21:10

A third candidate besides Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders could earn a delegate in West Virginia’s Democratic primary on Tuesday night, writes Guardian politics reporter Ben Jacobs:

Paul Ferrell, a lawyer who is running as a protest candidate against “the war on coal” could get the 15% of the vote needed to earn a delegate in West Virginia’s Third Congressional District. With 5% of precincts reporting, Ferrell was at 12%.

West Virginia has long kept up its Democratic registration even as the state has tilted Republican at the national level. The result was that in 2012, Keith Judd, a federal convict, got over 40% of the vote against Barack Obama. Even on Tuesday, a majority of Democratic voters said they would not support Clinton in a general election against Trump.

If Ferrell does break the 15% mark, it would be yet another obstacle in Sanders’s quixotic quest to wrest the Democratic nomination from Clinton and deprive him of an essential delegate in that fight.