Hours before the West Virginia polls closed Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s top fundraisers got a memo from campaign manager Robby Mook. The message: Even if Bernie runs the table in the remaining states, he still can’t win.

It’s a well-known point by now, but it’s still one Mook needed to make as Clinton sputters toward the finish line, loaded down with the baggage of recent losses in Indiana and West Virginia and the prospect of a few more losses still to come.


This wasn’t the way the Democratic primary was supposed to end. Clinton may have turned her focus to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, but at the same time her campaign is forced to continue fighting a rear-guard action against Bernie Sanders, who shows no sign of surrender.

After going dark on television for several weeks, the former secretary of state is suddenly investing in television advertisements in Kentucky — a state that should have been in her wheelhouse. Deep into the primary schedule, Clinton is forced to reckon with almost weekly results highlighting her relative weaknesses with white men and young voters, and she’s only gradually been able to increase her swing state travel. All the while, Trump sharpens his day-to-day critiques of her.

Some Democrats are now growing uneasy over a rocky finish that has Clinton spending resources and political capital so late in the process.

“The defeat in Indiana I was just horrified at, frankly,” said former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler, a Clinton backer, echoing others who say that for the moment it’s more of an annoyance than a deep concern about the candidate. “The longer Bernie stays in, and the longer he is not mathematically out of the process, the weaker we’re going to seem to be."

Clinton is still on track to pass the threshold to clinch the nomination at some point in June using a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates, and her lead among pledged delegates remains above 275. That makes it extremely difficult for Sanders to catch up to her unless he can win over a large number of the party elites who vote regardless of their state’s decision. Yet the Clinton campaign, cognizant of the need to show respect to Sanders’ legion of devoted supporters, is unable to initiate the call to unite behind her candidacy.

Even as she increases the frequency of her attacks and directly confronts Trump on the trail and in campaign communications, Republicans are all too eager to remind voters of how uncommon it is for a front-runner to be dropping contests with such frequency so late in the process, and to borrow lines from the Democratic challenger she can’t quite shake.

“Bernie Sanders has a message that’s interesting. I’m going to be taking a lot of the things Bernie said and using them,” Trump told MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" late in April, turning to a criticism of Clinton’s decision-making that Sanders frequently uses on the campaign trail. “He said some things about her that are actually surprising. That essentially she has no right to even be running. She’s got bad judgment. When he said ‘bad judgment,’ I said, ‘sound bite!’"

Trump returned to Sanders’ argument Tuesday, tweeting, “Hillary has bad judgment!,” and linking to an Instagram video hitting her over the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Sanders aides regularly brush aside questions about whether the Vermont senator’s decision to remain in the race through the convention is harming Clinton, referring to the notion that drawn-out primaries harm the nominee as a “myth.” Anyway, they insist, Sanders will ultimately do whatever he can to defeat Trump in November.

As long as Sanders continues to roll up wins, there’s little incentive for him to leave the race, making it likely she’ll have to weather three more weeks of nicks and bruises that could hand Trump lines of attack.

After West Virginia, there’s no respite: Oregon, which votes next Tuesday, is among the most liberal states in the country. Sanders has held massive rallies there and can point to the support of Jeff Merkley, his only endorser in the Senate.

The same day, Kentucky also votes. While it’s long been thought of as a likely Clinton win — in part because it is a closed primary where only Democrats can compete, not independents — her grip on the state seems increasingly tenuous.

Sanders has been the leading candidate for campaign donations coming from Kentucky for three straight months, according to an analysis performed by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. And Clinton’s March comment about putting “a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” has resonated. Though delivered within the context of investing in green jobs, it damaged her chances in the state’s coal-producing regions.

After appearing to stop spending money on primary state advertising following her sweeping wins in the Northeast in late April, Clinton resumed her television investment with a roughly $180,000 buy for the final week there on Monday night.

Sensing an opportunity, the Sanders campaign reserved additional Kentucky ad time of its own on Tuesday, according to media buyers. And it sent around a fundraising email carrying the news of Clinton’s ad buy.

"If you’re looking for a sign that the Clinton campaign knows this primary is far from finished," it proclaimed, "here it is."