Bernie Sanders says he plans to assess the status of his presidential campaign after Tuesday's primary contests, which could potentially deliver him a win in the critical state of California, where the lion's share of delegates are at stake.
At a campaign event on Monday, he was asked if would consider endorsing Hillary Clinton before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this July.
"Well, that's something. First of all, you're asking me to speculate. Let me just talk to you after the primary here in California where we hope to win. Let's assess where we are after tomorrow before we make statements based on speculation," Sanders said.
Sanders said that he'll be in Los Angeles on Tuesday night, then will fly back to Burlington, Vermont and then said he "certainly" plans to campaign in Washington, D.C. ahead of the final primary on June 14. He also said he and his campaign have had private conversations with superdelegates and mentioned that four superdelegates in three or four states might endorse Sanders.
For months, he has maintained that he intends to go all the way to the convention, but pressure is building for him to drop out. Some Democrats fear that it could hurt the party's chances in November if Sanders prolongs the Democratic primary race.
On Monday — even before the Associated Press declared her the presumptive Democratic nominee — Hillary Clinton leaned on Bernie Sanders to fall in line. Citing her own precedent from 2008, Clinton told reporters, “Tomorrow is eight years to the day after I withdrew and endorsed then-Sen. Obama. I believed it was the right thing to do.” The message from Clinton is clear: Let’s get that “Kumbaya moment” going, Bernie. And make it snappy.
But if you listen closely to Sanders — and Rolling Stone spoke to him at length in recent weeks — Clinton’s call for a replay of her 2008 unity ceremony reflects an almost willful misunderstanding of his motivations for running for president.
Clinton is asking Sanders to opt out of a nationally televised airing of the disagreements that have been the driving force of his candidacy — a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party that Sanders has loudly insisted he wants to see play out in Philadelphia.
Below are four reasons why a Kumbaya moment will remain elusive, and why the Democratic convention may well be contested until the final votes of the superdelegates are recorded in July.
This isn’t 2008 In her call for unity, Clinton referenced her disagreements with Obama. “No matter what differences we had in our long campaign,” Clinton said, “they paled in comparison to the differences we had with the Republicans.”
But, looking back on the 2008 campaign, the substantive differences on policy were vanishingly small. There were big fights over judgment (the Iraq War) and the claim to history (the first African-American versus the first woman nominee). But on policy grounds, Clinton and Obama were all but the same candidate.
The Associated Press may have declared Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee, but Bernie Sanders is still picking up superdelegates.
Democratic National Committeewoman Pat Cotham, a North Carolina superdelegate, said Monday evening she would support Sanders. The endorsement came on the eve of contests in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota.
"Yeah," said Cotham, "it's been coming on me the last few weeks really."
Cotham's backing came less than an hour before the AP reported that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had passed the 2,383 delegate threshold needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.
Cotham, a Mecklenburg County commissioner, said she decided to back Sanders in recent weeks because she believed he would be a better opponent against Donald Trump in the general election.
"He can beat Trump and we cannot have Donald Trump," Cotham said in an interview. "The polls show that [Bernie] has a better chance of beating him than Secretary Clinton does. That's just how I came to it."
Hillary Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday night, but Bernie Sanders still has a big problem with the word “presumptive."
Even after the Associated Press declared Monday that she would become the first woman to top a major party ticket this fall, the increasingly combative Vermont senator’s posture — and that of his increasingly furious campaign team — remained clear: This ain't over.
“It was one of the most appalling things I’ve seen in a long time,” senior campaign adviser Mark Longabaugh said of the AP call, noting that the organization had taken weeks to count Sanders’ delegates from Washington state earlier this year, a saga that roiled the Sanders team, but somehow managed to chase down enough undeclared superdelegates to declare Clinton the primary winner on the eve of the campaign’s last big primary day. “Yet here they are haranguing and badgering super delegates before the final votes were cast. On top of the fact that they’re awarding delegates in Puerto Rico when the counting isn’t even finished in Puerto Rico."
"It's scandalous. It's absolutely scandalous and it really feeds into what Sanders supporters believe, and quite frankly probably some people on the right who are sick and tired of the establishment that feeds right into it, that this whole thing was rigged right from the beginning," said prominent Sanders surrogate Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator. "The nominee for Democrats is not called. She does not have the absolute number. The number is set up by the Democratic party. She does not have that number and will not have that number without superdelegates and because superdelegates can not vote until the Wednesday of the convention neither her nor the senator will have it. And what it does it is it gets into the heads of people who are yet to vote."
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"Let those people vote and decide before the media tells them that the race is over," Jeff Weaver told CNN Tuesday. "What's the point of suppressing voter turnout in six states across the country to have a quick news hit that could easily have been done tonight?"
"They are suppressing the vote in the most vile, vicious way I've seen establishment media do, and the fact that the Clinton campaign is giddy about it because [sic] what they should be doing is be out there saying, 'don't do that, don't call this race. There's still other states that have yet to vote.' Be true to what they have been saying on TV which is she's competing for every last vote," said Turner. "It's obvious that that's not the truth."
ech workers who are concerned about free trade with China, immigration and education, are keeping a close eye on the 2016 election.
And as Californians vote in the state’s primary today, it appears that Bernie Sanders is the Silicon Valley favorite.
“By quite a long way,” said Steve Hilton, the CEO of Bay Area startup Crowdpac. The company helps individuals make small campaign donations and compiles data on political giving.
The tech sector, which typically leans heavily to the left, has donated more than $6 million to Sanders since his campaign began. That more than doubles Hillary Clinton’s haul, according to Crowdpac’s data.
Hilton said Sanders appeals to tech workers who “think in very anti-establishment ways within their own professional lives. That is very much the culture of Silicon Valley.”