Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is projected to win Sunday’s Puerto Rico primary.
Puerto Rico offers 60 pledged delegates, and Clinton’s win will pad her lead over rival Bernie Sanders. With 22 percent of the vote tallied at 9:30 p.m., Clinton had secured about 31 delegates, plus 6 of the island’s superdelegates. That puts her in a position to possibly clinch the Democratic nomination early Tuesday evening, before polls are even closed in California.
Polls closed at 3 p.m. and after several hours of counting, Clinton had 64 percent of the vote to Sanders’s 35 percent. CNN’s delegate tracker had Clinton 29 delegates away from 2,383 needed to secure the nomination, with about 22 percent of votes from Puerto Rico tallied.
The results were slow to trickle in on Sunday, as officials counted ballots by hand and focused first on results tied to the island’s local primary, Kenneth McClintock, Puerto Rico’s former Democratic National committeeman, told The Associated Press.
Voters reportedly faced lines of more than two hours and Sanders supporters were up in arms over the cuts to the number of polling stations.The commonwealth initially had 1,510 polling locations. But it announced last month that the number of polling locations would be cut to 455 for the Sunday primary.
Robert Prats, president of the Democratic Party on the island, said the 455 locations are four times more than the number of polling locations open in the Republican primary in March. And the local party told MSNBC that the Sanders campaign had requested fewer stations.
Clinton and her allies have said the primary is already over, but Sanders is vowing to stay in the race through the Democratic convention this summer. Clinton appeared at a rally in California shortly after the race was called, but made no mention of the results.
The delegate math supports Clinton’s argument, as Sanders trails her by more than 200 pledged delegates and by about 500 superdelegates. Clinton won the Virgin Islands caucuses on Saturday.
On Tuesday, Sanders and Clinton will compete for 694 pledged delegates — 475 of them in California alone.
Sanders needs to win more than 65 percent of those pledged delegates across the six contests on Tuesday in order to be in a position to overtake Clinton in pledged delegates before the convention.
Even in that unlikely scenario, Sanders will still need to convince several hundred superdelegates to go back on their promises to Clinton.