“I’m very proud of the campaign we’re running here, and I believe, on Tuesday, I will have decisively won the popular vote and I will have decisively won the pledged delegate majority”, Clinton said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.
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By all objective measures, she and her allies argue that the race is over.
While he has formally remained neutral in the race between Clinton and the Vermont independent senator, Obama has inched closer and closer to Clinton’s side in recent weeks and will take the final step after the last round of states vote on Tuesday.
“I think the Sanders campaign would agree that the president has worked hard and gone to great lengths to be fair”, said Earnest. A Clinton win ends Sanders’s campaign. That will be dependent upon superdelegates. “In other words, the Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention”.
Clinton now must try to unify the party and win over Sanders supporters, who booed lustily in California when Sanders congratulated her on her victories on Tuesday.
But the campaign of her rival, Bernie Sanders, vowed to keep up the fight in what has been a protracted and increasingly antagonised primary race that has exposed deep rifts between the left-wing and the more centrist of the Democratic Party.
President Barack Obama called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on June 7 to congratulate her on securing the delegates needed to become the Democratic presidential nominee, the White House said.
Clinton has 1,812 pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses, and Sanders has 1,521.
Speaking for more than an hour Saturday night outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as the flame of the Olympic torch flickered brightly above him, he urged his followers to dismiss those who claim his path is impossible. White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters the president was waiting for New Jersey and California to vote today before weighing in.
“I stand firmly with Muslim American communities in rejection of the voices that seek to divide us or limit our religious freedoms or civil rights”, Obama wrote, adding later: “We will continue to welcome immigrants and refugees into our nation, including those who are Muslim”. And that, he has done in spades. He has yet to reconcile those competing forces, aides say, but that rests at the heart of what he decides to do next. Following the results in Puerto Rico, it is no longer possible for Sanders to reach the 2,383 needed to win the nomination based on the remaining available pledged delegates and uncommitted superdelegates. He will not even engage on those kinds of questions at this point in the process. In a letter to fellow Senate Democrats, Sanders said the House bill to create a federal control board and allow some restructuring of the territory’s $70 billion debt would make “a awful situation even worse”. But that could be a tall order, considering he just joined the party to run for president.
But Sanders showed no interest in ending his upstart candidacy, telling cheering supporters in California that he would go on campaigning through next Tuesday’s primary in the District of Columbia and carry his political crusade – although not necessarily his campaign – to the convention in July.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said Friday that Democrats had added nearly 492,000 registrants since April, driving the party’s share of the electorate up to just less than 45 percent statewide.
“It is unfortunate that the media, in a rush to judgment, are ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of super-delegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer”, said Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, in a statement.
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With about 88 percent of the votes counted in California early on June 9, Clinton held a 14 point lead over Sanders.
