Bernie Sanders should drop out and endorse Hillary. Period.

I was at the 1980 convention. Kennedy dominated it. Kennedy had staged a late comeback in the primaries and had won California and New Jersey, but Carter had won the majority of delegates. At the convention, Kennedy tried to get the Rules Committee to allow delegates to repudiate their own voters on the first ballot. He predictably failed. Then Kennedy’s supporters staged a 17-hour marathon battle over the platform, winning support for federal funding for abortions and $12 billion in jobs spending. Then after Carter gave his acceptance speech, Kennedy snubbed him on the stage. What did it accomplish? Well, Carter came out of the convention with less of a bounce than he might have, and after he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, the platform planks for which Kennedy’s supporters fought—and which I had to explore the internet to recall — became footnotes in a doctoral thesis on party conventions.

Fractious conventions can definitely hurt a nominee. I certainly can’t think of an example where a bitter convention battle helped the nominee. And a well-run convention that puts the candidate forward and gets the campaign’s message across can help. Think of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000, and Barack Obama (thanks to Hillary Clinton’s concession after the primaries) in 2008. After the results come in tonight, the Sanders’ campaign can rejoice in whatever success the candidate achieves. But then it will be time to move off the stage and move on.