Sanders still has plenty of chance to win the nomination. March 15th was the last if the states Clinton was guaranteed to win. It wasn't until June in 2008 that Obama won. We still have three months before we can say that Sanders literally has no chance.
I mean, sure, it wasn't until June that Hillary dropped out, but Obama was considered to have won well before that. She just stuck around because why not. I expect Bernie to do the same.
And here's Bernie's situation in a nutshell. He lost the South by 50 points in multiple states. That's really
really bad. Worse than expected. You can see on 538's
delegate tracker just how badly he underperformed. He needs to make up not just losing the South, but the degree to which he lost it. He's losing by 300 pledged delegates, sure, but he's behind his benchmarks by
140. That number is a lot, and it's way harder to make up. It means he doesn't just need to win states, he needs to beat the demographics. And he hasn't been doing that for the most part. His strongholds are the pacific northwest, the northern bit of the Midwest, Colorado, and rural states. Hillary's got the South and Upper South. They're splitting the Rust Belt, though Pennsylvania still is due to have it's say. The Southwest is looking not great for Bernie because Hillary won Mexicans by 2:1 in Texas, and they make up some good portions of the vote down there. Again, because Bernie's margins with minorities are worse than expected, he could be due to
underperform again. Which is bad.
But wait, what about the Northeast? Reliable bastion of the liberal elite and fairly white to boot. He's already taken three of the states and barely lost the fourth. Sounds like good Bernie territory, right? Wrong.
Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire are not demographically similar to Maryland, New York, and Connecticut even if they all vote blue (except New Hampshire but it's got the whole first in the nation thing messing with it). The difference? The first three states are
rural. Bernie wins places that don't have people. But why was Massachusetts so close? It still has dicks for minorities, so where did Hillary make it up? With money. Not ad buys, but by people with money. Democrats who aren't poor aren't likely to vote Bernie. And in Massachusetts, the massive youth vote (Boston is basically a giant college town) couldn't beat out the fact that Massachusetts has a median income of 65k and those people either don't buy what Bernie's selling, or they don't want to pay for it. Which of those factors goes down in Rhode Island or Delaware? Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling big Hillary wins here (though she will take some more). But look at the tracker. The Northeast is not a Bernie stronghold. It was never a Bernie stronghold. The expectation was that they'd split it and it would be very contested. And if Bernie couldn't take Massachusetts by a comfortable margin when he's got such a strong youth vote to rely on, well, that doesn't bode well for elsewhere.
And that's Bernie's problem. He's got some naturally favorable territory ahead, but not in the places that matter.
