MARTINSBURG, W.Va. (May 10, 2016) -Bernie Sanders defeated front-runner Hillary Clinton in West Virginia and in Nebraska on Tuesday, regaining momentum and leaving some of Mrs. Clinton’s backers uneasy that her path to the Democratic presidential nomination figures to be rocky to the end. Sanders has 1,468. Sanders has now won 19 states to Hillary Clinton’s 23.
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The senator from Vermont campaigned in Sacramento to a crowd of thousands on Monday ahead of the state’s June 7 primary.
Democrats also voted on Tuesday in a presidential “beauty contest” in Nebraska, although the delegates from that state were all previously assigned during a March 5 caucus. But the presumptive GOP nominee has failed to gain the full support of his own party elite.
A remark Clinton made at an OH town hall in March that the country would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” at an OH town hall in a comment may have hurt her with voters in coal-mining states such as West Virginia.
But Clinton’s battle with Sanders, who defied pollsters to win in IN last week, has become a source of gloating for Trump.
West Virginia gave Clinton one of her largest victories over Obama of any state.
The win was a second consecutive victory for the Vermont senator, who remains well behind Mrs Clinton in the overall delegate count. Right now, she is only about 160 delegates short of the 2,383 delegate threshold she must reach to secure the nomination.
Bernie Sanders says he’ll “fight for every last vote”. But 4 in 10 also said they consider themselves to be independents or Republicans, and not Democrats, according to exit polls. Around 27 percent of the state’s Democrats said they would vote for Trump and 36 percent said it would depend.
FiveThirtyEight explains how nobody has ever come back from such a deficit on the Democratic side, while CBS News notes Clinton only needs to win 17 percent of the remaining delegates to clinch. West Virginia voters already set a new record of nearly 101,000 ballots cast during the 10-day early voting period.
In Nebraska, half of Republican primary voters say trade takes jobs, while about a third say it creates them.
Along with being one of the poorest states in the country-ranking 49th or 50th in measures like per capita income and income tax revenue-West Virginia is also a state historically dominated by the Democratic Party. “And I don’t think there’s any debate over who that candidate is”. “Probably not Hilary Clinton, but if you’re Bernie Sanders you go where the delegates are”, Barouth says. Roughly 1 in 3 primary voters said they would back Trump in the general election over Clinton, and Sanders won two-thirds of their votes.
Donald Trump’s victory in West Virginia means he will get at least three delegates. “They want real change”, Sanders said.
Meanwhile, Trump says he’s narrowed his list of potential running mates to “five or six” people and is leaning against accepting public money to finance a fall campaign against likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio says he’ll live up to his pledge to the Republican Party to support the GOP’s presidential nominee. “That wasn’t about getting votes, for her or for me”, Bill Clinton said, stopping to answer questions after a recent campaign event in California.
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Despite his differences with the former secretary of state Mrs Clinton, Mr Sanders said, they had one common goal – defeating Mr Trump.
