Clinton celebrates at a rally in Miami. (Rhone Wise/AFP/Getty)

Hillary won more states and creamed the Vermont senator in the South.

Alexandria, Va. — Bernie Sanders’s vaunted “political revolution” is now marooned on the shores of Super Tuesday’s Democratic vote.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign likely stymied his chances at the nomination tonight, sweeping seven states while Sanders picked up just four. Clinton was expected to do well in the southern-dominated primary after her strong showing with African-American voters in South Carolina last weekend. And she did, earning massive wins and huge delegate pickups in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas. She shellacked Sanders 79 to 18 percent in Alabama — the surest sign yet that Sanders’s outreach to black voters has completely collapsed.


But Clinton’s good night didn’t end there. She also picked up wins where she shouldn’t have, besting Sanders in mostly white Massachusetts by two percentage points. It was a race where Sanders had staked much, investing massive resources in a state bordering his own and raising expectations about the campaign’s performance there.

She also easily won Virginia, a purple state seen by many as a general-election bellwether where Sanders had hoped to do well. With 99 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday morning, Clinton had bested the Vermont senator by 64 percent to 35 percent.

RELATED: Clinton’s Virginia Push Stokes Vice-Presidential Speculation, Points to General-Election Pivot



Clinton’s Virginia surrogates were exuberant in an Alexandria celebration attended by a who’s who of the state’s bigwigs — including Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia governor who is on the short list of Clinton’s vice-presidential picks. They all breathed a sigh of relief as the Old Dominion’s race was called at 7:01 p.m., just a minute after the polls closed. “I think that the Democratic race is over — it’s over tonight for Bernie,” Jim Moran, the powerful former Democratic congressman from Virginia, tells National Review. Moran maintains that Sanders is a “decent guy” but that the Democratic race has always been a “foregone conclusion.”

#share#Sanders won four states, picking up his home state of Vermont by a crushing margin, winning Minnesota by 20 points, clinching Colorado comfortably, and earning a ten-point win in Oklahoma. They were good pickups for the senator, but less than his campaign had hoped for and woefully inadequate in terms of delegate count. Clinton now outpaces Sanders 527 to 325 in terms of pledged delegates, giving her a lead Sanders will struggle to recover from even as he plows forward with his prolific small-donor fundraising campaign. And that lead ignores her great advantage in super-delegates, which, together with pledged delegates, almost double Sanders’s own total.

Including super-delegates and pledged delegates, Hillary has almost double Sanders’s total.

The calendar looks slightly better for Sanders in the next two weeks, with several midwestern and northern states going to the polls. But Louisiana and Mississippi will also vote, and their large black electorates should break heavily for Clinton. Florida and North Carolina will follow on March 15, making it difficult for Sanders to gain much ground even if he wins everything he hopes to in March.


“Bernie was never going to be competitive,” says Moran. “Democrats, they’re not socialist — they may be liberal, but they’re not socialist.”


RELATED: Clinton Annihilates Sanders in South Carolina as Blacks Break against Bernie

There were several signs pointing to Tuesday’s crippling setback for Sanders. The most obvious were his two defeats in Nevada and South Carolina — the first by a margin of 5 points on February 20, the second by a devastating 48 points on February 29. The losses blunted the momentum his campaign had gained after his blowout victory in New Hampshire earlier that month. A CNN/ORC poll conducted on the eve of Super Tuesday gave Clinton a 20-point national lead over the Vermont senator.

#related#Clinton took her cue from those wins and her rising poll numbers, pivoting from attacks on Sanders’s “single-issue” campaign-finance-centered candidacy to target her likely opponent in the general election. Her surrogates, led by Bill Clinton, have largely directed their fire on what they call a divisive, racist, and sexist campaign led by Donald Trump. Even as Sanders honed his attacks on Clinton’s Wall Street ties — “I’m not quite so sure you’ll bring about real change in America if you give a speech to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 and you don’t release the transcript,” he told a Massachusetts rally on Monday — the Clinton campaign continued to ignore him in favor of an anti-Trump message. “We don’t need to make America great again, we need to make America WHOLE,” Clinton said during her victory speech on Tuesday.

And there are more signs that, even in victory, the Clinton camp is already turning a wary eye to Trump’s impressive Super Tuesday performance. “This is going to be a long road from tonight until November,” Virginia Democratic senator Mark Warner told the excited crowd, momentarily silencing their cheers as they listened in anxious attention. “We should not underestimate anyone. No matter how much craziness happens on the other side, it’s going to be a challenging election year.”


­­­— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter with National Review.