The establishment rallied around Biden incredibly quickly, and it may well make a big difference tonight. But I don’t think we’ve fully seen what the reaction of Bernie people is going to be to all of this. There is sure to be a backlash, driven by the belief that the last few days are the product of a conspiracy, which, in one sense, they were — this was all very well coordinated.

It had been common prior to the last few days to analogize Bernie to Trump in 2016 in terms of the difficulty of stopping him in a fractured field. But as our friend Luke Thompson has pointed out, Trump drew from all segments of the party; he was a different political animal than we’d seen in the Republican Party. This is different.

It’s as if Ted Cruz had won the first three contests and then the party establishment had swooped in to rally around Jeb Bush. That would have set up an outright grassroots vs. establishment war. And that’s what we’re likely to see here, and no one can be sure how it’s going to turn out or what the consequences will be.