Hillary Clinton is shifting her focus to a general election battle against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump — but she will get a reminder Tuesday that she’s not yet done with the Democratic primary.
Bernie Sanders is poised to pick up another win in the West Virginia primary, which he hopes will fuel his effort to take the fight for the Democratic nomination all the way to the party convention in July.
For the Vermont senator, West Virginia offers a chance to leap back into the political spotlight and confound hardening conventional wisdom that he is an afterthought in the race, as he struggles to get back into the conversation amid a fierce back and forth between the Clinton and Trump campaigns.
“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.
On the Republican side, meanwhile, Trump is looking to extend his hot streak, a week after he effectively ended the GOP primary fight with a victory in Indiana that knocked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz out of the race. Wins in the Republican primaries in West Virginia and Nebraska on Tuesday 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 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.
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.