California voters go to the polls Tuesday morning for the last major Democratic party primary as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders seeks to unsettle Hillary Clinton’s claimed victory ahead of the Democratic National Convention next month with a win in the key state.
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Five other states also have primaries Tuesday, but California is the big prize with its 475 pledged delegates up for grabs, dwarfing the numbers in New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana combined.
The primary comes after the Associated Press reported late Monday, to much criticism, that Clinton had already won the nomination after sweeping Puerto Rico on Sunday, stirring controversy among Sanders supporters who argue that the race isn’t over yet. Clinton claimed last month in an interview with CNN that she had already locked in the nomination, disregarding the importance of the California primary.
But according to political analysis Bill Scher, California can be a game changer. “Between 1976 and 1984, California Democrats made it a habit to kick the presumptive nominee in the teeth on the last day of balloting, leading to various degrees of unruliness at the convention,” Scher wrote in an article published in Politico.
According to aggregated data by Real Clear Politics based on three polls, Clinton is leading Sanders by just two points in California, where semi-open primary voting rules could work in Sanders’ advantage. The Vermont Senator has seen most success among independent voters and in open primaries.
Many have decried the anti-democratic system that has stacked the deck against Sanders with closed primaries and superdelegates.
Sanders is just 291 pledged delegates behind Clinton. But the vast majority of superdelegates—571 of them—have thrown their support behind the former Secretary of State, while just 48 have vowed to support Sanders.
A win in California for Sanders could close the gap in pledged delegates, but would be unlikely to upset Clinton’s superdelegate support. Nevertheless, it would likely make Sanders, who has already vowed to take his campaign all the way to the convention, more likely to stay in the race despite pressure from the party establishment to call it quits, which fears he could potentially contest the nomination.
Polls in California to decide the 475 delegates open at 7:00 a.m. and close at 8:00 p.m. local time. The second most significant primary on Tuesday is New Jersey with 126 delegates, while North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico offer 93 delegates total.
After Tuesday’s primary, only Washington, D.C., with just 20 delegates, is left to chime in next week before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in late July.