Voters from five states went to the polls on Tuesday, April 26, to choose a presidential nominee. This post was updated throughout the day with news, analysis, exit polls and results for the Democratic contests. For live updates of the Republican races, follow this link.



Update (April 27, 6:30 a.m. PT): Clinton extends lead

Pledged delegates won on Tuesday, April 26

Connecticut: Hillary Clinton 27, Bernie Sanders 25

Delaware: Hillary Clinton 12, Bernie Sander 9

Maryland: Hillary Clinton 59, Bernie Sanders 32

Pennsylvania: Hillary Clinton 95, Bernie Sanders 67

Rhode Island: Bernie Sanders 13, Hillary Clinton 11

According to the New York Times, Clinton now has 1,650 delegates, Sanders 1,348 (not including superdelegates). 2,383 delegates are needed to win the nomination.

Update (April 26, 7:45 p.m. PT): Big night for Clinton

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has won the Connecticut primary, the Associated Press reports. With 84 percent of precincts reporting, she won 50.3 percent of the vote to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' 47.9 percent.

Clinton had a big night, winning four of five contests. As a result, the window of opportunity has all but slammed shut on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's underdog bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton plans to stay focused, primary by primary, to the very end. Next week is the Indiana primary. But even though Sanders insists he's continuing on, Clinton is also starting to look ahead to the general election -- and Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

"Donald Trump says wages are too high in America and he doesn't support raising the minimum wage," she said Monday. "I have said, come out of those towers named for yourself and actually come out and talk and listen to people. At some point, if you want to be president of the United States, you've got to get familiar with the United States."

Update (April 26, 6:20 p.m. PT): Sanders wins Rhode Island

Bernie Sanders has won the Rhode Island primary, the Associated Press reports. With 55 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders has 56.3 percent of the vote, Hillary Clinton 42 percent.

Final results will be posted when they're available. The Connecticut primary is still too close to call.

Update (April 26, 6:10 p.m. PT): Clinton wins Pennsylvania

Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary, the Associated Press reports.

Bernie Sanders leads in Rhode Island and Connecticut but the races are still too close to call.

Update (April 26, 5:50 p.m. PT): Clinton wins Delaware

Hillary Clinton has won the Delaware primary, the Associated Press reports. With nearly 70 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton has 59 percent of the vote and Bernie Sanders has 39.4 percent.

With 26 percent of precincts reporting in Rhode Island, Bernie Sanders leads with 57 percent of the vote to Clinton's 41 percent.

Update (April 26, 5:06 p.m. PT): Clinton wins Maryland

Hillary Clinton has won the Maryland Democratic primary, multiple news sources project. Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island are too close to call at this time. More projections and details to come.

Update (April 26, 3:50 p.m. PT): Sanders on large turnouts

Many Hillary Clinton supporters wonder why Bernie Sanders doesn't gracefully bow out of the race already. This week, the Vermont senator made plain why he's staying in all the way to the national convention.

"We have got to involve people," he told CNN. "And it's not easy, because so many people have given up on the political process, including a whole lot of low-income people. Our job is to bring people into the political process."

Sanders went on to say that his goal was to "revitalize American democracy."

"What is good for America, what is good for the Democratic party, is to see a whole lot of people debating the real issues impacting our country," he said. "That's how you have a large voter turnout. And when you have a large voter turnout, Democrats and progressives win, and Republicans will lose."

He might be right about that, but the fact is, a lot of Sanders' supporters have very vocally said it's "Bernie or bust," that they have no plans to vote for Clinton in November if she's the Democratic nominee. Which leaves nervous Clinton backers and Democratic Party officials wondering if Sanders would be willing to play a significant role in a general-election campaign headed by his primaries rival. His hard-hitting rhetoric of recent weeks, combined with the fact that he's spent most of his long political career not as a Democrat but as a social-democratic independent, suggests to many that he wouldn't.

Update (April 26, 2:40 p.m. PT): Exit polls

Early exit polls from the five states voting today suggest Hillary Clinton will have reason to celebrate in the hours ahead, though there is possible good news for Bernie Sanders as well. Here's a representative sampling of the surveys:

32 percent of Maryland Democratic voters say Wall Street "helps" the economy, while 57 percent say it "hurts." This would appear to be good news for Sanders. But 46 percent of Maryland's Democratic voters are African-Americans. Black voters have strongly supported Clinton throughout the primary season.

31 percent of Maryland Democrats say "experience" is the most important quality for the next president to have. 30 percent says it's that the next president "cares about me."

26 percent of Pennsylvania Democratic voters today identify as "very liberal." 29 percent call themselves "moderate." Only 10 percent of the state's Democratic voters are under 30, which has been Sanders' most dedicated group of supporters.

48 percent of Connecticut Democratic voters say the next president should continue President Obama's policies. Clinton has closely aligned herself with Obama's agenda.

Updated (April 26, 1:40 p.m. PT): Sanders an independent again?

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is quite a ways behind Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates and is running out of primaries. It's increasingly looking like he won't be able to stop the former secretary of state from landing the Democratic presidential nomination. As a result, the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party insiders are beginning to pressure him to get in line and vocally support and campaign for Clinton in the fall. Sanders, meanwhile, says he's still focused on winning the nomination himself.

If Sanders comes up short in the primaries, how can he keep his agenda at the forefront of the national debate? How can he best keep his movement going? Republican front-runner Donald Trump has a suggestion:

Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, and run as an Independent! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2016

Update (April 26, 12:45 p.m. PT): The Big Dog keeps barking

Let's back up briefly: Campaigning for his wife across multiple states last week, Bill Clinton made a strong case against the economic policies advocated by the Republican Party.

"The reason that there's so much anxiety, intensity, anger, blame in this election is that 80 percent of the American people have not gotten a pay raise since the [financial] crash eight years ago, after inflation," the former president said at a rally in Harrisburg, Penn.

Republican obstructionism is to blame for this state of affairs, he made plain. But as has often been the case during this election cycle, Bill Clinton didn't know when to stop. He also added that millennials were to blame, too.

"If all the young people who claim to be disillusioned now had voted in 2010, we wouldn't have lost the Congress, and we'd probably have our incomes back," he said.

That line of reasoning is a bit of a stretch -- some of today's disillusioned young people weren't old enough to vote in 2010, for starters. Such comments certainly will not make it easier for Hillary Clinton to win over the 20-somethings who have flocked to Bernie Sanders' campaign if she's the Democratic nominee.

Update (April 26, 11:15 a.m. PT): Clinton hit with KKK smear

"Politics ain't beanbag," President Barack Obama once said. No, it certainly isn't. It's dirty pool.

Presidential politics in particular inevitably becomes an ugly game, because there's so much at stake. The latest appears to be a California Ku Klux Klan leader trying to wreck Hillary Clinton's reputation by claiming that his racist group is raising money for and endorsing her.

James King of the deep-web news site Vocativ reported Monday that KKK "Grand Dragon" Will Quigg is all-in for Clinton. In the report, Quigg claims he has raised $20,000 for her campaign.

"She is friends with the Klan," Quigg reportedly said in an interview. "A lot of people don't realize that. She's friends with Senator Byrd. He's been an Exulted Cyclops in the Klan. He's been King Kleagle." (Sen. Robert Byrd, the Senate majority leader for a time in the 1990s, died in 2010.)

This news actually isn't new. The Houston Chronicle, Britain's The Telegraph and other news sites reported in March that Quigg had switched his support from Donald Trump to Clinton, shortly after Trump took a PR hit for hesitating to disavow the backing of prominent white supremacist David Duke. "We want Hillary Clinton to win," Quigg told The Telegraph. "She is telling everybody one thing, but she has a hidden agenda."

The Clinton campaign scoffs at Quigg's gambit, insisting it wants nothing to do with Quigg or his racist group.

Update (April 26, 10:15 a.m. PT): Sanders' daunting path ahead

Bernie Sanders has admitted that his path to the Democratic presidential nomination at this point is "narrow." He's underselling it.

He would need to win 59 percent of all remaining pledged delegates -- and then, with that momentum as his calling card, pry a large number of superdelegates from Hillary Clinton's camp.

