Bernie Sanders supporters are celebrating his victories Saturday in the Democratic caucuses in Washington state, Alaska and Hawaii. And Sanders did carry those caucuses by impressive margins.
Sanders’s candidacy has had the beneficial effect of helping push Hillary Clinton to the left on issues such as huge and growing income inequality, regulating the financial industry and big corporations, and fair trade. However these latest results are unlikely to do him any good in his race against Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president.
The problem for Sanders is that he almost always does well in states (like the three he won Saturday) that hold caucuses and have small African-American populations. In other (usually bigger) states that hold primaries and have a larger percentage of minority voters, Clinton does well. So far that pattern hasn’t changed, and it’s unlikely to do so before the Democratic convention. Combine that with her support among unelected “super delegates” and the safe money is still on Clinton getting the nomination by a fairly comfortable margin.
In the category of “interesting but relatively meaningless,” Sanders also scored a big victory in the primary for American Democrats living in 170 countries outside the USA. (There are enough of them to have their own delegation to the Democratic convention in July.)
You can see a breakdown of the results by countries with Democratic committees. Democrats living in the UK supported Sanders over Clinton by 2,874 to 1,726. Those living in Israel supported him by 249 to 160. Sanders also swept the United Arab Emirates (541 to 334) and Afghanistan (5 to 2).
The only countries where Clinton beat Sanders are the Dominican Republic, Nigeria and Singapore.
