US Countdown: Clinton less than 100 delegates from nomination
Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders split the two primary contests--Clinton narrowly won in Kentucky while Sanders won big in Oregon. But for the night, Sanders fell short of the blowout margins he needs to begin to catch up to the frontrunner.
The razor-thin Kentucky margin means that the two candidates will about split the state's 55 delegates, while Sanders will earn a handful more of Oregon's 61 delegates.
As of midnight into Wednesday, The Associated Press awarded each candidate 25 delegates from Kentucky with 11 remaining to be allocated. And in Oregon, the AP gave Sanders 28 delegates to Clinton's 24 with another nine remaining.
That puts Clinton at 1,765 pledged delegates to Sanders' 1,486--a gap of 279 with just a handful of contests to go, according to the AP.
Neither candidate is likely to reach the threshold of 2,383 delegates without the help of superdelegates, party leaders given a vote on the convention floor. Clinton leads overwhelmingly there despite Sanders's pleas that they should support him instead. Her superdelegate success swells her delegate count to 2,289, just 94 delegates short.
So as long as most of her superdelegates stay with her at the Democratic convention, she sits just a stone's throw away from securing the nomination.
Tuesday marked the last contests until the pivotal June 7, where Clinton will almost assuredly surmount the threshold. Sanders would have to win more than two-thirds of the 714 delegates remaining in order to end primary season with more pledged delegates than Clinton. And even then, she'd still hold the upper hand unless her superdelegate supporters broke en masse.
Despite the grim prospects for Sanders's nomination, he has repeatedly promised to fight until the convention. Even if he falls short of the nomination, the delegates he wins throughout the nomination process will help him wield an outsized influence on the convention floor on issues like party rules and the party platform.
