Sanders defeats Clinton in Indiana, throwing wrench in her pivot to November

Sen. Bernie Sanders pumps his fist in the air after his wife, Jane, joins him at a campaign event in Louisville, Ky., Tuesday night.

 

Bernie Sanders triumphed over Hillary Clinton in Indiana’s open primary Tuesday, boosting the grassroots candidate’s argument that the party’s superdelegates should flip their support to him in July’s Democratic convention.

Sanders spoke to thousands of supporters in Louisville, Ky., before Indiana’s results were in. He called for an end to closed primaries and criticized Clinton for her ties to Wall Street and paid speeches to Goldman Sachs — a sign the heated rhetoric on the Democratic side shows no signs of cooling down. Meanwhile, the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, won Indiana in a landslide, and his top rival Sen. Ted Cruz dropped out.

Sanders continues to trail Clinton by hundreds of pledged delegates and faces an extremely difficult path to close that gap. And Tuesday’s win doesn’t     propel Sanders very far; he and Clinton will roughly split Indiana’s 83 Democratic delegates because his victory was narrow. But the win fuels the senator’s argument that he should keep fighting until the end and creates a headache for Clinton, who has made a hard pivot from frontrunner to presumptive nominee. “I think we can pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States,” Sanders said in a press conference late Tuesday night.

Sanders said earlier this week that the Democratic convention will be “contested,” and told reporters Tuesday that the party’s superdelegates, almost all Clinton backers, should take a “hard look at which candidate is more likely to defeat Donald Trump.” He referenced polls that show him beating Trump by a wider margin than Clinton in hypothetical matchups.

Clinton, meanwhile, has pointedly shifted her focus away from Sanders and toward Trump, sending a signal to that it’s time for him to moderate his tone and to begin unifying the party. In an interview on Tuesday with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Clinton laughed when asked about Sanders’ claim that the convention will be “contested” in July.