Bernie Sanders won the Maine Democratic caucuses on Sunday, his fifth victory in a caucus state, following wins in Nebraska and Kansas on Saturday.

With 91% of results counted, the leftwing Vermont senator had 64.3% of the vote to Clinton’s 35.5%.

“With another double-digit victory, we have now won by wide margins in states from New England to the Rocky Mountains and from the midwest to the Great Plains,” said Sanders in a statement put out by his campaign while he faced Clinton in a debate in Flint, Michigan.

“This weekend alone we won in Maine, Kansas and Nebraska. The pundits might not like it but the people are making history. We now have the momentum to go all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.”

Democratic officials reported unexpectedly high turnout at caucus sites across Maine, especially in Portland, where the party was forced to adjust the process in order to expedite the line, according to the Portland Press Herald.

According to the paper, voters in line were allowed to fill out a paper ballot, in effect an absentee ballot used in primary voting, as opposed to participating in a traditional town meeting style caucus.

Meanwhile, facing an uphill battle in the Republican race for president, Marco Rubio scored a much-needed victory on Sunday in Puerto Rico’s primary, one day after his opponents called on the Florida senator to drop out of the race.

Rubio, the only Republican candidate to have campaigned in the US territory, secured more than 50% of the vote – meaning as winner he took all 23 delegates at stake. Donald Trump trailed at a distant second, while Texas senator Ted Cruz followed in third.

The result in Maine – Sanders’s eighth win of the 19 Democratic contests so far – hardly puts a dent in the dynamics of the Democratic race. Maine offers the party 30 delegates, just a fraction of those needed to amass the 2,383 delegates needed to win the presidential nomination.

Including superdelegates – members of Congress, governors and party officials who can support the candidate of their choice – Clinton has at least 1,129 while Sanders has at least 498.

Clinton and Sanders faced off on Sunday night in a debate in Flint, a city of 100,000 that is grappling with the long-term consequences of the poisoned water crisis. The candidates have circled each other this week in Michigan, where they have each campaigned hard ahead of Tuesday’s primary. Sanders drew a large crowd in Warren, Michigan, on Saturday while Clinton addressed state Democrats at a dinner.

Earlier in the week, she outlined her plan to raise wages and create more jobs during a visit to a manufacturing plant in Detroit while Sanders increased his attacks against her on trade, trying to tie the resulting manufacturing job losses to her support for certain international trade deals.

Sunday was the first time the candidates had debated since Super Tuesday, when Clinton extended her lead and solidified her position as the party’s frontrunner with a lead of more than 200 pledged delegates over the leftwing Vermont senator.

On what has been dubbed Super Saturday one day ago, Clinton claimed a crucial victory in Louisiana, while Sanders earned wins in Nebraska and Kansas.

In Michigan, Sanders is looking to blunt her momentum and prove that he still has a clear path to the Democratic nomination. His campaign has insisted that it will fare better in the coming weeks as the primary race pivots from the south, where Clinton has won by sweeping margins with help from the largely African American electorate there, and into the delegate-rich midwestern states.

Sanders has insisted he will remain in the race until the Democratic convention in July.

“I still think we have that path toward victory,” Sanders said on CNN on Sunday.

Rubio’s victory in Puerto Rico is only his second in the Republican contest thus far, after Minnesota on Super Tuesday. He has otherwise faced dismal results in 15 states’ primaries and caucuses over the past week.

He reacted to the news at a rally in Idaho Falls on Sunday evening, telling voters he had won 70% of the vote in an open primary where members of any party could vote for the candidate of their choosing.

“In an open primary, where anyone can vote, not just Republicans - Democrats and independents – I got over 70% of the vote,” Rubio said. “Not because I became less conservative, but because I took our conservative principles to people who are living the way I grew up.”

Rubio campaigned in Puerto Rico on Saturday evening, making a stop in San Juan for a stump speech entirely in Spanish before a crowd of roughly 500 people. His event was nonetheless overshadowed by news that he had been trounced in four states by Trump and Cruz.

Although the senator dismissed the poor results as a consequence of southern and north-eastern voters who favored his opponents, his failure to pick up delegates in two states put Rubio far behind his rivals in the overall Republican delegate count. It also underscored Rubio’s need to win on 15 March in his home state of Florida, where he is trailing Trump and faces a do-or-die moment for his presidential ambitions.

Rubio’s victory in Puerto Rico, however, could help bolster his chances. Florida is home to the second-largest Puerto Rican population in the US, at roughly a million people, and Rubio is counting on the state’s Hispanic voters to help see him through. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans have left the territory for central Florida in recent years, in search of jobs, housing and the right to vote in the general election.

Rubio has insisted he will win Florida, which doles out delegates only to the winner, rather than through the proportional format of other states.

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“We knew this would be the roughest period in the campaign give the makeup of the electoral map,” he told reporters of his losses on Saturday. “This map only gets better for us as we move forward in some of the other states.”

While in Puerto Rico on Saturday, Rubio reiterated his support for the island holding a referendum on statehood. He also maintained that Puerto Rico should resolve its crippling debt crisis on its own rather than being bailed out by the US Congress, a position he took in September while campaigning in San Juan on the same day as Hillary Clinton.



With all of Puerto Rico’s 23 delegates, Rubio’s total now rises to 151. Trump leads he pack with 382 delegates, followed by Cruz with 300, while Ohio governor John Kasich has picked up just 35.

Faced with improbable mathematical odds to obtain the 1,237 delegates required to clinch the nomination, Rubio’s campaign has raised the possibility of a brokered convention in July, in which delegates would be freed from voting in line with state primary election results.

Trump and Cruz have instead framed the Republican contest as a two-man race, suggesting Rubio should bow out.

Rubio, who was set to campaign in Idaho on Sunday, has vowed to do no such thing.