And if the final preference polls for Tuesday's contests are accurate, that math is about to get quite a bit more daunting. Clinton's expected to win at least four of the five states on offer, a result that would extend her lead to some 300 pledged delegates. That expectation is due, in part, to the fact that four of the five states voting Tuesday -- Rhode Island is the exception -- are closed primaries, meaning independents don't get a say. This is a big blow to Sanders. According to a CNN analysis last month, exit polls from 15 states found that about 40 percent of Sanders' votes came not from Democrats but from independents.

As a result, The Associated Press is betting Clinton will have a lot to crow about today. The news service writes:

"The most likely scenario: big [delegate] hauls in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and modest gains in Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. At that point, she would need to win just 35 percent or so of the remaining delegates from primaries and caucuses to maintain her lead in pledged delegates. In actuality, she's been winning 55 percent so far."

Sanders, of course, will trumpet any wins he gets Tuesday. But he really needs the big prizes: Pennsylvania and Maryland. And, because of the proportional distribution of delegates, he needs to win them by a lot.

April 26 primaries preview (April 26, 6 a.m. PT): Clinton seeks momentum

"If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere."

That's an iconic lyric from the classic Frank Sinatra song, "New York, New York," and it just might apply to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Illinoisan-turned-Arkansan-turned-First Lady, like Robert Kennedy 35 years before her, swooped into New York when the lure of electoral politics became irresistible. Critics called her a carpetbagger in 2000 -- the same label RFK's critics pinned to him -- but she prevailed and became a popular senator in the Empire State. Last week, she proved once again that she had earned a place in New Yorkers' hearts, winning the state's Democratic presidential primary when she desperately needed a win. She has definitely made it there.

So will she make it in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island?

Those five states vote Tuesday, and a clean sweep would finally allow her to both relax and begin to pivot to the general election.

Her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, doesn't plan on letting Clinton do either of those things.

Clinton holds significant leads in the two largest states, Pennsylvania and Maryland. But Sanders appears to be within striking range in Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island -- and he's proven time and again that he closes strong.

Vice President Joe Biden gave Sanders a boost last week by saying he liked that the self-proclaimed democratic socialist is "thinking big." "I don't think any Democrat's ever won saying, 'We can't think that big -- we ought to really downsize here because it's not realistic,'" Biden said. "C'mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I'm not part of the party that says, 'Well, we can't do it.'"

Clinton, of course, has been saying exactly that, insisting that Sanders' plans for breaking up Wall Street banks and providing single-payer universal health care and free college education sound good but are unrealistic. She says, in essence, that she's a progressive in spirit but as president would be dedicated to getting the best deal she can from a potentially hostile Congress.

Sanders immediately embraced Biden's sentiments. "I think the vice president is exactly right," he declared at a rally in Pennsylvania.

This could be why Sanders does better than Clinton in some head-to-head polls against Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Working-class Democratic "populists" are drawn to aspects of Trump's economic message, but polls suggest Sanders as the nominee would prevent these voters -- the next generation of the famed "Reagan Democrats" -- from bleeding over to the GOP.

Robert Reich, the UC Berkeley professor who was labor secretary in President Bill Clinton's administration, insists "the populist left and right are on the same side" in this unusual election. He points out that both are opposed to crony capitalism, Wall Street bailouts and Wall Street tax loopholes, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and CEO tax deductions on million-dollar-plus pay. (Interestingly, Reich doesn't mention U.S. trade deals, a key issue for both Trump and Sanders.)

Could this argument win over unbound super-delegates at the national convention, leading them to abandon the pledged-delegate-leading Clinton for Sanders? That's almost certainly Sanders' only hope at this late date in the process, and his campaign strategists have said they will be making an "electability" case for him at the convention.

Such an approach is, of course, the opposite of what the Sanders campaign has been arguing for weeks, which is that the super-delegates -- elected officials and other party insiders -- should reflect the will of the people, not cold political calculation. But politics is about adapting to changing realities, and that's what the Sanders campaign is doing.

That said, the Vermont senator, though more than two-and-a-half-million votes in the hole, is not yet ready to concede that the majority of pledged delegates will end up belonging to Clinton. Which means he needs big upsets Tuesday in Pennsylvania and Maryland ... and smaller upsets in Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.

Clinton knows not to count him out. After winning in New York last week, she said the nomination was "in sight" -- and then quickly added that she's taking "nothing for granted."

-- Douglas Perry