Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were battling Tuesday in the West Virginia primary as the Vermont senator seeks a morale-boosting win over the Democratic front-runner.
Sanders is favored to win West Virginia, which, like previous states he has won, is largely white and rural. A victory would offer him a chance to leap back into the political spotlight amid a fierce back and forth between the Clinton and Donald Trump campaigns but will not change the overall dynamic of the race.
“It’s an uphill struggle,” Sanders said Tuesday in Stockton, California. “We have a chance to end up with a majority of the pledged delegates. And if we do that, I think you are looking at the Democratic nominee for president.”
Still, Sanders is mathematically prevented from winning the nomination based on pledged delegates alone. Vice President Joe Biden, who has stopped short of endorsing either candidate, acknowledged Tuesday that Clinton will ultimately become the Democratic nominee.
“I feel confident that Hillary will be the nominee and I feel confident she’ll be the next president,” Biden told ABC News.
Clinton, for her part, spent the day in Kentucky, which votes next week, ignoring the primary in West Virginia, and instead warning Republicans that their attempts to bring her down will fail.
“The right wing never gives up attacking me. I think they are really going to throw everything including the kitchen sink this time. I have a message for them: They have done it for 25 years and I am still standing,” Clinton said at a rally in Louisville.
On the Republican side, Trump — facing no opposition — won the West Virginia and Nebraska primaries, according to CNN projections. The GOP primary effectively ended last week with Trump’s victory in Indiana that knocked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz out of the race. Wins in the Republican primaries in West Virginia and Nebraska, where polls close later in the evening, would bring him ever closer to the 1,237 delegates he needs to officially close out the nomination.
Even though the GOP race is essentially over, thumping vote totals on Tuesday would also reinforce the billionaire’s appeals for the party to unite around him, despite significant antipathy towards him from many conservatives and establishment leaders.
Still, most of the most attention will be on the Democratic side of the race Tuesday with Clinton still unable to emphatically snuff out the Sanders challenge so that she can turn her full fire on Trump.
Eight years ago, West Virginia helped Clinton in the same way it might aid Sanders on Tuesday — her landslide victory in the primary over then Sen. Barack Obama boosted her morale even if it wasn’t enough to change the basic delegate math that made it impossible for her to win the nomination.
This time around, Clinton faces difficulties of her own making in West Virginia after saying in a March CNN town hall meeting in Ohio that she was going to put a “lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” with her policies on climate change.
During a swing through West Virginia last week, she apologized and said that while she believes the comments were taken out of context, she was guilty of a “misstatement.”
Even if Sanders wins West Virginia on Tuesday, he is unlikely to significantly cut into Clinton’s lead of nearly 300 pledged delegates, which itself is more than exceeded by her advantage in Democratic super delegates. Right now, she is only about 160 delegates short of the 2,383 delegate threshold she must reach to secure the nomination. Even if she loses in West Virginia, the proportional allocation of delegates in the primary means her lead over Sanders will stay mostly intact.
Clinton and Sanders are competing for only 29 pledged delegates in West Virginia. According to the latest CNN estimates, Clinton leads Sanders by 2,224 delegates to 1,448. She has 1,708 pledged delegates and 516 super delegates — party officials and lawmakers who can vote at the convention. Sanders has 1,407 pledged delegates and 41 committed super delegates. Those figures call into question his contention that he will be able to convince super delegates at the convention to back him and not the former secretary of state.
Sanders insisted on Tuesday that he could still win a majority of pledged delegates — a goal that remains mathematically possible if unlikely.
There are 34 Republican delegates available in West Virginia and 36 in Nebraska.
Trump currently has a total of 1,080 delegates, just short of the 1,237 delegates needed to formally claim the GOP nomination.
