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Clinton scrambles to salvage California

A loss to Bernie Sanders in the nation’s most populous state would be a fitting coda to Hillary Clinton's long primary slog.

By Annie Karni

Hillary Clinton is expected to clinch the Democratic nomination on the night of June 7, after the polls close in New Jersey.

But her campaign is girding for what could be an anticlimactic and potentially embarrassing finish, after the fact — Clinton could lose California, where the polls close three hours later, after she has already won the nomination.

A final loss to Bernie Sanders in the nation’s most populous state, where Clinton won comfortably eight years ago, would be a fitting coda to an upside-down primary season.

Clinton has lost states she once won and won where she once lost, with the biggest state looming as the biggest potential reversal of all. California was a signal victory in a hard-fought 2008 campaign that gave her candidacy credibility even as Barack Obama fought her to a draw on Super Tuesday. And she ended that campaign on high note -- Clinton’s high-water mark as a politician — her famous “glass ceiling” speech in Washington, was delivered days after besting Obama in a string of final primaries.

This time around, Clinton officials are predicting, at best, a very tight contest. They’ve poured in resources and devoted the candidate’s time to the state but a new poll out Wednesday from the Public Policy Institute of California showed Clinton’s one-time 18-point lead over Sanders had dwindled to just 2 percentage points.

Now, a state that has in the past embraced the Clintons — Bill Clinton won the state in the 1992 primary — offers little to the Democratic front-runner except the prospect of a humbling, though electorally meaningless, defeat.

“It will not change who the nominee is,” San Francisco-based Clinton donor Eleni Kounalakis said of her home state primary. “My view is that why Bernie Sanders is tightening in the polls is that she is still getting attacked by both sides and he’s not getting hit by anybody anymore.”

Clinton campaigned hard across the state on a four-day swing this week, leaving just once to attend the annual United Food and Commercial Workers conference in Las Vegas Thursday morning and returning immediately for a rally in San Jose. But even the Las Vegas pop-out wasn’t wholly unrelated: the UFCW serves as the lead union organizer in California. At multiple rallies each day across the state, Clinton kept her attacks focused on Donald Trump, making only one veiled allusion to Sanders.

“I’m tired of people who are so negative about our country,” she vented Wednesday at a rally in Salinas, where she campaigned with actor Jamie Lee Curtis. “If you’ve been alive longer than an hour you’ve got a problem. I speak from experience.”

The bulk of Clinton’s time was spent hammering Trump for cheering the housing crisis and avoiding questions about the State Department inspector general’s damaging report on her emails.

A California loss would cement the notion that even if Clinton isn’t what Trump would call a “total loser,” neither is she a decisive winner — despite her built-in strength and resources, she was incapable of shucking off a challenge from a self-described Democratic socialist even at the very end.

“Hillary has a lot of work to do to consolidate Democrats,” longtime ally Paul Begala conceded. “Proof of one of Bill Clinton’s Laws of Politics: ‘Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just want to fall in line.”

Sanders’ surprising ability to do with ease exactly what Clinton can’t — make voters fall in love — has provided a damning contrast, even as Clinton is expected to finish out the primary season with more than 55 percent of the popular vote and a larger lead in pledged delegates than Obama ever scored over her.

“The presidential nomination is a marathon and the person who gets the most votes wins,” California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who supports Clinton, said in an interview. “It doesn’t matter how you put it together. It would be wonderful to pull off a win, but if we don’t, we expect to give her plenty of delegates to put her over the top.”

Clinton officials are still hoping to eke out a win in California, in part thanks to what they see as strategic errors on the part of Sanders campaign. The biggest problem for Sanders has to do with independent voters, who in California are registered as “No Party Preference,” and referred to as NPPs.

Those voters can vote in the Democratic primary, but to do so they must request a Democratic ballot — an extra step that is crucial for turnout in a state where 60 percent of the electorate votes by mail.

Educating those independent voters about the clunky process was part of a field organizing strategy that Sanders’ former California state director, Michael Ceraso, was pushing for before he parted ways with the campaign earlier this month.

“I wrote out a state plan,” he said. “I said mailers is a big key because NPP voters need to be educated. I said that would be my priority targeting.”

But the campaign decided to go in a different direction, focusing its dwindling resources on television advertising. Sanders‘ allies said they are worried that confused independents who want to support Sanders will now find themselves out of luck.

Clinton allies have seized on the disorganization.

“Hillary has a good organization and my understanding is Bernie had a week when a lot of his top notch people were let go,” said Boxer, who plans to campaign for Clinton across Northern California this weekend.

For the past three weeks, the Clinton campaign has been conducting women-to-women weekly phone banks at more than 30 sites across the state, reaching over 125,000 female voters, and it has opened eight field offices. It also went back up on the air with television ads for the first time since Kentucky earlier this month, airing commercials in English, Spanish, Mandarin and other languages beginning Friday in three key media markets.

To some extent, Sanders’ has already done damage to Clinton even if she pulls out a win. Her Brooklyn-based staff has been holding meetings to discuss the best way to attack Trump, and the candidate herself has been at the center of the effort, even presiding over one session last week.

But she has been diverted by the Sanders’ challenge, hopping back on a plane for a time-consuming West Coast campaign swing that otherwise might have been avoided. “There’s an opportunity cost” in not putting an end to Sanders earlier, said one Clinton insider.

Speaking to a national group of food workers at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas on Thursday morning, Clinton struck a conciliatory tone while discussing Sanders in a rare mention.

“I applaud Sen. Sanders and his supporters for challenging us to get unaccountable money out of politics and take on the crisis of income inequality,” Clinton said. “I look forward to coming together to unify our party to stop Donald Trump and move our country forward because there’s much more that unites us than divides us.”

Clinton may be taking the high road, but some of her California supporters are still smarting over the unsettling challenge the Vermont senator has posed.

“Telling young people that the American system is rigged against them? That is so irresponsible,” said Kounalakis, “it verges on un-American.”