Hillary Clinton became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee before California, New Jersey and four other states voted on Tuesday – prompting even more questions about what her rival, Bernie Sanders, will do now.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, second from right, greets her husband, former president Bill Clinton during a presidential primary election night rally Tuesday, June 7, 2016, in NY.
In order to successfully contest the convention, he’d need superdelegates – or elected officials and Democratic insiders – to defect from Clinton in large numbers, despite the fact she won both the popular vote and a majority of the pledged delegates, which were allotted based on primary results. But Clinton will spend Tuesday night embracing the historic nature of her expected nomination as the first woman to ever head a major-party ticket in this country.
Sanders is under intense pressure from top Democrats hoping to coax him gently out of the race, win over his voters and turn to the task of challenging Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee.
“When Trump says, ‘Let’s Make America Great Again, ‘ that’s code for ‘Let’s take America backwards, ‘ ” she said of his famed slogan.
The White House announced Mr Obama had telephoned both candidates to congratulate them on their hard-fought primary race, and said the President would meet with Senator Sanders on Thursday “at Sanders’ request” at the White House.
Sanders’s hopes for mounting a campaign to convince the party’s “superdelegates” to switch sides had rested on winning California and demonstrating that Clinton did not have the loyalty of her party’s broad constituencies. “Let me thank all of you for being here tonight – and let me thank all of you for being part of the political revolution”, he said.
But the president did not formally endorse Clinton.
Later in the night, Clinton won the New Mexico primary.
At a press conference Monday afternoon in California, Sanders did seem to soften his resolve in soldiering on and wouldn’t directly address the future of his candidacy past Tuesday.
The news came hours after the former secretary of state clinched the Democratic White House nomination on the last major date of the 2016 primary calendar, with six states holding polls. “They’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favours, selling government contracts, and I mean hundreds of millions of dollars”, he said.
“Our mission is more than just defeating Donald Trump, it is transforming our country”, he declared to supporters in Santa Monica, California.
Brady said Sanders had already pushed Clinton further left than she needed to be, and had raised some serious issues, though without providing serious solutions.
The announcement was made in a speech Clinton delivered in Brooklyn just 30 minutes before polls closed in California last night.
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He vowed to “fight hard to win” the final primary, in the District of Columbia next week, and to continue “our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice” at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
