Hillary Clinton looks set to take on Donald Trump for the White House after securing the 2383 delegates needed to become the Democratic nominee.
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The nomination would make Clinton the first woman to run at the top of the ticket for a major United States political party.
After winning weekend votes in the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, Mrs Clinton was just a couple of dozen delegates short of the nomination threshold of 2,383, AP said earlier.
Democrats are voting in six states on Tuesday, headlined by California, the nation’s largest state, offering 475 pledged delegates, while Mrs Clinton, a former NY senator, is heavily favoured in New Jersey primary, which has 142 pledged delegates.
Mrs Clinton, who needs to enlist Sanders supporters in the looming showdown with Republican Donald Trump, held an olive branch to her rival.
Clinton told reporters in California that Tuesday marked eight years from the day she withdrew from the 2008 White House race, endorsing Barack Obama after a bitter rivalry.
For that reason, the Democratic National Committee has echoed the Sanders campaign, saying the superdelegates should not be counted until they vote at the convention in Philadelphia.
Sanders has said he intends to stay in the race until the party’s convention in July. Mr Sanders has given no indication he plans to concede before the Democratic convention in July.
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and New Mexico also hold nominating contests on Tuesday, but most attention will focus on California, the country’s most populous state where another 475 pledged delegates are at stake.
Morgan Reed, a rafting guide from Mendicino, California, attended the rally and said it was unseemly for the media to call the race for Clinton so close to the start of voting in California, warning that it amounted to “disenfranchising the vote”.
She also has a history, while secretary of state, of promoting fracking internationally and said in the U.S.it was “a preferable alternative to coal”, according to Mother Jones.
The Sanders campaign acknowledges it is unlikely he can switch enough superdelegates from Clinton to overtake her lead among the party insiders unless he is able to win a majority of the pledged delegates. I hope you’ll go to my Web site at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.
Michelle Chan, vice president at Friends of the Earth, told Mother Jones many environmentalists may see Clinton as an unsavory choice, but she is still one whom many California voters could eventually rally behind. “We’ve never had a woman president”. But the only real question now is not who nominee will be, but what will Sanders do?
The call comes before voting Tuesday in six states including California, where Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was hoping for an upset victory to extend his campaign.
In the primary elections and caucuses, Clinton has won 1,812 pledged delegates. Make a very clear statement: “We are repudiating Donald Trump; we are getting ready for the fall election; we are going to defeat him”, Clinton said.
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But Michael Briggs, Sanders’ spokesman, dismissed the AP and NBC tallies. Some 27 percent of Sanders’ supporters said in May that they would vote for neither candidate or another alternative.
