It won’t really matter, but Clinton could still use the win
Hillary Clinton hopes to avoid another round of primary defeats that, while doing little to diminish her delegate lead over Bernie Sanders, magnify her difficulty in unifying the Democratic Party.
Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, which vote on Tuesday, could extend her losses after the Vermont senator carried Indiana and West Virginia earlier this month.
While Sanders is expected to win in Oregon, the Clinton campaign sees an opportunity in Kentucky, a state she carried easily in her primary campaign eight years ago.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton has struggled with working-class, white voters, however, particularly in communities hit hard by manufacturing job losses in the Rust Belt. It’s a group that's also boosting Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Over the weekend, Clinton made several stops in Kentucky, including drop-ins at churches, and she continued her busy schedule on Monday. Despite an earlier decision to shift resources to general election swing states, the campaign is running television ads in the Bluegrass State.
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Ky primary matters thanks to Bernie, Hillary
On Monday, Clinton dropped by a smoke-filled diner in Paducah. “I want to help bring back the kind of economy that worked for everybody in the 1990s,” she told the audience, which included at least one Trump supporter.
Entering Tuesday's contests, Clinton leads Sanders by nearly 300 pledged delegates. When superdelegates — elected officials and party leaders free to support either candidate — are factored in, her lead is much larger and brings her to within 150 delegates away of the 2,383 needed to clinch the Democratic nomination, according to the Associated Press. In the final round of state primaries next month, Clinton holds a 10-point lead in California, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, where 475 pledged delegates will be at stake.
Yet Sanders has repeatedly said he’ll fight all the way to the Philadelphia convention in July. And he’s showing he’ll battle for every last delegate, jetting on Monday to Puerto Rico, which holds a caucus on June 5.
Appalachian states, including West Virginia and Kentucky, had been loyal to Clinton, who won there by big margins over then-senator Barack Obama in 2008. Her husband also carried them in his 1992 and 1996 campaigns, and she’s been placing increased emphasis on his role in a possible Hillary Clinton administration, betting that he remains a popular figure in the region.
“I’ve already told my husband that, if I’m so fortunate to be president and he will be the first gentleman, I’ll expect him to go to work,” she told the Kentucky diners Monday.
On Sunday, she said the former president would be “in charge of economic revitalization,” particularly in hard-hit areas like Appalachian coal country. She’s also touting her plan for coal miners, including investments to create new jobs in infrastructure and repurposing mines and protecting miners’ health insurance and retirement programs.
Clinton reaches out to Trump's angry Appalachian voters
While the outcome of the Kentucky primary won’t matter much in the overall delegate battle between Clinton and Sanders (Democrats award delegates proportionally), it could highlight the challenges ahead for Clinton in a potential matchup with Trump. In exit polls of West Virginia, a third of those who voted in the Democratic contest said they planned to back Trump in November.
Part of Clinton's challenge may stem from comments she made at a town hall meeting in Ohio, when the Democratic front-runner said she would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." She would later apologize.
Meantime, Clinton now rarely mentions Sanders in her stump speeches, making clear that her chief target is Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, whom she’s portraying as a “loose cannon.” Separately, the main super PAC supporting her, Priorities USA, is planning to begin $6 million in anti-Trump ads starting on Wednesday.
Other high-profile Democrats have also stepped in to do battle with Trump.
After a commencement address on Saturday at Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren called Trump “a truly dangerous man.” Warren has also engaged in heated Twitter exchanges with Trump. On Sunday, President Obama, who’s largely stayed on the sidelines until a nominee is official, waded into the race during a commencement speech at Rutgers University.
“In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue,” he said, in an apparent reference to Trump. “That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you are talking about.’”