Mrs Clinton will become the first will become the first woman to top the presidential ticket of a major United States political party, according to an Associated Press count.
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Clinton is expecting to wrap up the Democratic nomination fight Tuesday following contests in New Jersey and California.
A candidate needs 2,383 delegates to secure the nomination. Bernie Sanders has vowed to take his campaign to the convention regardless, hoping to convince Democratic superdelegates that his superior performance in head-to-head polls with Trump is cause for overturning the will of the party’s voters.
While Clinton has always been considered the favorite for the Democratic nomination, she has been unable to decisively fend off a challenge from Sanders. She won 29 primaries and caucuses to his 21.
Democrats believe that if Clinton is able to rally the coalition of young, minority voters and suburban women that twice propelled Obama to the White House, she should be able to defeat Trump. “We shouldn’t be acting like we are undecided when the people of America have spoken”.
Superdelegates will not formally cast their votes for Mrs Clinton until the party’s July convention in Philadelphia.
“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night”, Mr. Sanders said during a news conference over the weekend in California.
California citizens may not head to the polls for the state’s primaries until tomorrow, but they’ve already made a statement with their dollars.
In the primary elections and caucuses, Clinton has won 1,812 pledged delegates. She is on track to safely end the primary season with a majority of pledged delegates even if she loses all six states on Tuesday and in Washington, D.C., the following week. “In other words, the Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention”.
Mrs Clinton reached the threshold with a big win in Puerto Rico and a burst of last-minute support from party insiders called superdelegates, AP said. Within weeks, Sanders erased Clinton’s double-digit lead in California.
Asked by reporters in San Francisco if he had talked to Obama, Sanders demurred.
But those surveyed by AP are adamant they will support Mrs Clinton.
Trump, a real estate developer, has regularly stirred up controversy on the campaign trail and has frequently dismayed Republican establishment leaders. “Otherwise, it looks like you’re a narcissistic politician who is in to win at any cost”, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who specializes in presidential leadership. He campaigned aggressively in California ahead of the state’s Tuesday election, unwilling to exit a race Clinton stood on the cusp of winning. His liberal positions pushed the issue of income inequality into the spotlight and drove Clinton to the left on issues such as trade, Wall Street and campaign finance reform.
A senior White House official would not comment on the timing of any endorsement but said Obama is eager to campaign where he might be useful. Bush had presided over too many disastrous wars and economic collapses to be of use to John McCain in 2008; Bill Clinton had lied about too many blow jobs to do much for Al Gore in 2000. President Obama is reportedly preparing to endorse Clinton.
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If the trend holds, it would be the first time since voters in the state starting electing senators a century ago that a Republican has not appeared on a California general election ballot for U.S. Senate.
