Hilary Rodham Clinton has made history by becoming the first woman to win a presidential ticket of a major political party in the United States. She accomplished this feat on Monday nearly eight years to the day after she conceded her first White House campaign to Barack Obama.
The former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday with a decisive weekend victory in Puerto Rico and a burst of last-minute support from super delegates. Those are party officials and officeholders, many of them eager to wrap up the primary amid preference polls showing her in a tightening race with presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Clinton has 1,812 pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses. She also has the support of 571 super delegates, according to an Associated Press count.
The AP surveyed all 714 super delegates repeatedly in the past seven months, and only 95 remain publicly uncommitted.
While super delegates can change their minds, those counted in Clinton’s tally have unequivocally told the AP they will support her at the party’s summer convention. Since the start of the AP’s survey in late 2015, no super delegates have switched from supporting Clinton to backing Bernie Sanders.
“We really need to bring a close to this primary process and get on to defeating Donald Trump,” said Nancy Worley, a super delegate who chairs Alabama’s Democratic Party and provided one of the last endorsements to put Clinton over the top.
Clinton outpaced Sanders in winning new super delegate endorsements even after his string of primary and caucus wins in May. Following the results in Puerto Rico, it is no longer possible for Sanders to reach the 2,383 needed to win the nomination based on the remaining available pledged delegates and uncommitted super delegates.
Indeed, Clinton’s victory is broadly decisive. She leads Sanders by more than 3 million cast votes, by 291 pledged delegates and by 523 super delegates. She won 29 caucuses and primaries to his 21 victories.
That’s a far bigger margin than Obama had in 2008, when he led Clinton by 131 pledged delegates and 105 super delegates at the point he clinched the nomination.
Clinton now moves on to face Trump, whose ascent to the top of the Republican Party few expected. The brash real estate mogul and reality TV star has long since turned his attention from primary foes to Clinton, debuting a nickname — “Crooked Hillary” — and arguing she belongs in jail for her email setup.
After a long primary campaign, Clinton said this past weekend in California she was ready to accept his challenge. “We’re judged by our words and our deeds, not our race, not our ethnicity, not our religion,” she said Saturday in Oxnard, California. “So it is time to judge Donald Trump by his words and his deeds. And I believe that his words and his deeds disqualify him from being president of the United States.”
