Super Tuesday was the biggest voting day of the primary season so far. Now, the campaigns that survived are looking forward. Although Senator Bernie Sanders won in Vermont and three other states, he still remains far behind Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the total number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination for president. Two of his top advisors discussed the campaign’s strategy for making up what seems to be an insurmountable deficit.
Following the Super Tuesday primaries, Clinton has 1,034 delegates while Sanders has 408.
The difference may seem vast, but the candidate took time to reassure his supporters during victory rally in Essex Junction Tuesday. “Tonight you’re going to see a lot of election results come in. And let me remind you this is not a general election. It’s not winner take all. If you get 52 percent, you get 48 percent, you roughly end up with the same amount of delegates in a state. By the end of tonight we are going to win many hundreds of delegates. At the end of tonight 15 states will have voted. Thirty-five states remain. We are going to take our fight for economic justice, for social justice, for environmental sanity, for a world of peace to every one of those states.”
On Wednesday morning, Sanders’ Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver and Senior Strategist Tad Devine emphasized the gap can be closed and the nomination won. Devine says Tuesday’s results reflect their strategic targeting of key states. “We did not target 11 states yesterday because we understand that we have a long road ahead of us that we’re going to have to take if we want to win the nomination of the Democratic Party. And in order to win that nomination we’re going to have to make very deliberate and strategic choices about the allocation of our resources.”
Devine called Super Tuesday the single best day yet for Clinton. But he says if you analyze the demographics of upcoming states, it does not look as good for the former Secretary of State. He discounts an incessant emphasis on delegate counts, arguing it does not take into account the dynamics of a modern presidential campaign. “If Hillary Clinton does not consistently win in the weeks and months ahead in big states and in small, questions will arise around her candidacy and her ability to coalesce a nominating majority of delegates will be, I think, substantially inhibited.”
Weaver points out that the campaign is raising substantial amounts of money. “We raised over $40 million last month in small donations online, out-raising Secretary Clinton by her own campaign’s admission. You know our ability to raise money in small donations from people across the country is really a bedrock of this campaign. We’re very gratified that people stood with us even after the disappointment in South Carolina and provided us the resources that we’re going to need to go into the industrial Midwest and beyond. When this campaign started Secretary Clinton’s campaign said that they had a super-PAC in order to fight Republicans. They’ve now engaged those super-PACs against us. The more money they spend against us the more our people step up and support us.”
Sanders won in his home of Vermont, plus Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma. Clinton strongly won the Southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. She defeated Sanders in Massachusetts by one percentage point. Primaries are scheduled in Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Maine this weekend. Michigan and Mississippi poll their voters next Tuesday.
