Shortly after 8pm on Tuesday evening, June 7, it seems likely that Hillary Clinton will be named the presumptive Democratic nominee when the results begin trickling in from the state of New Jersey. With her victory over the weekend in Puerto Rico, Clinton is just 26 delegates away from the magical number of 2,383 needed for a first ballot nomination at the Democratic convention in July.
And as Tuesday evening progresses and the results from the California primary begin to be counted and analyzed, pressure will increase within the Bernie Sanders camp to concede in the interest of uniting the party for the upcoming general election battle against Donald Trump. But the Sanders campaign is deeply split between those who want the Vermont Senator to drop out of the race and others who want him to remain in the fray.
The Wall Street Journal reports those two factions can be placed in two categories:
“One camp might be dubbed the Sandersistas, the loyalists who helped guide Mr. Sanders’s political ascent in Vermont and the U.S. Congress and are loath to give up a fight that has far surpassed expectations. Another has ties not only to Mr. Sanders but to the broader interests of a Democratic Party pining to beat back the challenge from Republican Donald Trump and make gains in congressional elections.”
For his part, Sanders continues to play hardball, saying over the weekend:
“The Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention.”
Apparently Sanders still believes he can court superdelegates and get them to switch to his side. This seems more than a bit odd–not to mention hypocritical–since Sanders has repeatedly called for superdelegates to be eliminated. It gives the impression that Sanders is opposed to superdelegates when they support Clinton, but loves them if he can manage to flip them to his side, which seems increasingly unlikely.
Clinton appears impatient with Sanders, remarking:
“I’m going to do everything I can to reach out to try to unify the Democratic Party, and I expect Senator Sanders to do the same.”
The math is against Sanders, even if he happens to manage a win in delegate-rich California. He is now so far behind in the delegate count that any attempt to keep Clinton from a first ballot victory in Philadelphia is not only next to impossible, it would also require some unknown mathematical formulation. Sanders is not going to win the nomination, and it now falls to him to help unify the party in the battle against Trump. Can he bow our gracefully, or will his final act forever stain his reputation?
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