“We have to be unified to take on Trump. And that unity is going to begin today as soon as the polls close,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., says on CNN.

“To come together, people have to feel like they’ve been respected and they’ve been heard,” Merkley says ●“It is absolutely important to be together”

Merkley supported Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whose campaign manager said yday will continue bid until July national convention

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Monday said he'd “assess” his path to victory after California’s primary.

“Let’s assess where we are after tomorrow before we make statements based on speculation,” Sanders told reporters in California when asked whether he would step aside if he loses on Tuesday night.

“We are speculating before what is in fact the most important primary.”

He added that he would be flying back to his home in Vermont after the California primary.

But after two rallies and a flurry of interviews there's no question Clinton has gotten to Trump in a big way. As she said, he is very thin skinned. (Emphatically denying that you're thin-skinned is not a credible rebuttal.) Given who he is, being denigrated by a strong woman must cut deeply. Underneath the angry talk, he appears befuddled and uncertain about just how to respond. That is mainly because even before her assault he'd maxed out his invective. She was crooked, a liar, untalented, a lightweight, a sexual predator by proxy. How exactly do you escalate from there?

His furious effort to wring more aggression out of the English language has proved a rather unconvincing rebuttal to her central charge that he is temperamentally unfit, too emotionally unstable to serve as President. He now says flatly that she should be in jail, says he'll find an Attorney General who will imprison her. He now also calls her a "thief" which somehow is the reason she set up her own email server. Overshadowed by the "my African-American" stumble in Friday's speech in Redding was a bizarre interlude in which Trump gave a glowing evocation of the supporter who cold-cocked and beat a protester in Tucson on March 20th as an example of his little-heralded but purportedly expansive support among African-Americans. He's trying to escalate but has little room to go. He's maxed out. The transcripts of the two speeches read like compressed literary spittle.

His affect is also different. Both rallies struck me as significantly hotter than anything we've seen before from Trump, more sweat, more chopping hands, more yelling - simply more electric, frenzied and angry.

As Clinton and her team certainly anticipated, hitting him hard as mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency has placed Trump in a sort of Chinese finger puzzle of his own creation. The only mode of response he knows - an escalating and bellicose round of personal attacks with increasingly hyperbolic accusations - only confirms Clinton's diagnosis. The harder he fights the tighter the charge sticks.


The final important backdrop are the most recent polls. Polls in the early summer can be erratic and are easy to over-interpret. But people do over-interpret them. Trump is uniquely dependent on impressive poll numbers because his entire campaign message is a disquisition on his own strength and dominance. When your whole message is about winning but you're losing, you start to seem ridiculous. What now seems like an ephemeral surge in Trump's numbers after clinching the Republican nomination greased the skids for numerous Republican elected officials to endorse Trump's candidacy and pledge their support. They're now locked in for a ride with an emotionally unstable man whose personal insecurities and instinctive racism now seem only to be accelerating.

A split is emerging inside the Bernie Sanders campaign over whether the senator should stand down after Tuesday’s election contests and unite behind Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, or take the fight all the way to the July party convention and try to pry the nomination from her…

Tad Devine, a senior Sanders strategist who advised Democratic nominees Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, among others, suggested the “path forward” is uncertain, hinging on the outcome in California and other states that have yet to vote. He voiced a conciliatory note, describing how the two campaigns might set aside differences that have grown more pronounced in the heat of the year-long campaign…

Campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who has worked in Mr. Sanders’s congressional offices and Vermont-based campaigns dating to the mid-1980s, takes a more aggressive approach…

“The plan is as the senator has described it: to go forward after Tuesday and keep the campaign going to the convention and make the case to superdelegates that Sen. Sanders is the best chance that Democrats have to beat Trump,” Mr. Weaver said. “The trajectory is the same regardless of the outcome in California.”

Former President Bill Clinton did not mince his words when Bernie Sanders supporters heckled him during a campaign event for Hillary Clinton.

“If I were them, I’d be screaming too because they know they will be toast by election day,” Clinton said, according to a Fox News reporter at the event.

But Sanders struck a different tone in 2008, when he told his hometown newspaper, the Burlington Free Press in Vermont, that he planned to “play a very active role” in supporting Obama.

“I will do everything I can to see that he is elected president,” he said at the time.

That interview was published on June 5, 2008, two days after the last Democratic contests but two days before Clinton suspended her campaign.

The story also noted that “Sanders said he held off supporting either of the Democrats because he has made it a custom not to support any Democrat for the presidential nomination until the party had chosen its nominee.”

At that point, however, Obama had 1,766.5 pledged delegates and Clinton had 1,639.5, according to data from RealClearPolitics. In 2008, 2,118 total delegates were required to secure the nomination.

At present, Clinton has 1,768 pledged delegates to Sanders’s 1,497, according to the AP. But the news service also counts Clinton as having the backing of 537 superdelegates to only 42 for Sanders.