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New California Hillary Clinton Vs. Bernie Sanders Polls: June 7 Battle For 475 Delegates Too Close to Call

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 08:22 PST, Jun 3, 2016

After a week with no new California primary polls pitting Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton, a flurry of polling was released over the past 3 days — polls that gave a significant morale boost to Bernie Sanders and his supporters, because they showed Sanders closing into a near-tie with front-runner Clinton in the largest state to vote in the primary process.

One poll even showed Sanders ahead of Clinton in California, among all registered voters, by a single percentage point; though, it should be noted that among “likely” voters, the same poll, conducted by The Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California, showed Clinton leading by 10 points, 49-39.

Watch a brief summary of that and other recent polls in the video below from the online news outlet Veuer.

Demographics-based models, however, continue to show a probable victory of about eight points for Hillary Clinton.

Sanders, however, would need much more than a narrow victory to make any difference in the race for a delegate majority. He would likely need to win about 70 percent of the state’s 475 pledged delegates to cut into Clinton’s 208 lead in pledged delegates.

Clinton is fighting Sanders in California, while at the same time attempting to pivot to her general election stance against Donald Trump. On Thursday, she delivered a major foreign policy address in which she blasted Trump for his foreign policy of “chaos,” but never mentioned Bernie Sanders.

Though the speech was scheduled to be delivered in New Jersey, she moved it to San Diego, California. Watch Clinton’s entire speech, which she hopes will be a game changer both in the general election and the California primary, in the video below.

What a victory in California would do, however, is allow Sanders to claim “momentum” as the primary season comes to a close, and allow him to continue his argument that unpledged superdelegates — who now favor the former secretary of state by an overwhelming factor of more than 11-1 — should switch their allegiances to him, Bernie Sanders, granting him the Democratic presidential nomination despite the fact that Democratic primary voters have so far preferred Clinton by a large margin.

Sanders has won less than 43 percent of the overall popular vote prior to June 7’s California and other Super Tuesday primaries, while Clinton has won just over 55 percent of Democratic primary voters.

Sanders also argues that his large lead over Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump in national head-to-head polls — 11.3 points in the most recent Huffington Post Pollster.com average of all polls — makes him the better choice to be the Democratic nominee.

But, Clinton has surged over the past week in head-to-head polling against Trump, opening up a 4.8 point lead with a sharp upward spike on the Pollster.com graph. In one poll, the Ipsos/Reuters daily tracking poll from June 1, Clinton had a nine-point lead over Trump.

The Clinton vs. Sanders California polls showed a much tighter race. A poll by the highly-rated Field Research Corporation of San Francisco released on Thursday gave Clinton a slim two-point lead over Sanders, 45-43.

The Field poll contained the most alarming news for Clinton, showing that support for Sanders among the Latino population, with whom she has dominated for most of the primary campaign, was nearly equal to hers. Clinton led among Latino voters 46-42.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll released on the same day also showed Clinton clinging to a narrow two-point lead, while an American Research Group poll gave her a lead of just one point.

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As a result of the new polls, the election-projecting site FiveThirtyEight.com dropped what it said is Clinton’s probability of winning the California primary over Bernie Sanders to 86 percent — where it was as high as 97 percent just nine days earlier.

Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton would like to score a decisive victory over Sanders in California to finally extinguish his case for continuing his campaign through the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which opens July 25. But this week’s polling largely indicates that her victory in California will be a narrow one, and that an upset win for Bernie Sanders is not out of the question.

[Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images; Jae C. Hong/Associated Press]

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