I’ve seen some reports that suggest an 8-6 split, but McClatchy says that Sanders and Clinton will evenly split Wyoming’s 14 pledged delegates.
Officials say the Wyoming Democratic caucuses have resulted in an even split of the state’s 14 available delegates between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
Sanders won 56 percent of the votes cast Saturday in the 23 county caucuses while 44 percent went to Clinton.
Wyoming has a total of 18 delegates who will cast votes for presidential candidates at the Democratic National Convention in July.
Two are party leaders and two are national committee members who are allowed to vote independently for the candidate for their choice.
I don’t know who the party leaders and national committee members are ultimately going to vote for at the convention, but I guess the odds are that more of them will support Clinton than Sanders. So, I’d put money on Clinton emerging from her loss in Wyoming yesterday with more delegates than Sanders out of the state.
But even if it comes out the other way, Sanders will only net two or four delegates out of a contest he won by twelve points.
It’s tough to see Sanders win strong victories in Wisconsin and Wyoming and discover that he’s getting further away rather than closer to winning the nomination. You can argue about whether this is fair or not, but the rules haven’t been changed in the middle of the game. Candidates don’t set out to win some abstract and idealized version of the process. They set out to win a contest with defined challenges and obstacles, and their strategies should match those requirements. If there are no delegates to be netted out of Wyoming, it’s probably not worth spending any time, money or effort on it, especially if the polls show you’re going to win it easily without any effort.
This contest was won or lost (depending on your perspective) in the South. Beyond that, it was won far earlier when Clinton won enough party support to dissuade others from challenging her and to get most of the party officials in her corner. The reason this was so easy to accomplish is that Clinton maintained sky-high approval ratings throughout Obama’s second term, including better than 80% support from self-described progressive Democrats.
That support among progressives is what made me realize as far back as 2014 that it would be fruitless to try to take her on from the left. And that’s when I knew that she’d be the nominee.
Of course, I wouldn’t call Sanders’ challenge fruitless at all if we’re talking broadly about positive influences and outcomes. But he won’t win, and I don’t think he could have won in an environment where most progressives, particularly in the South, have a very positive view of Hillary.
White progressives struggle to accept these facts because Clinton is not popular in white liberal circles. But that doesn’t get you very far, as white progressive champions always fall short unless they can unite the entire progressive community and still appeal to the middle.
Obama could do that. But there aren’t many Obamas out there.
