The 2016 presidential campaign rumbled through Indiana Sunday focused on Tuesday’s critical primary, even as front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump itched to fully engage in the one-on-one battle they cast as inevitable.
Advertisement
Data showed that Hillary Clinton already has 91 per cent of the votes needed to secure the nomination.
When including superdelegates, Sanders would need to win more than 82 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates. His April fundraising numbers may be a sign that his supporters realize the presidency is increasingly out of his grasp.
Clinton’s campaign said Monday that they brought in $26.4 million in primary funds in April. “We’ve got to fight for every one of those states”, he said.
Sanders also continued the campaign’s criticism of the Democratic primary process, saying independents should be allowed to vote and the outsized role of superdelegates enables the party to subvert the voters’ will.
Clinton’s narrow 38% to 32% lead among those under 40, traditionally a reliable Democratic group, suggests that younger voters will be a big target in the upcoming campaigning.
Bernie Sanders acknowledged “an uphill climb” ahead of him in the Democratic nomination race on Sunday, but vowed to continue battling against Hillary Clinton despite his diminishing chances of catching her.
“An independent investigation of the firewall failures in the DNC’s shared voter file database has definitively confirmed that the original claims by the DNC and the Clinton campaign were wholly inaccurate – the Sanders campaign never “stole” any voter file data”, the campaign said in its statement Friday.
He’s mostly focusing on the pledged delegates won just from primaries and caucuses.
He said Sunday on Face the Nation of the superdelegates debacle, ‘that’s not the point at all’. Democrats are also eyeing the possibility of making a run at traditionally Republican-leaning states such as Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, calculating that Trump’s penchant for controversy could put minority and female voters in play. There will be those in the Sanders campaign who will want to fight to the end. He’s going after superdelegates who are supporting Clinton in states he’s won – for instance in Minnesota, Sens. He told CBS on Sunday that winning the nomination will be “difficult but not impossible”. But he is a practical man, and he certainly doesn’t wish to see a President Donald Trump or President Ted Cruz.
Trump is more toxic within his own party than Clinton is in hers.
Hours later, the Clinton campaign’s political director Amanda Renteria walked back Clinton’s use of “reservation”, a term she said had “some very offensive roots” to Native Americans. If Trump is the Republican nominee, 16% of GOP voters say they would choose a third-party candidate, while five percent (5%) would stay home.
Advertisement
The last USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll had Clinton leading Sanders by 45 percent to 37 percent. And one hopes, what kind of leader they think each candidate would be. But Terry McAuliffe, then the campaign chairman and emcee of this Clinton “victory” party, recited a list of Clinton’s primary wins and introduced her as “the next president of the United States”.
