At Politico, "Hillary Clinton's primary quagmire":
Hours before the West Virginia polls closed Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s top fundraisers got a memo from campaign manager Robby Mook. The message: Even if Bernie runs the table in the remaining states, he still can’t win.More.
It’s a well-known point by now, but it’s still one Mook needed to make as Clinton sputters toward the finish line, loaded down with the baggage of recent losses in Indiana and West Virginia and the prospect of a few more losses still to come.
This wasn’t the way the Democratic primary was supposed to end. Clinton may have turned her focus to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, but at the same time her campaign is forced to continue fighting a rear-guard action against Bernie Sanders, who shows no sign of surrender.
After going dark on television for several weeks, the former secretary of state is suddenly investing in television advertisements in Kentucky — a state that should have been in her wheelhouse. Deep into the primary schedule, Clinton is forced to reckon with almost weekly results highlighting her relative weaknesses with white men and young voters, and she’s only gradually been able to increase her swing state travel. All the while, Trump sharpens his day-to-day critiques of her.
Some Democrats are now growing uneasy over a rocky finish that has Clinton spending resources and political capital so late in the process.
“The defeat in Indiana I was just horrified at, frankly,” said former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler, a Clinton backer, echoing others who say that for the moment it’s more of an annoyance than a deep concern about the candidate. “The longer Bernie stays in, and the longer he is not mathematically out of the process, the weaker we’re going to seem to be."
Clinton is still on track to pass the threshold to clinch the nomination at some point in June using a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates, and her lead among pledged delegates remains above 275. That makes it extremely difficult for Sanders to catch up to her unless he can win over a large number of the party elites who vote regardless of their state’s decision. Yet the Clinton campaign, cognizant of the need to show respect to Sanders’ legion of devoted supporters, is unable to initiate the call to unite behind her candidacy...
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