The caveat is, even if Sanders drops out and dedicates his fundraising efforts to Clinton’s campaign, that’s probably not enough to placate his most ardent supporters.

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Is Sanders Hurting Clinton By Staying In The Race? • 2016 May 17 • FiveThirtyEight

Yikes to that survey Harry just noted, by YouGov, which found that one-third of Democratic voters have an unfavorable view of Clinton, and her unfavorables have jumped of late.

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Most people… thought Sanders would win some votes but that Clinton would ultimately crush him. And while she holds a significant lead, Sanders won more than 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote.

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…the polls right now are sort of a test of what might happen if the Sanders voters don’t rally behind Clinton. And the answer is that it makes it a closer election — Clinton’s still ahead, but it’s close enough that if something goes wrong (a recession, for instance), you could have President Trump.

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[Sanders] has a lot of power, though. He’s the third-most-influential Democrat/liberal in the country, following President Obama and Clinton. And you have a big vacuum between the top 3 and everyone else.

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I think one of the main lessons of the Sanders campaign is that the Democratic elite have an outsider/insider problem too. Maybe it’s not as dire as the GOP’s, but it’s there.

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…is there a sizable bloc of Democratic voters, young voters in particular, who are sick of standard Democratic politics — who feel the system is rigged…[?] …I think that potentially poses long-term problems for the Democratic Party. It increases the chances that the Democrats, at some point, get a nominee unacceptable to the party elites, like the GOP got this year.

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The [non-cynical] interpretation is that the Democratic consensus/coalition associated with the Clintons and Obama is fraying. In particular, the consensus around neo-liberal economic policies. A lot of the differences between Clinton and Sanders are over the efficacy of free markets.