WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) — Shortly after polls closed, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was declared the winner in three of five Atlantic states voting Tuesday, including the largest prize of the night, Pennsylvania.
Clinton has also been projected to win Maryland and Delaware.
Clinton’s string of victories comes on the heels of a large victory in her adopted home state of New York, where the Sanders campaign had hoped to stage another upset victory. After he fell short there, the campaign calendar provided no sanctuary.
Of the five states voting, at least four have appeared for months to lean toward Clinton, and the fifth, Rhode Island, is small enough it cannot alter the delegate math based on her victories elsewhere. At most, Rhode Island provides a bright spot on an otherwise very dark night for the Sanders campaign.
After Pennsylvania, Sanders has failed to score a win in a single true general election battleground state. With the commonwealth on her side, Clinton has scored victories in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania — the holy trinity of states for Democrats in a general election.
Not since John F. Kennedy in 1960 has a Democrat won the White House without carrying at least two of those three states.
Clinton’s campaign clearly had an eye toward the general election Tuesday night. After a day of campaigning in Indiana, she opted to return to Philadelphia to celebrate Tuesday’s primary results, rather than try to create momentum in the next state to vote.
The question for Sanders in the wake of Tuesday’s stinging defeats is whether he will heed the calls, which almost certainly will become louder, for him to exit the race or at least begin winding down his campaign.
CNN’s delegate count had Clinton leading Sanders by 253 coming into Tuesday’s contests. She could extend that lead by 30 or so delegates depending on final vote counts in individual congressional districts in each of the five states voting.
Sanders spoke to supporters from West Virginia shortly after polls closed on what looked to be a tough night for his campaign. He reprised his call for Democratic super delegates to the party convention to look past primary results, which have given Clinton a large lead in pledged delegates, and examine polls he says show he is the candidate best-equipped to take on Republicans in the general election.
“Almost every national poll and every state poll has us up 15, 20 [percentage] points and that margin is significantly larger than Secretary Clinton,” Sanders said. “And the reason we are doing so much better against Republicans is, not only are we winning the overwhelming number of Democratic votes, we are winning independent votes and even some Republican votes.”
