More than five months after Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama began their unexpectedly epic grudge match for the Democratic presidential nomination in Iowa, the final two primaries are slated to take place in South Dakota and Montana on Tuesday (June 3). But, as has been the case ever since Obama shocked Clinton in January — and as comments from both Bill Clinton and a member of Hillary’s staff have led many to believe the end of her campaign may be very near — don’t expect the fight to end when the polls close.
The final two elections come after a weekend of furious activity that included answering the biggest outstanding question of the primary season — what to do with the disallowed delegates from Michigan and Florida — and the tallying of another big win for Clinton, in Puerto Rico, in an effort that many pundits continue to feel is a fruitless one.
On Saturday, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations — whose votes were disallowed because the states violated party rules and moved up their primaries. The committee voted to reinstate all of the two states’ delegates to the national convention in Denver in August, though each state was penalized by being given only a half vote.
The decision gave Clinton 105 pledged delegates from Florida and 69 from Michigan, for a total of 87 votes, while Obama got 67 from Florida and 59 from Michigan, for a total of 63 votes. Even with the additional delegates, Obama leads Clinton by the equivalent of 178 delegates, according to CNN. If each disputed delegate had received a full vote, Obama would still have led Clinton.
Clinton, who has long vowed to stay in the race until every state has voted, breezed into the wind-down of the bare-knuckle primary season with an impressive win in Puerto Rico on Sunday. She beat Obama by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, 68 percent to 32 percent, taking the lion’s share of the U.S. territory’s 55 delegates. (Citizens of Puerto Rico cannot vote in the general election, which may explain why turnout was low.) Though the margin on the island was wide, and Clinton won in nearly every major demographic group — including men and women, as well as her traditional older voting base and Obama’s typically reliable younger voting bloc — it did little to close the gap with Obama.
With Clinton polling well ahead of him in the week leading up to the Puerto Rico primary, Obama quickly conceded the win to his rival, but treated the victory as another stop toward his presumed coronation as the Democratic candidate. Campaigning in South Dakota on Sunday, he congratulated Clinton and said she was going to be a “great asset when we go into November to make sure that we defeat the Republicans,” according to CNN.
Amid the flurry of additional headlines on Monday was a surprising comment from former President Bill Clinton, who told an audience in South Dakota that his time stumping for his wife might be winding down. “This may be the last day I’m ever involved in a campaign of this kind,” he said, according to CNN, seemingly conceding that his wife’s historic bid for the presidency was coming to an end. In a sign that Hillary Clinton may be gearing up for a major announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Monday that she is planning to give her post-primary speech at Baruch College in her home state of New York Tuesday night, rather than in either South Dakota or Montana. One of her top aides said, “New York is where she started, New York is where she ends,” according to the paper.
Also Monday, a group composed of several of the 17 uncommitted Senate superdelegates held a closed-door meeting to discuss their plans for when the polls close on Tuesday, with most of them planning to back Obama, sources told the CNN.
The delegate total for Tuesday’s final two primaries is only 31, but Democrats hope that the official end of the primary season will allow them to finally reach a consensus on who will take on presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain in November. Though Obama is not expected to come out of Tuesday’s primaries with enough pledged delegates to reach the new magic number needed to clinch the nomination — now 2,118 following the addition of the Michigan and Florida votes — speculation is that enough superdelegates will flock his way later this week to make him the presumptive nominee.
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