Also scoring wins was Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, defeating his challengers, all of whom have suspended their campaigns.
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The billionaire businessman says in a statement after Tuesday’s elections that his time campaigning in both states was a wonderful and “enlightening” experience. Although nearly certain to win the Democratic nomination – she is only about 160 delegates short of that goal – Clinton’s ability to excite young and white working-class Democrats going into the general election has been put in doubt by Sanders’s primary successes. “Likewise, my time spent last week with the great people of OR will hopefully lead to another victory next Tuesday”.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump takes a telephone call from his daughter Ivanka during an interview with The Associated Press in his office at Trump Tower, Tuesday, May 10, 2016, in NY.
Earlier Tuesday, Sanders won the Democratic primary in West Virginia.
Clinton also won a primary election Tuesday in Nebraska, although the party allocated all of its delegates to the summer nominating convention at a caucus won in March by Sanders.
Sanders was expected to add another 13 delegates, but still has no chance to overcome Clinton’s huge lead in the delegate count.
Things got weird in West Virginia Tuesday night. Fully 80 percent are anxious about the economy, and more than any other single issue; four in 10 cited the economy as the nation’s top problem.
A third of those who voted in West Virginia’s Democratic primary say they plan to back Trump in November, according to NBC News exit polls.
The alternate message – that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination is effectively over – isn’t getting through to Democratic voters.
Preliminary results include interviews with 734 Democratic primary voters and 566 Republican primary voters in West Virginia, and with 653 Republican primary voters in Nebraska.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Bolivia’s president Evo Morales (L) attend a conference at the Vatican, April 15, 2016.
Thirty percent of Democratic primary voters came from a coal household, and Sanders won those voters with 63 percent of the vote.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says it’s a “great honor” to win both West Virginia and Nebraska.
Sanders’s own role is to channel this opposition back into the Democratic Party. The 74-year-old Vermont senator, who defeated Clinton in IN, has mounted an unyielding come-from-behind challenge that has exposed weaknesses in the former secretary of state’s campaign.
Clinton won the state’s primary in 2008 over Obama, but her approval has plummeted in the wake of hemorrhaging job losses in coal and other industries in the last few years.
The economy was, unsurprisingly, the top issue for voters. The state’s official unemployment rate, consistently the worst in the country, stands at 7 percent. About 6 in 10 voters in the Democratic primary say they’re very anxious about the economy and 3 in 10 say they’re somewhat anxious.
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Still, her failure to win over voters deeply skeptical about the direction of the economy underscored the work she will need to do to court working-class voters in the Rust Belt, which includes key states such as OH and Pennsylvania. Concerns about Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness continue to haunt her.
