And after her more-than-convincing primary victories in New Jersey and California last night … she decided it was time for a victory lap.
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Pepper and McLin said they support Clinton because she captured a majority of pledged delegates during Tuesday’s primaries and handily won Ohio’s March 15 primary.
“I am pretty good at arithmetic, and I know that the fight in front of us is a very, very steep fight, but we will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate we can get”, Sanders wrote Wednesday in an email to supporters. Clinton won the nomination in 2016 in the same way she lost it in 2008 – through the grinding accumulation of delegates to the point at which the math became determinative.
Indeed, to appreciate just how much chutzpah Sanders has, it’s worth noting that in between Clinton’s victory speech and his own belated early morning appearance, Politico had dropped an explosive story that revealed the sea of dysfunction in the Sanders campaign, a stunning behind-the-scenes dig that was clearly sourced from some of Sanders’ senior aides.
Clinton’s new delegate count (including superdelegates) makes her the presumptive nominee heading into the July convention.
That hasn’t stopped voters from embracing the historical moment of Clinton’s victory, even those who supported Sen.
“They’re both good people”.
“Our vision”, Sanders said, “will be the future of America”. And, if Trump has many more weeks like this past week, the Republicans are looking at a loss of historic proportions.
Defeating Trump, however, is but a step.
In a normal presidential campaign, there’s usually a strong staff to take the candidate behind the barn and shoot him when the end is inevitable. While Sanders drastically overperformed – a sign of Clinton’s inherent weaknesses – he was never able to recreate the three legs of the Obama electoral stool: Affluent, highly educated whites, young people and minority voters. “I really hope this means moving forward we see a lot more women in politics”, Chelsea tells Teen Vogue. “And that is what OUR movement is about”.
“It will be very important for Senator Sanders to link arms with Secretary Clinton”, he added.
“The struggle continues”, the senator told a California crowd.
She is a pioneering if polarizing stateswoman whose unfavorability ratings are second only to Trump – the brash billionaire and political neophyte who rewrote the campaign playbook to clinch the Republican ticket with mudslinging unparalleled in modern U.S. politics.
Even with her campaign on more solid footing, nothing prepared Clinton for the challenge she would face from Sanders.
In addition, his remarks invoking the “Mexican heritage” of a judge presiding over the lawsuit challenging Trump University as a fraud prompted sharp denunciations within his own party. But there the similarities end, and last night outlined the general shape of the election to come. Democrats like to point out that the bad blood between the Obama and Clinton campaign teams was considerably worse than between this year’s rival camps – and that it did not stop them from winning. Most importantly, in the delegate behemoth of the night, California, Clinton beat Sanders decisively, 56 percent to 43 percent as of this morning, with 95 percent of the precincts reporting. Those headlines were based on a secret AP canvas of unelected superdelegates, speaking anonymously about their intentions. An insurgent candidate challenging the establishment isn’t likely to get a fair shake from the media or the party, which only reinforces the need to build independent organization and communication networks.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been vocal about the irrelevance of Clinton’s gender for varying reasons. More than a year into her first term, the history still weighs heavily on her – but she suspects Clinton is cognizant of the history, as well.
Trump, meanwhile, was making a fresh pitch to Sanders voters, refusing to concede that the Vermont senator’s backers were unlikely to vote for him. It offered a broad statement of contrasting values, but was notably free of substance.
Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, feared the race will be less a battle over substance like the economy or foreign policy than a clash of two outsised personalities. She also reached out to Sanders’s supports for their support too. “I thought it made Hillary a better candidate”. But he stayed in character.
And yet, that’s exactly what Donald Trump tried to do with his claim that Clinton was relying on the “woman’s card”. He is, as Clinton repeats, unfit to be president.
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Polls suggest that up to one-quarter of Sanders supporters say they’d support Trump.
