Because Bernie Sanders didn’t do nearly as well in three of the five “the Acela primaries” — so named because Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island are all on the route of Amtrak’s high-speed Washington-to-Boston Acela route—as he did in heartland primaries and caucuses last month, the wise and the mighty of the Democratic Party and the press who regularly travel that route will now call more loudly than they already have for him to stand down as a candidate and to focus his and his supporters’ energies instead on helping Hillary Clinton to discredit Donald Trump or any Republican opponent.
But it’s worth noting that Rhode Island, which Sanders won handily, was founded by the extraordinary dissent Roger Williams, who fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s established Puritan orthodoxy, power, and apparent legitimacy in 1636 to establish a refuge for religious tolerance and friendliness toward Indians, among whom he lived and whose languages he actually learned. Some of the founders of Connecticut had fled Puritan orthodoxy, too and were even more democratically inclined.