party should defy the apparent will of its voters? By insisting that many of those voters shouldn’t count. Over the past week, Sanders has declared that Clinton leads only because she has won in the “Deep South,” which is a “pretty conservative part of the country.” The tally so far, he says, “distorts reality” because it contains so many Southern states.

The big problem with this argument should be obvious. Clinton didn’t win big in the South on the strength of conservative voters; she won by getting an overwhelming majority of black voters. This puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it?

Is it possible that Sanders doesn’t know this? Maybe. He is not a details guy.

It’s more likely, however, that he’s being deliberately misleading — and that his effort to delegitimize a big part of the Democratic electorate is a cynical ploy.

Who’s the target of this ploy? Not the superdelegates, surely. Can you imagine Democratic Party insiders deciding to deny the nomination to the candidate who won the most votes, on the grounds that African-American voters don’t count as much as whites?

No, claims that Clinton wins in the South should be discounted are really aimed at giving Sanders supporters an unrealistic view of the chances that their favorite can still win — and thereby keeping the flow of money and volunteers coming.

Sanders has the right to keep campaigning, in the hope either of pulling off huge upsets in the remaining primaries or of having influence at the convention.

But trying to keep his campaign going by misleading his supporters is not OK.

Does this sound familiar? “They wanted something new, something fresh, and they found in this man a radical discourse. He said he would get rid forever of the old elites.”

Or this: “He ran as the outsider, the non-politician in a country which had come to distrust politicians. The media loved him, and he loved them back . ... They gave him huge amounts of newspaper space and hours on television.”

Or this: “He can be funny. He can seem buffoonish. He obeys none of the rules for what is expected of a head of state, or for that matter, a public official on television.”

These are not, as you may have guessed, quotes