Bernie Still Has A Very, Very Slight Chance

Monday, June 6 will go down in history as the day that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secured enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination through the primary process, according to the Associated Press. But one big question remains: Is it possible for Sanders to still win the nomination? While the possibility is slight, it does exist.

On Monday, before many states voted in their primaries on Tuesday, June 7, the Associated Press declared that Clinton was the presumptive nominee after securing 2,383 delegates, including commitments from superdelegates. However, there is a very small likelihood that Sanders could become the nominee, because the only shot Sanders would have at winning still would be by taking the race to the July convention, and making a case to the superdelegates — many of whom have pledged their support to Clinton — about why he should be the nominee.

Superdelegates are generally supposed to align their vote with the votes of the people in their state, and throughout these primaries, they have, more often than not, done the exact opposite. Even so, the purpose of superdelegates at a convention would be to essentially veto the delegate-based results. This means that, should Sanders convince them, they could override a Clinton nomination by changing their allegiance to Sanders.

The odds of superdelegates changing their alignment to Sanders are slim to none, however. The Huffington Post clearly laid out the reasons that superdelegates would potentially overturn a Clinton nomination, and they don't look good for Sanders. The list includes Sanders winning 19 of the last 25 contests, Sanders being within a few hundred popular votes compared to Clinton, Sanders winning 54 percent of pledged delegates after the Super Tuesday primaries, and Sanders and Clinton polling closely at a national scale.

Sanders is aware that the contest rests very much on the vote of superdelegates. He said at a rally in Santa Cruz last week that "No candidate — not Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders — will have received the number of pledged delegates ... that he or she needs to become the Democratic nominee" and that both candidates will "be dependent on superdelegates [to win the nomination], that’s just a fact."

At the end of the day, the fate of the Democratic nomination will very much remain in the hands of superdelegates, especially since Sanders has made it clear that no matter what, he will take the race to a convention. The question is whether superdelegates will effectively veto a Clinton nomination in favor of Sanders, and whether that would be in the best interests of the Democratic establishment.