An article (posted within the last couple of hours) by the U.K’s “The Guardian”
starts off by saying:
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has had the best night of his campaign thus far, winning two caucuses by massive margins, with a third victory in Hawaii within reach.
With overwhelming victories in Washington state and Alaska, Sanders has narrowed - however slightly - former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s significant delegate lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. “We are making significant inroads in Secretary Clinton’s lead,” Sanders said in a speech to supporters in Madison, Wisconsin.“We have a path toward victory.”
But the “however slightly” phrase later is shown to refer more to the current state of Hillary’s massive super-delegate lead:
His landslide victory in the Washington caucus was called shortly thereafter. With 57% of precincts reporting, Sanders has won 73.2% of delegates, as well as every county that has declared a victory so far. Clinton, in contrast, won only 26.6% of delegates,underperforming her own showing in the state’s caucus in 2008 against Barack Obama. Washington, like Alaska, determines its delegate allocation proportionally, which means that more than 70 of its 101 delegates will likely go Sanders’ way, deeply cutting into Clinton’s 300-delegate lead. Clinton’s lead, however, won’t be as damaged once superdelegates are factored in to the final count. Superdelegates, party officials who vote at the Democratic National Convention but who are not bound to vote according to their states’ election results, support Clinton over Sanders by a margin of 469 to 29, making his path to the nomination even more arduous.But, of course, the oft repeated strategy from the Sanders’s camp is that once Bernie chips away at Ms. Clinton’s lead over the next few weeks, and is then in a position to overtake the lead on June 7th, the superdelegates will be thinking twice about who they should be committing themselves to, at the actual convention.
So, from that perspective, the fact that Hillary’s super-delegate lead remains currently intact, in terms of the big picture may not be nearly as significant as the “deeply cutting into Clinton’s 300-delegate lead” observation is.
For me, the crucial aspect of Senator Sanders’s ability to overtake Mrs. Clinton is the fact that the massive June 7th primary is still over two months of “chipping” away. And, in a matter of just weeks, Bernie has repeatedly turned seemingly insurmountable Clinton leads into Sanders victories, in states where he’s simply had the opportunity to campaign and focus.
Even Nate Cohn, who brilliantly limned the challenge before the Senator (as of March 17th) said that while winning the nomination was certainly daunting for Sanders, it was not impossible (Here’s How Bernie Sanders Could Win the Nomination). And Cohn said this without mentioning Sanders’s history of quickly coming from behind, i.e. for some reason all of these folks seem to leave out that rather not insignificant point. Particularly when taking into account that there are still two months remaining in a race, which has had more than its share of reversals, in half that time.
Hillary supporters will naturally take issue with any and all of these points (as is certainly legitimate to do from their perspective.) But I do hope that this rather interesting “slip” on the part of The Guardian, starts to get some currency, and is increasingly put in better perspective.