Beyond attracting some readers and viewers on a quiet news night, what real purpose was served by declaring Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee on the eve of Tuesday’s primaries? PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN ALCORN / AFP / GETTY

Ever since late April, when Hillary Clinton won the New York Democratic primary and followed up by carrying four of the five states in the so-called Acela primary, it has been clear that she would almost certainly be her party’s candidate in November.

Today, as the primary process comes to a climax with votes in six states, including California, little has changed. Clinton looks set to wrap up the Democratic nomination, fair and square. She has won twenty-nine of the fifty primaries and caucuses that have been held in the U.S. and its overseas territories, such as Puerto Rico, which she carried easily, on Sunday. She’s leading the popular vote by about three million. (Even if you adjust the numbers for the fact that Sanders won a lot of caucus states, where the final vote tallies weren’t announced, Clinton is well ahead.) In the tally of elected or pledged delegates, which is surely the most important factor, she is leading Sanders by nearly three hundred. (According to the Times, the tally is eighteen hundred and twelve for Clinton, fifteen hundred and twenty-one for Sanders.) And she has a big lead among the more than seven hundred superdelegates.

Any way you look at it, Clinton is on the verge of a win—one that she has earned. Barring a series of huge victories for Sanders today, she will have every right to claim late tonight or tomorrow that she’s the presumptive nominee. Sanders will be left with the choice of accepting that he has lost and formally ending his campaign, or taking his case to the superdelegates, whose very existence he has been bemoaning for months (with good cause—nobody elected them; they were appointed by the Party). Over the weekend, Sanders indicated that, whatever happened, he would fight on to the Convention, a statement that evoked cries of outrage from Clinton supporters. On Monday, the Vermont senator’s language was more equivocal. “You’re asking me to speculate,” he told reporters who asked about his intentions. “Let me just talk to you after the primary here in California, where we hope to win. Let’s assess where we are after tomorrow.”

The media wasn’t willing to wait. At 8:20 P.M. Eastern, the Associated Press reported, via Twitter, “HILLARY CLINTON CLINCHES DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION.” A one-paragraph story on the A.P.’s Web site said, “An Associated Press count of pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses and a survey of party insiders known as superdelegates shows Clinton with the overall support of the required 2,383 delegates. Now the presumptive nominee, she will formally accept her party’s nomination in July at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.”

There followed a network stampede. Shortly before nine o’clock, NBC News declared Clinton the “presumptive nominee.” It, too, cited a survey of superdelegates that it had carried out. In addition to the eighteen hundred and twelve pledged delegates that Clinton had in her column, the network said that she now had commitments from five hundred and seventy-two superdelegates. If you add these two numbers together, you get twenty-three hundred and eighty-four, which is one more than she needs for a majority. By midnight, CNN, citing its own count, and ABC News, citing the A.P., had also declared Clinton the presumed nominee.

Was all of this warranted? If you go by the media’s logic, which, roughly stated, is “We just report the math,” it can be justified. Evidently, a hundred or so superdelegates who had previously not publicly stated their affiliation have now confirmed that they are backing Clinton. That’s not very surprising—most of them are Party loyalists, after all. Arithmetically, however, it was just enough to put the former Secretary of State over the top.

Another possible defense of the media, although not one that the A.P. and the networks would like very much, is that none of last night’s calls mattered much. The word “presumptive” means “based on probability or reason.” Its synonyms include “conjectural” and “likely.” The phrase “presumptive nominee” clearly indicates something provisional. Attaching it to Clinton now is merely confirming what we already knew: absent something very shocking, she will be the Democratic candidate.

But in political terms, as the final sentence of the A.P.’s story indicated, the phrase “presumptive nominee” implies something more than “likely candidate.” It suggests that the race is already over, and that Clinton has already won. All she has to do is turn up in Philly and collect the prize.

That isn’t quite true. Sanders is down, but he isn’t completely out. To have any prospect of shaking up the race, he would have to overtake Clinton in the tally of pledged delegates and then make the case that it would be antidemocratic to deny him the nomination. This means he would have to win a series of landslides in the remaining contests, where eight hundred and fifty-one delegates remain to be divided. To catch Clinton, Sanders would have to pick up at least five hundred and seventy-one of them—more than two-thirds.

With Clinton expected to win New Jersey and New Mexico, and with the polls indicating that California is a close race, the probability of this happening is very small. Some commentators would say that it’s negligible. But it isn’t zero. And it will be the primary voters in California, New Jersey, and other states who decide Sanders’s fate, not the media.

It was therefore neither surprising nor unreasonable when the Sanders campaign issued a statement on Monday night criticizing the media for “a rush to judgment.” The statement pointed out that superdelegates won’t vote until the Convention, and that they could change their minds between now and then: “Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump.” That is a forlorn hope, and, as Sanders’s earlier statement on Monday indicated, it isn’t entirely clear that he will fight all the way to the Convention. His next move will follow from an assessment of the situation after all the votes are in.

The Clinton campaign, perhaps worried that the declarations from the news organizations would suppress turnout in today's primaries, also reacted coolly. “We are on the brink of a historic moment, but we still have work to do. Let’s keep fighting for every vote,” Clinton tweeted. And Bill Clinton told reporters, “We can't say the primary is over. Let people vote. Let them have their say.”

Nevertheless, the decision by some (though not all) of the media to call the race on the eve of the last big set of primaries seems likely to inflame the divisions in the Party. As Jeff Stein commented at Vox, “By using the superdelegates to declare the race over, these news outlets risk giving greater circulation to the false idea that these party elites have somehow stolen the nomination from Sanders.”

The organizations in question will doubtless reply that their job is to report the news, and that they had some news to impart. But the timing of their calls was questionable. Beyond attracting some readers and viewers on a quiet news night, what real purpose did it serve? If they had waited twenty-four hours, they could have twinned the results of today’s primaries with the near-final tally of elected delegates and the findings from their new surveys of the superdelegates. At that point, assuming things go as most people expect, the news organizations would have been in a stronger position to declare the race over. And they wouldn’t have exposed themselves to the charge that they had called the race prematurely.