But Tuesday’s (local time) loss could signal trouble for Mrs Clinton with working-class voters in the US Rust Belt, where she would need to prevail in key states, such as OH and Pennsylvania, in the general election.
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As she traveled through Appalachia, a swath of coal country where Trump has found many of his most ardent supporters, Clinton encountered voters set in rigid opposition to her presence.
“She is going to be the one that will reach out – to not try to divide Americans against each other, but bring people together even if they don’t start off supporting her. We especially want to do that in areas that frequently get overlooked”, Fallon said, noting that Clinton will continue to “highlight those areas” as she travels to battleground states while also competing in the remaining Democratic primaries and caucuses. Sanders needs to win almost two-thirds of the remaining pledged delegates to do that. Sanders tends to perform best in states where the overwhelmingly majority of Democratic voters are white, and West Virginia was no exception to the rule.
West Virginia has largely fought the Obama administration’s regulations to curb climate change by limiting airborne carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants – limits that Sanders and Clinton support.
That means he picks up 15 delegates, while Clinton gets 11. Even without superdelegates, she leads 1,716-1,430 – and is also more than 3 million votes ahead when looking at the popular vote. A total of 2,383 delegates are needed to clinch the nomination.
More than 60 percent of the state’s Democratic voters said jobs and the economy were the most important issue in deciding their vote, according to ABC News exit polling.
They were the billionaire businessman’s first primaries since his last remaining rivals bowed out of the race.
Sanders acknowledges at a campaign event in Salem, Oregon, that his path is narrowing, but says he’s used “to fighting uphill climbs”. I have a message for them: “They have done it for 25 years and I am still standing”, Clinton said at a rally in Louisville.
In 2012, when Obama ran for reelection unopposed in the primary, Keith Judd, an inmate sitting in a federal prison in Texas won a stunning 41 percent of the Democratic primary vote in the state.
In West Virginia with half the vote counted, he had 75.7 of the vote.
There are 37 Democratic delegates at stake. Mr. Sanders typically scores well among independents.
“I’d either write in Bernie’s name or stay home”, said Tim Feaster, 22. “She can’t lead, why should I vote for her to be the leader of my county?”
Once a Clinton stronghold, West Virginia’s political preference has shifted dramatically since she won by a landslide in the 2008 presidential primary.
Though she also voiced concern for the plight of displaced coal miners, her remarks caused damage that she later sought to minimize.
In West Virginia, where the electorate is unusually hostile to the Obama administration’s actions around clean power, which has decimated the state’s coal industry, that’s a hindrance. Still, she conceded: “I know that my chances are pretty hard [in West Virginia], to be honest”.
Sanders’s own role is to channel this opposition back into the Democratic Party.
US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has defeated Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary, slowing her march to the nomination.
Sanders told a reporter: “The media said the campaign was all over, that she [Hillary Clinton] had won, but now she has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars because I think she is catching on, that here in California and all over this country, working people are saying that it is too late for establishment politics …” “We will be back here in Oakland, we will be in San Francisco, we will be marching all over the state, and we hope you will be marching with us”, Sanders promised the crowd.
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“With all the politicians and everybody that’s running, to be honest, I don’t believe with everything that they all say”, said Blackmon, a 31-year-old social worker.
