“Bernie Sanders may have a path, but it’s a narrow, steep path,” said Dante J. Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. “You just wonder, if he couldn’t win and win convincingly in a place like Massachusetts, where is he going to be able to do that?”

But beyond Sanders’ Burlington headquarters, few shared that view, giving the insurgent candidate a slim chance of prevailing. Even as the Sanders camp tried to spin losses in 7 of 11 Democratic contests on Super Tuesday into a kind of victory, analysts were skeptical, citing Clinton’s towering advantage in the crucial delegate race and Sanders’ continued difficulty attracting the party’s African-American voters.

BURLINGTON, Vt. — With Hillary Clinton holding a seemingly insurmountable lead over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary, the Vermont senator’s top advisers Wednesday promoted what they viewed as a plausible path toward victory.


Sanders lost to Clinton by less than 2 percentage points in Massachusetts — one of five states his campaign targeted on Super Tuesday, when they won in Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont. Speaking to reporters crowded into the Sanders headquarters — a modest office above a jewelry store and a pub in an old bank building, decorated with populist Sanders art — campaign manager Jeff Weaver cast the day not as the setback but as a near-perfect performance.

“We shot for five [states]. We got 4.9,” Weaver said. “I know some people are ready to write this campaign off as a message campaign, but this is a campaign to win. The people of this country are standing behind us.”

To that end, Sanders traveled to Maine and Michigan Wednesday and planned to visit Kansas and Nebraska Thursday — all states with nominating contests in the next week. His advisers said he should fare well in those states — making a play for African-American voters in Michigan on economic grounds, countering Clinton’s trade policies — while pushing on to major contests in New York (April 19) and California (June 7).


But College of the Holy Cross political science professor Daniel Klinghard said the Sanders campaign’s talk of a map to victory “sounds to me like a lot of hopeful thinking that doesn’t have any kind of reality behind it.” Klinghard questioned whether Sanders could attract more African-American voters than he had so far.

“Black voters are not necessarily bloc voters, but they do tend to be somewhat conservative, and they vote for the person they think has the best chance of winning,” he said.

Coming off a romp in South Carolina, Clinton’s Super Tuesday haul gives her an advantage in the delegate race that is already greater than the largest lead Barack Obama held over Clinton in 2008.

With 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination, the Associated Press Wednesday put Clinton’s tally at 1,052, compared to 427 for Sanders. Nearly half her total came from “superdelegates” — elected officials and state and national party leaders — who are not tethered to primary results and overwhelmingly back Clinton.

On Wednesday, her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said they expect to widen that margin soon, “making it increasingly difficult and eventually mathematically impossible for Senator Sanders to catch up.”

Still, Sanders’ longtime supporters in Vermont’s Queen City — where he served as mayor before being elected to the US Congress — share the conviction that he can come back to win. And they want to see him stay in the race no matter what.


“It’s an uphill fight, but he has a strong message, and I’m glad he’s going to keep giving that message,” said Michael Kiey, a 76-year-old retired lawyer from nearby Williston who walked into Sanders’ campaign headquarters to write a donation check Wednesday. “It’s an important one for all the country.”

Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Sanders, said part of their plan is to peel off superdelegates. He called their support for Clinton “very soft,” noting that 120 seemingly committed superdelegates jumped from her to Obama in 2008.



Devine also said party rules mean even seemingly “pledged” delegates, determined by primary and caucus results, have some flexibility to switch at the convention if a race remains competitive. Though he acknowledged “a long road ahead of us,” he said the math is more favorable than it seems.

“I would suggest that understanding the dynamics of a modern presidential campaign requires more than the skills of simple arithmetic,” Devine said.

Rich Cassidy, a Democratic National Committee member from Vermont who is pledged to Sanders, said many superdelegates at the 2015 DNC summer meeting told him they were supporting Clinton out of loyalty but were “really impressed” by Sanders’ message. That was ages ago in campaign time, when Sanders was still considered a quixotic upstart. Now he has won multiple primaries and raised $42 million in February alone.


“I think he has a very realistic chance to be nominated,” Cassidy said. He thinks Sanders’ main battle nationally is over “familiarity,” and that his message resonates with voters once they hear it.

But DNC member Billi Gosh, a rare Vermonter backing Clinton, said she thinks fewer fellow superdelegates this time will leave the secretary of state.

“People like to support a winner,” Gosh said, adding that she could not see Clinton losing. Still, she added, “politics is so volatile, and of course, 24 hours is a lifetime. A lot can happen between now and March 15.”

Super Tuesday 2016

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at eric.moskowitz@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeMoskowitz.