With news organizations calling California for Hillary Clinton, she ends this long primary campaign on the highest of high notes: the first woman in American history to claim a major party’s presidential nomination. There were concerns that it would take days to tally the results, thanks to California’s peculiar voting rules, but the relatively early call indicates that Clinton won the state handily.
And so go the tattered remnants of Bernie Sanders’s rationale to stay in the race. There’s no way the party’s super-delegates will switch to him now, and it would be monumentally unfair if they did. He suddenly finds himself in an ever-weakening position: the longer he hangs around, the more quixotic his campaign seems, and therefore the less leverage he has to wield influence in the party. He is meeting with President Obama on Thursday, and my guess is that he’ll emerge from the White House to do what he failed to do last night: congratulate Clinton on her historic achievement.