Hillary Clinton has reached the number of
delegates needed to clinch the Democratic U.S. presidential nomination,
according to tallies on Monday by two US media outlets.
Six states are still set
to vote in nominating contests, Reuters reports.
A former senator and US
secretary of state, Clinton would be the first woman to ever be the
presidential candidate of a major political party in the country’s 239-year
history.
But the campaign of her
rival, Bernie Sanders, vowed to keep up the fight in what has been a protracted
and increasingly antagonised primary race that has exposed deep rifts between
the left-wing and the more centrist of the Democratic Party.
A Sanders campaign
spokesman said it was wrong of the Associated Press and NBC News, which made
the calls on Monday evening, to count the votes of superdelegates before they
cast ballots at the Democratic National Convention in July.
“Our job from now until
the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the
strongest candidate against Donald Trump,” Sanders’ spokesman Michael Briggs
said in a statement, castigating what he called the media’s “rush to judgment.”
While most delegates are
awarded by popular votes in state-by-state elections, superdelegates largely
consist of party leaders and elected senators, members of Congress and
governors, and can change their mind at any time.
For that reason, the
Democratic National Committee has echoed the Sanders campaign, saying the
superdelegates should not be counted until they vote at the convention in
Philadelphia.
But that has not
deterred the news media. The AP and NBC reported that Clinton reached the 2,383
delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee with a decisive
weekend victory in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, and a burst of additional
support from superdelegates.
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