After Super Tuesday drubbing, Sanders plots his next move
After getting trounced in most Super Tuesday states, Sen. Bernie Sanders hoped to recover some momentum beginning with rallies in Maine and Michigan on Wednesday.
The Vermont independent said his “political revolution” had begun and the campaign is just getting started. “We’re going all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and beyond,” he said in an early morning statement.
Sanders won just four of the 11 Super Tuesday states — Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont. His rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and American Samoa.
Clinton’s wins gave her a total 594 pledged delegates to 405 for Sanders. Of the 2,382 delegates needed to win the nomination, 865 were in play Tuesday. Clinton is far ahead of Sanders in superdelegates, elected officials and party leaders who are unpledged.
Sanders’ campaign said Wednesday it can erase that deficit with strong performances in Nebraska and Kansas on March 5, and in other states that vote later in the process, including Michigan, New York and California. His $42 million-plus fundraising haul in February will help support the campaign in the industrial Midwest and beyond, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said.
Weaver acknowledged the difficulty Sanders has had making inroads with black voters, but he said the African-American community is not “monolithic.”
“The experiences of communities in places like Michigan ... will perhaps make Bernie’s message on economics” much more pow- erful, he said.
Clinton’s campaign notes her lead over Sanders in pledged delegates is larger than any of the leads Barack Obama enjoyed over Clinton during the 2008 primary season. And it will only become more difficult — “and eventually mathematically impossible” — for Sanders to catch up, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in an open memo.
In New York City, Clinton reveled in her victories at a labor rally Wednesday attended by top Democrats. Super Tuesday “was one for the history books,” she exalted, picking up on other speakers’ claims that Clinton is now on her way to becoming the nation’s first woman president.
“Some people are ready to write this campaign off as a message campaign, but this is a campaign to win.” Jeff Weaver, campaign manager