The polls have closed in South Carolina, and Hillary Clinton has been declared the winner of the Democratic primary. Here are a few brief thoughts:
Hillary’s First Win
Hillary Clinton scored her first huge victory of the campaign Saturday. The race was called for Clinton right as polls closed. Compare that to Iowa (won by 0.3 percent), New Hampshire (lost by 22 percent) and Nevada (won by five percent, took hours to declare a victory for her).
This is the result everyone expected to see a long time ago. Coming into the campaign, everyone expected Clinton to win the nomination in a landslide (unless Vice President Biden ran or her scandals caught up with her). Instead, it has taken until the fourth contest for her to score a huge, landslide victory. Although it’s taken so long for her to get this far, Clinton should have relatively smooth sailing going forward (again, assuming her scandals don’t catch up with her).
Sanders Has Nothing to Lose
The Super Tuesday polls are not looking great for Bernie Sanders. In eight of the 11 states, Clinton leads Sanders by double digits in the latest poll. The two states Sanders has a real chance of winning are Vermont (his home state) and Massachusetts (which borders Vermont). You can’t win a nomination if you win only in New England.
That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to drop out anytime soon. He has nothing to lose. It’s not like the Republican side, where remaining candidates have to wonder if they’re hurting someone else’s chance to beat Trump. Sanders can bide his time, hold large rallies, spread his message and hope Clinton gets indicted and has to drop out. That may be Sanders’s only hope to win the Democratic nomination.
Super Tuesday
Let’s assume Clinton wins all 53 delegates in South Carolina. That would put her at 104 delegates won to Sanders’s 51. If Clinton wins delegates at that same rate on Super Tuesday (which seems optimistic for the Sanders campaign at this point), it would leave her with 786 delegates earned, plus her 453 superdelegates. That would put Clinton more than half of the way toward clinching the nomination, with 40 nominating contests left to go (including territories and Washington, D.C.).
That’s a tough hill to climb for Sanders. Clinton would have a massive amount of momentum going in her favor. Victory would quickly start to seem inevitable for her, and Sanders might start to view the race as futile by the end of March.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
