On the verge of being mathematically eliminated from the Democratic race, Sanders campaign was able to slow down Clinton’s momentum with Tuesday night’s win.
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Sanders: Absolutely. We have made that commitment. He added later, “I think it is good for the United States of America, good for the Democratic Party, to have a vigorous debate, to engage people in the political process”.
Despite a string of losses to Clinton, Sanders was adamant in a news conference Sunday that he would not drop out of the race before the California primary on June 7. But Indiana voters on both sides don’t see much of a fairness issue in the presidential race. He says he’s exhausted of voting for career politicians and called Trump “a working man, for us”. Donald Trump has been playing up the importance of Tuesday’s vote all week, saying that a win in the Hoosier State would effectively end the race. And as NPR’s Arnie Seipel has calculated, even if all superdelegates voted way their states did, Clinton would still have a 200-plus superdelegate lead over Sanders, with a 500 total delegate lead. If Sanders is still talking about a narrow path to victory, that path probably includes raising money from leprechauns and getting votes from unicorns. Clinton holds a commanding lead, with 91 percent of the delegates she needs to win the nomination. And Sanders was the primary beneficiary – not necessarily in terms of the ideology of proto-Biden voters who wound up in the Sanders camp, but in terms of room to maneuver and air time.
Clinton has faced a hostile reception in West Virginia, coal country where voters appear infuriated over her comment in March about plans to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”. But in some later states, it gets tougher. And the open primary allows independents to vote in the Democratic primary, which has helped Sanders in past contests. But while 55 per cent of Americans said they had a negative opinion of Clinton in an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month, 69 per cent said the same of Trump. “In essence, we’re not going to nominate Hillary Clinton with a penis”, Steve Lonegan, Cruz’s New Jersey campaign director, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “At This Hour”.
In addition, he acknowledged, superdelegates would have to change their minds.
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“I’m going to keep telling people what I would do as president, and I’m going to keep being specific about it”, Clinton said in response to a question about Trump’s attacks. “I guess I should just admit my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis, and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his back yard”. She said she would “most likely” go for Clinton over Trump, but stressed that she wasn’t “100 per cent”.
