With a nearly insurmountable lead in the delegate race, and the nomination within her grasps, Hillary Clinton still can’t put away her Democratic rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The democratic socialist defeated the former Secretary of State on Tuesday, 51-36 percent in West Virginia. He picked up a slim majority of the state’s 29 pledged delegates.
Clinton, however, still maintains a 286 delegate edge in the race—a lead that Sanders was unbothered by when addressing supporters late Tuesday night.
“Let me be as clear as I can be,” Sanders said at a rally in Salem, Ore. on Tuesday night, “We are in this campaign to win the Democratic nomination.”
It was the 19th state that the Sanders campaign has won this season—a total that no political prognosticator would have predicted a year ago when the senator jumped in the race, facing a more than 60-point deficit in the polls to Clinton.
Sanders went on to say that he would make a better general election candidate in November against the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump—a case Sanders currently plans to make to superdelegates, too, in hopes of gaining their support.
“It is not only in national polls where we defeat Donald Trump by bigger numbers than Secretary Clinton, it is state poll, after state poll, after state poll,” he noted.
According to the latest polling from Quinnipiac, Trump is within striking distance and leading Clinton in the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
West Virginia was a state that Clinton won handily in her 2008 bid for the Democratic nomination against Barack Obama. Her loss this year illustrates the trouble she still faces connecting with independent voters who represented roughly a fifth of the electorate Tuesday thanks to the state’s open primary rules. Sanders won the voting bloc with 58 percent, according to exit polls.
The GOP took notice of the Democratic front-runner’s struggles. Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus tweeted after the results, “It is nothing short of embarrassing that Hillary Clinton has now been defeated twenty times by a 74-year old socialist from Vermont.”
Sanders will look to pick up two more wins next week when Democrats in Kentucky and Oregon head to the polls. After that, only eight more states, plus the District of Columbia, remain on the primary calendar.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, continued his unimpeded march to the GOP nomination, winning both West Virginia and Nebraska on Tuesday night. The victories put the real estate mogul within roughly 100 delegates of securing his party’s nomination.
