The White House tacitly said Bernie Sanders has every right to remain in the Democratic race and President Obama would only wade into the 2016 election once the Democratic nominee is chosen.
Asked if Obama now considers Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee after her multiple wins in the so-called “Acela primary” Tuesday night, White House spokesman Josh Earnest demurred.
“The Democratic voters will determine who the Democratic nominee is going to be and Republicans will determine who the Republican nominee will be,” he said. “That’s the way our process was structured, and the president participated in that process by casting a vote of his own in the Illinois primary.”
When it comes to Sanders’ assertion that he will stay in the race up until the late July convention in order to help influence the party’s platform, Earnest said it’s his right to do so and the president has no plans to try to pressure him to get out beforehand.
“Primary candidates will make their individual decisions about how long [to pursue the nomination],” he said. “I don’t have any details to announce about when the president will be engaged in this debate, but he certainly will in the general election.”
Clinton won four primaries in state in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic Tuesday night, including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Delaware.
Sanders won Rhode Island, and although he cannot catch up to Clinton’s delegate and superdelegate leads, he said he would go to the Democratic Party’s national convention in July “with as many delegates as possible” in order to fight for a “progressive party platform.”
Such a platform, Sanders said, would include calls for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and “end to our disastrous trade policies, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition-free and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change.”
