Watch Jake Tapper Roast Wide-Eyed Biden Supporters in Iowa: ‘Hope Springs Eternal…’

When you’re a true believer in a presidential candidate — or any potential officeholder, for that matter — it can sometimes be difficult to throw in the towel and admit defeat. And unfortunately for Joe Biden supporters at one precinct in Iowa, CNN’s Jake Tapper made the former vice president’s struggles even tougher to take by delivering a cold, hard dose of reality.

During Monday night’s coverage on CNN, Tapper checked in with a group of Biden backers who were caucusing in Des Moines. The former vice president had just been declared not viable — having failed to clear the bar of 56 votes in the precinct.

“This does not look like 56 people,” Tapper said — eyeing the tiny assemblage, trying their best to remain upbeat.

“You look like lovely, wonderful people,” Tapper said, addressing a woman in the group. “But it doesn’t look like you made the viability threshold.”

“Not yet,” the woman said, ever optimistic. ‘There’s time, buddy.”

That was when Tapper stepped in to deliver the death blow.

“There’s time.” Tapper said, dryly. “This… year?”

The woman did not appear to take kindly to the joke.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” Tapper said. “But what are you going to do?”

A man responded, “We’re going to stand strong with our first choice. And when other candidates are not viable, we know that Joe is a lot of people’s second choice. And we’ll become viable in the second alignment.”

Tapper allowed the man to sketch out his pie-in-the-sky path to glory for Biden for a moment — some desperate scenario involving the poaching of Andrew Yang and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) supporters.

“Hope springs eternal…” the disbelieving CNN anchor said.

Watch above, via CNN.