Joseph Gerth

Opinion Columnist | Louisville Courier Journal

Bowling Green, Ky. Bernie Sanders spent the weekend in Western Kentucky trying to convince voters that he can win the Democratic primary for president and perhaps, more importantly, that he is best positioned to beat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in the November election.

"Think very hard about which candidate and which campaign is most likely to beat Donald Trump," said Sanders, a U.S. Senator from Vermont, to a crowd Saturday night in Bowling Green. "We do very well with Democrats but we also do very well with independents and the Democratic leadership may not know it yet but independents are the fastest growing segment of the American political system."

While polling suggests that Sanders may be best suited to beat Trump in the fall, his argument that he can actually overtake Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination may be more difficult to believe.

With only eight state primaries to go and 1,053 delegates outstanding, Clinton leads Sanders by 767 delegates. For Sanders to overtake her at the Democratic National Convention in July, Sanders would have to win a huge percentage of remaining delegates and convince a huge number of superdelegates to bolt from Clinton.

The Associated Press views that scenario so unlikely that it is no longer covering Sanders on the campaign trail.

But nevertheless, Sanders presses on.

Saturday night, he made stops at a small gathering in Elizabethtown before heading to a rally with some 2,500 people in Bowling Green urged his supporters not to give up hope. Sunday, he spoke to a crowd the campaign estimated at 1,900 in Paducah.

"We began this campaign a little bit over a year ago and when we began, this campaign was considered to be a fringe campaign. Nobody believed that we would be in Kentucky in early May fighting for the Democratic nomination," he said. "Nobody believed that at this point in the campaign we would have won 19 state primaries and caucuses. Nobody would have believed that we would receive over 9 million votes at this point in the campaign."

"And very few people would have believed that this coming Tuesday, we're going to win a great victory right here in Kentucky," he said.

It's difficult to tell who actually leads in the race in Kentucky but its clear that Sanders has some momentum. Last June, a survey by Public Policy Polling found that Clinton led Sanders 56-12. But when the company tested the state in March, Sanders had narrowed the gap to 43-38.

On Tuesday, 55 delegates will be up for grabs here. The state also has five superdelegates, two of whom have pledged to support Clinton. Two others haven't announced their decisions and the party still has to appoint a vice chairman, who would be the final superdelegate.

And that was before Clinton made a gaffe and said her administration would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." That error likely has harmed her chances in Eastern Kentucky, even though Sander's views on coal are not that different from Clinton's, and even though Clinton has proposed spending $30 billion to rebuild the economy in Appalachia.

No public polling has been released since then.

At the event in Bowling Green, Sanders said his goal was to overtake her in earned delegates and then to convince a majority of superdelegates to switch allegiances. To catch overtake Clinton in earned delegates, Sanders would have to win about two-thirds of the remaining delegates, which is unlikely because Democratic rules require states award delegates based proportionally based on primary or caucus votes.

He is counting on enthusiasm while Clinton appears to be banking on the organization that delivered Kentucky to her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in 1992 and 1996, and propelled her to a 66-30 percent victory over Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary here.

"What our campaign has done is, I believe, we have created a level of energy and excitement not seen in this country for a very very long time.

On the stump Saturday, he continued his attacks on Wall Street and big businesses, accusing them of shafting the American worker and taxpayer for the sake of higher profits.

He criticized the Walton family, owner of Walmart, from Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas, for paying some workers wages that keep them on food stamps and Medicaid.

"We hear about people ripping off welfare. The major Welfare ripoff artist in the country is not some poor person, it is the wealthiest family in this country, the Walton family," he said.

He called for more controls on campaign giving saying that U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, who opposes campaign giving limits, of moving the nation away from a democracy to an oligarchy where the wealthy are in charge.

Sanders got a huge cheer in Bowling Green when he predicted that if he wins the presidency, McConnell will be ousted as senate majority leader. "I've got to tell the people of Kentucky this, Mitch McConnell will not be the majority leader."

