Democrats will have their say in Kentucky and Oregon on Tuesday, the last two meaningful nominating contests before June’s primary season-ending delegate bonanza. Who’s going to win tonight, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? No one knows!
Polling has been nearly nonexistent in both states—pollsters have largely moved on to asking about a still-technically hypothetical general election matchup between Hillary and Donald Trump—though the most recent surveys found Clinton in the lead. She was up by 15 points in an Oregon survey from earlier this month and up 5 points in a Kentucky survey from March. But it’s a mistake to read too much into such a small sample. Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight are wisely refraining from handicapping either contest.
While the polls favor Hillary, recent results in neighboring states point to trouble. Bernie’s coming off a 5-point win in Indiana and a 15-point victory in West Virginia earlier this month, so he may be stronger than he looks in Kentucky. And back in March, he bested Clinton by a whopping 57 points in Idaho and 46 points in Washington, suggesting Oregon will be similarly friendly terrain for the Vermont senator.
Perhaps the best news for Bernie is that both of Tuesday’s contests are in states that are light on the type of nonwhite voters that have been voting for Clinton this year. Oregon isn’t just white, it’s also overwhelming liberal, making it pretty much tailor-made for Sanders. Indeed, he was drawing massive crowds in places such as Portland dating back to last summer. Kentucky is a different story, but it’s still far whiter than many of its Southern neighbors that served as Clinton’s firewall earlier this year. The Kentucky electorate looks far more like it does in Oklahoma, where Sanders won by about 10 points earlier this year, than it does in Alabama, where he lost by nearly 50 points on the same day.
Other factors: Both of Tuesday’s primaries are closed contests—meaning only registered Democrats can participate—a dynamic that has favored Hillary time and again this year (though may not help quite as much in this particular case.) While Oregon has seen record new voter registration this year—something that theoretically bodes well for an insurgent such as Sanders—an Oregon Public Broadcasting poll taken at the start of this month found Clinton with a clear advantage among those voters who had already mailed in their ballots. (The state conducts its primary entirely by mail.) In Kentucky, meanwhile, Clinton has particularly deep ties to the local Democratic Party, which she has been trying to leverage of late to pull out the victory there.
Anyway, in terms of the Democratic nomination, Tuesday’s results don’t matter all that much. Clinton now needs only 143 delegates to clinch the nomination outright, a figure she’ll easily reach even if she were to lose each and every remaining contest on the primary calendar, since Democrats divvy up their delegates proportionally. Even if she gets blown out in Oregon and loses by a substantial margin in Kentucky, she’d probably still lower her magic number by roughly a third.
Still, it goes without saying that losing isn’t exactly a good look for a politician, particularly one eager to focus all of her energy on the general election. Hillary could easily shake off an Oregon loss, but doing the same in Kentucky would be more of a challenge. She won the state back in 2008 during her battle with then–Sen. Barack Obama, and losing it eight years later would amount to a mild embarrassment given her structural advantages there. Nonetheless, it won’t change the mathematical reality that Clinton entered Tuesday as the presumptive nominee, and nothing that happens in Oregon or Kentucky will change that.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.
