Bernie Sanders has won Washington’s Democratic presidential caucuses after tens of thousands of people met at schools, libraries and community centers across the state.
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Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders scored big wins in two US state caucuses on Saturday, boosting his competition with Hillary Clinton for party nomination.
They have overwhelmingly supporting Clinton and that makes it extremely unlikely Sanders will prevail.
The Vermont senator spent much of the week on the West Coast, trying to build his enduring support among liberal activists into a Saturday sweep that could help him narrow a gap of 300 delegates won in primaries behind Clinton. United States networks projected Mr Sanders winning 79.2 per cent against 20.8 per cent for Ms Clinton in Alaska. It takes 2,383 delegates to win the nomination at the party’s national convention in July in Philadelphia. Saturday’s election impacts how 25 of those delegates vote.
Clinton has the endorsement of many established Democrats in the state, including most of the congressional delegation, two former governors and many other high-profile Democrats in the state. Heading into the day, he needed to win about 58 percent of all the remaining pledged delegates to clinch the nomination. Clinton, who held a conference call with supporters in Hawaii, did not send any high-profile supporters to campaign on her behalf. These victories today in the state of Washington, which is about a hundred delegates, is energizing his base and I think that more more Americans now are seeing that he is not the establishment candidate and that’s what they want. One of the few Clinton supporters seen at the location, Harper wore a Washingtonians for Hillary T-shirt.She would be a role model for generations of young women across the world, she said. “We are going to do both”.
A self-declared democratic socialist, Sanders continues to draw large crowds to rallies and is especially popular among younger voters, tromping Clinton in the critical electorate that twice brought President Barack Obama to the White House.
Adding in the support of superdelegates – party leaders who are free to back any candidate – she has 1690 delegates to 946 for Sanders.
Washington offers 101 delegates, with 16 delegates on offer in Alaska and 25 in Hawaii.
As he struggles to remain competitive, Western states have become must-wins for Sanders, who lost by large margins in earlier contests in the South.
He pulled in more than 15,000 people to a Seattle sport stadium on Friday evening where he told cheering supporters: “We need a political revolution!”
She delivered a somber counterterrorism speech Wednesday in the aftermath of deadly attacks in Brussels, using it as an opportunity to launch vigorous assaults on Republican candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and warn their “reckless” foreign policies would harm USA interests.
There were no Republican primaries on Saturday.
Mr Cruz told reporters that Mr Trump was behind a story in the National Enquirer that alleged Mr Cruz had had extramarital affairs.
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NY is followed a week later by five northeastern states.
