Bernie Sanders needed a big win in Kentucky. Hillary Clinton needed to close out the Democratic nominating contest strong and turn her undivided attention toward Donald Trump.
Neither happened Tuesday night. Instead, Democratic primary voters delivered a split decision in Kentucky and Oregon.
Clinton went from beating Barack Obama in Kentucky by more than 35 points in 2008 to leading Sanders there by just 0.4 points after nearly all the votes were in. Even if Sanders had won the Bluegrass State, which was too close to call for most of the night, it wouldn’t have changed the daunting delegate math.
With 99.9 percent of the votes in Wednesday morning, Clinton led Sanders 46.75 percent to 46.33 percent, a difference of less than 2,000 votes out of more than 450,000 cast.
The Vermont socialist senator did manage to beat the former secretary of state by nine points in Oregon, despite it being a closed Democratic primary. This barely dented his huge delegate deficit either but it helped him rally his supporters.
Sanders was the projected winner of Oregon, 54-45 percent with about 75 percent of the votes in.
Democrats have settled into a race where Clinton’s nomination has been virtually inevitable for weeks but Sanders has continued to win enough state contests to convince his supporters there is still a viable path forward.
Technically, that may be true. In practice, the Democrats’ proportional delegate allocation system and large number of unbound superdelegates (party leaders who overwhelmingly favor Clinton) makes it all but impossible. Sanders supporters see the latter half of that equation as indicative of a system as “rigged” as the American economy, a perception the presumptive GOP nominee — who won two-thirds of the vote in Tuesday night’s only Republican primary, held in Oregon — has been all too happy to reinforce.
That sense of injustice played out in a particularly ugly fashion at Nevada’s Democratic state convention, where Sanders supporters rioted and threatened the state party chairwoman over a dispute involving a minuscule number of delegates to the national convention.
Sanders lost the popular vote in the Nevada caucuses by 5 points earlier this year, but hoped to out-organize the Clinton forces at the convention to no avail. After Nevada Democrats filed a complaint and the Democratic National Committee expressed concern, Sanders remained defiant and said his supporters were being disrespected by party establishment.
“The Democratic Party has a choice,” he said in a statement. “It can open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change — people who are willing to take on Wall Street, corporate greed and a fossil fuel industry which is destroying this planet. Or the party can choose to maintain its status quo structure.”
Republicans just concluded a bruising primary process in which some of the defeated candidates have refused to endorse Trump, as have many prominent conservatives. But the talk of a contested GOP convention is all but over while Sanders continues to promise to fight for the Democratic nomination in Philadelphia this summer.
Reflecting on the weekends events in Nevada and the possibility they could be replicated at the Democratic National Convention, Reno Gazette-Journal columnist Jon Ralston wrote, “All things considered, I’d rather not be in Philadelphia.”
What’s important for Clinton isn’t the odds that Sanders can win — how many superdelegates are really going to switch from the possible first female president to a 74-year-old socialist from a small state who is trailing in both pledged delegates and the popular vote? — but how many of his supporters think he can and will feel cheated when he doesn’t.
Sanders has won overwhelmingly among millennials. Clinton needs them to turn out in numbers similar to 2008 and 2012, not stay home. He has done well with independents, among whom Clinton has begun to trail in head-to-head matchups with Trump. He has had some strong showings in the industrial Midwest, with voters hit hard by the costs of globalization. That region and those voters are crucial to Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes.
For months, Sanders has been a perfect opponent for Clinton: strong enough to force her to compete and stay organized, but not so strong that he was a threat to beat her if she did everything she needed to do. She has been hoping that Trump will be a similar kind of opponent in the general election.
Sanders’ staying power has made the Democratic primaries more difficult for Clinton than she’d ideally prefer. Will it hurt her plans against Trump in November too?
Perhaps he can’t win, but he can still help her lose.
