Bernie Sanders won the Democratic caucus in Idaho on Tuesday night by a huge margin, slightly closing the gap between himself and front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Sanders scored a 56.8-point lead over Clinton, earning 78 percent of caucus-goers’ support to Clinton’s 21.2 percent.
With few polls conducted in the state, the Idaho matchup remained all but unpredictable going into Tuesday’s vote. The most recent poll, conducted by Idaho Politics/Dan Jones a month ago, put Sanders ahead by 2 points.
Idaho awards Democratic candidates 23 delegates. Sanders will take home 17 delegates, while Clinton has secured 5. Sanders also won the Utah Democratic caucus by a wide margin, giving him 18 delegates to another five for Clinton.
Sanders’s wins in Utah and Idaho are far from enough to close the delegate gap between him and the former secretary of state. Clinton—who won the Arizona primary on Tuesday, earning her 41 delegates to Sanders’s 22—now has 1,214 pledged delegates to Sanders’s 901 pledged delegates. Clinton also has 467 superdelegates (Sanders has 26), giving her 1,681 of the 2,383 needed to secure the Democratic nomination in July.
Photo via Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
