Lara M. Brown is an associate professor and a program director in the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.

No matter what Bernie Sanders’s surprise upset in Michigan may mean for the contests in Illinois, Missouri and Ohio, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Hillary Clinton is well on her way toward securing the Democratic presidential nomination.‎

In the 21 contests where Democrats have allocated delegates, Clinton has won 12 states and amassed more than 1.6 million more votes and some 200 more pledged delegates than Sanders. Further, in the 18 contests where the popular vote totals have been made public, Clinton has won 10 states with an average margin of about 194,000 votes. By contrast, Sanders has won seven states, not counting his home state of Vermont, with an average margin of about 28,000 votes.‎

Independents might like Sanders, but Clinton has the Democratic voters and leaders. She's her party's choice.

Even more important, in the three primaries with exit polling that Sanders won, other than Vermont, Clinton won the majority of Democratic voters in two of them — 52 percent of the Democrats in Oklahoma and 58 percent in Michigan.

The third was New Hampshire, the only state where Sanders earned the majority of Democrats who voted (52 percent). In essence, Sanders's victories have been fueled by his large vote margins among independents — 48 percent margins in Oklahoma and 43 percent in Michigan — and the size of the turnout in these states; 27 percent of those who voted in those two states were independent.

True, this voting pattern may not help Clinton much on Tuesday, because Illinois, Missouri and Ohio are all open or semi-open contests, when independents are more likely to affect the overall results. But the voting pattern will almost certainly become a decided advantage for her in several other states (some quite large) that have yet to cast ballots. Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, California, New Jersey, New Mexico and the District of Columbia are all closed or semi-closed primaries, in which independents participate much less.

Those upcoming states with closed (or semi-closed) primaries have a total of 1,827 delegates at stake. Should Clinton only win these states and win by an average of 55 percent, her share would be 1,005 pledged delegates. If she earned an average of 45 percent in the remaining states that could go for Sanders (including Illinois, Ohio and Missouri), she would still garner 398 pledged delegates. Given the 748 pledged delegates that she has already earned, this means that she would only be about 231 delegates shy of the nomination. In short, in this worst case scenario she wins the nomination with the support of her 461 superdelegate votes.

Simply put, Clinton is the choice of her party — its voters and its leaders — and she should be its presidential nominee.‎



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