An increasingly contentious Democratic presidential race remained unresolved on Tuesday night, even as frontrunner Hillary Clinton edged past her dogged challenger, Bernie Sanders, with a wafer-thin primary victory in Kentucky. While Ms Clinton looked to have eked out a win in the Bluegrass State, across the country in Oregon the Sanders campaign anticipated an upset, despite a recent poll that put the former Secretary of State ahead there by several points.
Mr Sanders had claimed 18 states to his rival’s 23 ahead of this week's votes, winning his latest in a string of primary season victories in West Virginia last Tuesday. But Democratic delegates are distributed proportionately in every primary, and Ms Clinton’s wins in major states such as New York, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania have helped the former Secretary of State to maintain a commanding lead in the divisive contest.
Kentucky is worth 61 delegates overall, and Oregon 73. Even narrow defeats in both states would have kept Ms Clinton edging ever closer to the 2,383 delegate majority she needs to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination. But Mr Sanders, who became a Democrat last year after a lengthy career as an independent, has vowed to fight on at least as far as the final primaries next month – and even to contest the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July.
With Donald Trump now running unopposed in Oregon, the only GOP primary of the night, Republicans are resigned – if not uniformly agreeable – to the billionaire real estate mogul being their nominee. Over the weekend, it was instead the Democrats’ turn to tackle dissent in their ranks. The party’s Nevada convention was disrupted by Sanders supporters, who threw chairs and threatened the state’s party chairwoman, angry at the process of awarding delegates, which they saw as biased towards Ms Clinton.
Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat and the Senate minority leader, urged Mr Sanders to condemn his supporters’ actions, while Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said there was “no excuse for what happened in Nevada”. Mr Sanders subsequently condemned the unrest, but declined to apologise, saying claims that his campaign had a “penchant for violence” were “nonsense”.
