Biden wins Hawaii primary
Former Vice President Joe Biden won Hawaii’s Democratic presidential primary on Saturday in the latest victory on his march toward the party’s 2020 nomination.
Biden defeated Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who dropped out of the race last month, by a comfortable margin, earning 63 percent of the vote to Sanders’s 37 percent, according to The Associated Press. Biden won 16 of the state’s delegates, and Sanders earned eight.
The 16 delegates give the former vice president a total of 1,566 to the Democratic Party’s convention, according to a tally compiled by the AP. Biden is projected to reach 1,991 delegates, the threshold needed to win the nomination, by June.
Sanders, meanwhile, has remained on primary ballots in an effort to accrue delegates and influence the party’s platform.
Hawaii’s primary was conducted on Saturday following a weeks-long delay because of the coronavirus outbreak. The party-run election was held entirely by mail, with just more than 35,000 voters casting ballots.
The win for Biden comes as his 2020 White House bid remains a virtual campaign due to the pandemic. Despite the pause in in-person campaigning, the former vice president has polled ahead of President Trump in many head-to-head surveys in recent months.
A Fox News survey released last week, for example, showed Biden with an 8-point advantage over Trump nationally and a 13-point lead among independents. A RealClearPolitics average of polling also shows the former vice president leading Trump by 5.5 percentage points.
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