As expected Sanders won the West Virginia primary. The interesting thing is that he only garnered 51% of the vote, while 13% of the primary voters decided that neither candidate was acceptable and voted ‘other’.
Sanders has won two past races, and will continue to win at least half the remaining primaries through the convention. However, almost 70% of the remaining delegates will be awarded in two states that Clinton is very likely to win, California and New Jersey.
When i first started building this model my interest was to analyze why Clinton was doing better than Sanders, and if his performance in states with lower non-White populations would be enough to win the populations. The initial results were telling. Sanders was only winning states with large White populations, the significant initial exception being Kansas and Michigan, then later on Hawaii. My amazement was that Sanders was not adjusting his tactics to accommodate these trends, trends that, even with his 70% performance in some White states, would not net him delegates of the popular vote.
So why continue this series when there is at least one comment on every diary that says stop, don’t beat a dead horse, the race is won. Well, Sanders does not think so. Even though Clinton has over 1700 pledged delegates, and will likely be over 2000 delegates by California while Sanders will be lucky to break 2000, Sanders and many supporters seem to think the race is still in play. Why else would he go to West Virginia and tell them that they are going to have coal mining jobs when the markets and the necessary regulations for climate change say they won’t. Why, in effect, is he pushing the progressive politics to the right? If he thinks that he is here to push us left, to to a person that is a populist protecting the little guy, that he believe in the importance of protecting future generations, why is he not in Kentucky telling them the truth instead of the pretty lies they want to hear?