Wise man Charlie Cook describes the agonies of Hillary Clinton. She can hardly quit now: she's winning big states, and the bloom is coming off her opponent. But at the same time, it's hard to see how she wins.
In some ways, Clinton has spent the past six weeks in a horrible situation. How do you quit a race when you’re still winning primaries? The delegate and fundraising pictures looked dismal to the point of near-impossibility, yet she was still taking the big primaries. There was really no way she could have stood on the podium in Philadelphia on Tuesday night and said, “Thank you, Pennsylvania, for this great victory. Oh, by the way, I’m now dropping out.”
As long as Clinton is winning, she can’t quit. But even in victory, she
isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political
purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North
Carolina—hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If
she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as
well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But
that can’t happen as long as she continues to win.
We're at a very strange place in this contest.
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