We begin today’s roundup with Philip Elliot at the AP, who analyzes a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump general election in the wake of the AP’s tally of pledged and super delegates and its declaration of Hillary Clinton as the presumptive nominee (and first woman ever to be nominated for president by a major party):
The Clinton campaign is perhaps the most advanced ever, with teams of data scientists, message analysts, new media mavens and traditional get-out-the-vote engineers packed into two stories of a Brooklyn headquarters and around the country. The campaign is building on President Barack Obama’s two technically groundbreaking campaign techniques, and Clinton has invested millions in a political machine that, if it works, could make history and elect the nation’s first female President. [...]
She is now the de facto nominee for the Democratic Party. The base of her party is growing more quickly than Republicans’ core supporters. She has the better campaign machinery. She has the donor network that Trump never will. Her team is remarkably unified, while Trump’s inner-circle feuds publicly in the New York tabloids and on cable shows. And, as Clinton’s team bets, Trump’s nomination will be sufficiently horrifying to unify Democrats who didn’t vote for her in the primary. They don’t have to like Clinton. They just need to defeat Trump.
The Clinton campaign, for its part, sidestepped the AP report and focused on today’s primaries. Here is the Sanders campaign statement on the AP report.
Meanwhile, here’s CNN’s Stephen Collinson on the state of the contest:
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are blitzing California on an intense final day of campaigning in the 2016 Democratic primary. The former secretary of state on Tuesday is expected to become the first female presumptive nominee of a major party -- a feat that will likely raise pressure on Sanders to drop his bid quickly. The Vermont senator has been loathe to discuss exiting the race -- even raising the potential over the weekend of a contested convention -- but struck a more subdued note Monday. [...]
The Clinton-Sanders battle is playing out far longer than most would have predicted at the beginning of the campaign season. With his critique of economic inequality, Sanders, a 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist, has become the unlikely hero of the young, progressive Democratic base. Still, Clinton is on the verge of the nomination after she dominated contests in the South and won large states including New York and Pennsylvania.
