Sen. Bernie Sanders handily defeated Hillary Clinton in the Washington state and Alaska caucuses Saturday, infusing his underdog campaign with critical momentum and bolstering his argument that the race for the Democratic nomination is not a foregone conclusion.
Sanders found a welcome tableau in the largely white and liberal electorates of the Pacific Northwest, where just days after routing Clinton in Idaho he repeated the feat in Washington. With a handful of precincts still reporting, he was leading Clinton by more than 40 percentage points. He performed even better in Alaska, winning 82 percent of the vote.
Washington, with 101 delegates in play, was a vital state for Sanders, whose prospects of capturing the nomination dimmed after double-digit losses to Clinton across the South and weak showings in delegate-rich Ohio, Florida and North Carolina this month.
At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, late Saturday afternoon, Sanders assured more than 8,000 supporters that his victories had cleared a viable path to the nomination. “We knew from Day 1 that politically we were going to have a hard time in the Deep South,” Sanders said. “But we knew things were going to improve when we headed west.”
The victories in Washington and Alaska, which awarded 16 delegates Saturday, slightly narrow the gulf with Clinton in the quest for the 2,382 delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. As of Saturday evening, Clinton had roughly 280 more so-called pledged delegates, who are awarded based on voting, and 440 more superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials — than Sanders.
But the wins are likely to bestow on the Sanders campaign a surge of online donations with which to buy advertising in the expensive media markets of New York and Pennsylvania, which hold primaries next month.
Hawaii Democrats also voted Saturday, awarding 25 delegates through a “presidential preference poll,” a hybrid event in which voters showed up at a scheduled meeting, like a caucus, but voted by secret ballot, like a primary.
Republicans did not hold any contests Saturday.