Clinton struggles to knock Sanders out as socialist keeps winning

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders won West Virginia’s Democratic primary on Tuesday but his second straight victory over frontrunner Hillary Clinton does little or nothing to halt her march to the Democratic presidential nomination.

While the Republican race appears all but over with Donald Trump beating the last of 16 opponents last week, the Democratic primary is still far from finished, notwithstanding Clinton’s strong lead. Sanders’s continued state victories leave Clinton struggling to defeat an opponent running as a populist and raises questions about her chances in the November ballot.

Trump’s decisive victories in West Virginia and Nebraska – where Texas senator Ted Cruz and Ohio governor John Kasich, who dropped out of the race last week, remained on the ballot – removed any doubt about a possible protest vote against the New York businessman that would reflect internal party divisions.

The property developer visits the US Capitol today with the support of 11 million Republican primary voters and a strong case to receive the formal backing of Republican leaders. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan and other party elders are unhappy about the polarising businessman being the party’s standard-bearer in the presidential election.

The divisions may not be as deep in the Democratic Party but Sanders has promised to fight “for every last vote” until the primary ballots end with the District of Columbia on June 14th, a continued distraction for the Clinton camp.

Sanders’s 51 per cent to 36 per cent win over Clinton in West Virginia handed him a net gain of just seven pledged convention delegates who will vote for the nominee at the party’s national convention in Philadelphia in late July.

While the victory gives the self-professed democratic socialist a psychological lift heading into the final stretch of the Democratic race, it does little to cut into her almost 300 delegate lead. Add to this Clinton’s 524 to 40 lead among super delegates, the Democratic Party’s top brass of elected officials and party leaders.

Confident

One party leader, vice-president Joe Biden, predicted that Clinton would be the nominee despite the challenge she still faces.

“I feel confident that Hillary will be the nominee and I feel confident that she’ll be the next president,” Biden told ABC News in an interview broadcast yesterday.

“[West Virginia] does virtually nothing for Bernie,” said Democratic strategist Matt Bennett.

“These really are irrelevancies as they were in 2008 when Clinton won seven out of nine of the last states and it didn’t matter, and she was a whole lot closer than Bernie is now. It gives Bernie’s people something to cheer about, allows them to raise more money and gives him a little bit of oxygen.”

His victory in the Mountain State, after his win last week in Indiana, shows the primary map has turned in Mr Sanders’s favour to states where there are more white, younger and more liberal voters, a constituency in which he has performed well during the primary. They come after Clinton’s victories in the northeast where Democratic voters are more ethnically diverse, playing to the former secretary of state’s advantage among black and Hispanic voters.

Sanders said at a campaign stop in San Francisco yesterday that he has “an outside shot” of finishing the primaries with more pledged delegates than his rival. Should he pull this off, his focus will then move to putting pressure on super-delegates to switch candidates to reflect the will of the Democratic voters.

Worrying trend

A potentially more worrying trend for the Clinton campaign that emerged in West Virginia was the high number of Democratic voters who said they would support Trump in November. Exit polls showed a third of the state’s Democratic voters said they would vote for the businessman in the election, while 39 per cent of Sanders voters said they would vote for Trump.

Although Democrats outnumber Republicans in West Virginia, the state has not voted for a Democratic president in 20 years and the fact the Democratic ballot was an open primary on Tuesday – independent voters could participate – meant that, with the Republican race wrapped up, some Trump supporters could have mischievously sought to damage Clinton by voting for Sanders.

Still, it underscores the poor standing of both the likely Democratic nominee and the Democratic establishment in West Virginia, a coal industry state with a large population of miners where Republicans have effectively turned the policies of the Obama administration into a “war on coal”.

“They should be concerned but not overly so,” said Democratic strategist and campaign veteran Jamal Simmons about Sanders voters turning to Trump. “A lot of voters at the end of the campaign cannot imagine voting for the candidate they are losing to but that number is much smaller in the Sanders- Clinton race than it was in the Clinton-Obama race and those voters ultimately came around to Barack Obama.”