It’s a time of trial for Bernie Sanders, and so far he’s failing the test.

Tuesday’s shellacking in New York was among the most significant setbacks his campaign has faced. He spent big, played up his Brooklyn roots, and campaigned relentlessly. He got clobbered. Races in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to cite two fast-approaching examples, suggest it won’t get much easier in the near-term.

But that’s not his real problem.

As the results were coming in Tuesday, Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver was asked on MSNBC whether Sanders would keep fighting for the nomination even if, after all the primary and caucus voting was over, he was still behind in both pledged delegates and the popular vote.

“Absolutely,” he said. “At this point, absolutely.”

This is a double-standard that undercuts Sanders’ authenticity and threatens to undo much of the good his hope-filled campaign has accomplished. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Weaver said Sanders will try to win the nomination even if it takes appealing to the superdelegates because Sanders is more electable in the fall, the same flimsy rationale Sanders himself used in March when he told Rachel Maddow of his plans to rely on superdelegates to overcome any deficit he may have among pledged delegates.

But as The Washington Post noted, Weaver’s comments came after Clinton beat him by 16 points Tuesday. And he expanded on the point to say he’d fight to win through the superdelegates even if he was losing both the delegate count and the popular vote.

Ezra Klein makes the spot-on observation that this is precisely the campaign tactic that legions of Sanders supporters raged about when his early surges made them think he had a good chance of beating her in the pledged-delegate race. They worried she’d rely on his establishment connections among the superdelegates and essentially steal the election from the voters.

It was probably always a misplaced fear. Superdelegates favored Clinton overwhelmingly in 2008, but when it became clear that Clinton would not overtake Barack Obama’s lead in pledged delegates, they abandoned Clinton in droves.

Eight years later, Clinton’s lead over Sanders is much larger than Obama’s had been. (Clinton trailed Obama by 148 pledged delegates on April 23 in that year, a lead she would continue to reduce all the way through the final voting in early June.)

Clinton’s early lead in superdelegates would have easily overcome that deficit and made her the nominee — except that as it became clear that Obama was going to finish out with nearly 130 more pledged delegates than Clinton, they abandoned her in droves.

But they won’t this time, not if Clinton keeps her lead in delegates. And why would they?

Believing that they will leave Clinton based on the fact that Sanders polls marginally higher against Trump is absurd. (She leads Trump in every poll used in the RCP average.) In fact, it’s delusional.

Where does this leave us? It’s too soon for Sanders to drop out. His chances of winning the pledged delegates are increasingly small. Some say vanishingly so. But they aren’t zero, and he has every right to keep asking voters to choose him. California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey — they all hold large chests of delegates to be won.

But if — and I’d be willing to say when — it becomes clear that he simply can’t catch her, he should suspend his campaign against Clinton and target instead the Republican front-runners. Only then can he begin the difficult but vital task of unifying the party behind its presumptive leader.

That would give him weeks, or perhaps longer, to conclude his campaign where most people thought it began and where it undoubtedly has already succeeded — in the service of ideas.

Michael A. Lindenberger writes for the Dallas Morning News.