Hillary Clinton secured the Democratic nomination for president Tuesday night, becoming the first woman to find her name at the top of the ballot in US history.
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The victories effectively put an end to her battle with challenger Bernie Sanders, the self-declared democratic socialist senator from Vermont who waged an extraordinarily successful grassroots campaign.
It’s also worth noting that a Clinton-Sanders duo looks pretty old, and some voters and politicians are already anxious that Clinton is too old to occupy the Oval.
Clinton thanked the senator for driving the debate over economic mobility and income inequality and tried to show she absorbed some of his message.
As the former secretary of state began to speak, New Jersey’s primary contest went into her column, and she took credit for winning a majority of pledged delegates overall, and 3 million more votes than Sanders collected. “It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now”, she said. However, Sanders, who won in Montana and North Dakota, refused to concede defeat to Clinton, vowing to stay in the Democratic nomination.
The White House announced that Mr Obama telephoned both candidates to congratulate them on their hard-fought primary race, and said the president would meet with Mr Sanders on Thursday, “at Sanders’ request”, at the White House.
Previous polls had predicted California to be a close primary for the Democratic candidates.
“It’s ridiculous. California is the biggest state in the nation”, she said.
Trump was also the projected victor in Montana’s, New Mexico’s and South Dakota’s GOP primaries, multiple outlets reported.
On June 13, Clinton will campaign against Trump in Cleveland, Ohio, and on June 14 she will hold an event in the Pittsburgh area to work for support in Pennsylvania, where the NY businessman says he can compete for working-class voters.
A Sanders spokesman condemned the media’s “rush to judgment” in declaring Clinton the nominee, arguing that superdelegates should not be counted until the party’s convention in July where they officially pledge votes.
A video that played prior to her speech spliced images of pivotal moments in the fight for women’s equality in the USA – from the suffragettes and the women’s liberation movement – with shots of her climbing stairs to address supporters.
Citrin added that Sanders has been incredibly successful in forcing Clinton to move her policy views to the left. “At some point, when we’re trying to flip 400 super-delegates, and it’s not gaining traction, I think you have to come to the conclusion that it’s not going to happen”.
Mrs Clinton’s moment came a day after she secured the necessary 2,383 delegates, according to the AP tally.
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Sanders has been making the case that he could still persuade enough superdelegates to switch their allegiances and back him instead of Clinton, with the argument that he’d be a stronger candidate to take on Donald Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee, in November’s general election.
