Clinton projected to win Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware

PHILADELPHIA - Hillary Clinton was projected to win primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, three of the five states voting Tuesday, as the Democratic front-runner seeks to build an insurmountable lead over rival Bernie Sanders.

Clinton is expected to expand her lead of 275 pledged delegates when ballots are counted in the five Eastern states at stake. Results were still pending in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

But the delegate haul from Pennsylvania and Maryland, the two largest states voting, could make it close to impossible for Sanders to catch up, even with voting on June 7 in the biggest prize of the campaign, California. Polls show he faces an uphill race there as well.

Sanders signaled again Tuesday that he would stay in the race until the Democratic Party convention in July so his delegates can mount a vigorous effort to push the platform left on the issues that fueled his insurgent campaign.

Speaking shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m., Sanders argued that he would be the stronger candidate in the fall election.

'Almost every national poll and every state poll has us defeating Trump, and that margin for us is significantly larger” than Clinton has, he told cheering supporters in Huntington, W.Va. The state holds its primary in two weeks.

He highlighted the enthusiasm driving his campaign: 'Look at this room tonight. We have over 6,000 people. And the reason we are generating this enthusiasm is because we are doing something very unusual in contemporary American politics: We are telling the truth.”

Sanders has won caucuses or primaries in 16 states, an impressive performance by a democratic socialist who began far down in the polls. But he has struggled in more densely populated, diverse parts of the country that are crucial to winning the Democratic nomination.

His winning streak came to an abrupt halt in delegate-rich New York last week, when his weak performance among minorities and women resulted in a rout by Clinton that dramatically boosted her delegate lead.

The same demographics that tripped up Sanders in New York were at play in the two most important contests Tuesday, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

In a predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia on Tuesday, Clinton's decadeslong ties to the black community were evident in interviews with voters streaming into a polling station.

'This is a loyalty thing,” said Rob Troy, 69, a lifelong Democrat who worked for 25 years removing asbestos from the city's aging row houses. 'The Clintons have been loyal to Democrats, to the black community. They've been with us.”

Jamil Glover, a 28-year-old school counselor, also was swayed by Clinton's long history with black voters. Sanders remains a relative unknown to him.

'I know that with Hillary comes Bill, and we're good,” Glover said.

In Connecticut, where Sanders, the senator from Vermont, arguably has some measure of home-court advantage, he has been battered for his more centrist position on gun control.

The state is still struggling to heal from the mass shooting of 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, and Sanders drew ire from local leaders when he said he did not support the rights of families of victims to sue the manufacturer of the rifle used in the massacre.

Sanders is under pressure to refocus his energy to help unite the party and boost the Democratic front-runner's prospects in a general election.

Party leaders caution that attacks on Clinton at this point serve little purpose other than to weaken her for the fall. Clinton is continually reminding voters that her 2.7 million vote lead over Sanders far exceeds the biggest lead Barack Obama had over her when the two competed in the 2008 primary.

Yet Sanders made clear Tuesday that he won't yield to Clinton, even after the last primary ballot is counted in June.

Instead, he envisions a continued battle at the convention in Philadelphia in an effort to ensure the Democratic platform embraces such policy goals as the European-style government-run healthcare system that Clinton has rejected as an achievable goal.

'I think what the Democratic process is about,” Sanders said on CNN Tuesday, 'is going to the convention and arguing about what the platform should be. ... We are going to have - if we don't win this thing - we're going to have a lot of delegates in Philadelphia fighting that fight.”

Sanders said he will not hesitate to push an agenda on the convention floor that primary voters already have rejected.

'You don't know what the delegates there will do,” he said to CNN's Chris Cuomo. 'If you do, please tell me, but you don't. So we are going to go to the American people and say, ‘This is the agenda for the working people.' ... I think that we can win some of these platform fights.”

Sanders' strategy could backfire. If his effort falls short in Philadelphia - or if it goes too far - he could lose leverage with Clinton if she wins the White House in the fall.

On Monday, Clinton expressed irritation with Sanders' warnings that she needs to embrace more of his agenda if she wins the nomination and hopes to draw his voters to her side in November. Clinton said she set no such conditions when she endorsed Obama in 2008 and campaigned for him.

'We got to the end in June, and I did not put down conditions,” Clinton said at an MSNBC Town Hall on Monday night.

'I didn't say, ‘You know what, if Sen. Obama does x, y and z, maybe I'll support him.' I said, ‘I am supporting Sen. Obama because no matter what our differences might be, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and the Republicans.' That's what I did.”

But Clinton is also treading cautiously. While polls consistently show Democratic voters are far more willing to unite behind their eventual nominee than they were at this stage of the bitter 2008 contest, the voters turning out for Sanders are a unique bunch.

Many are involved in politics for the first time. They skew young, and they express frustration with a nominating process that the Sanders campaign has argued is rigged for establishment favorites like Clinton. She is trying hard not to alienate them.

That is no easy task. Many of those voters have no plans to give up on the Sanders agenda any time soon.

'I want to plant my flag over there to keep the Democratic Party leaning left,” said Adam Woolley, a 31-year-old acrobatics coach, who voted in downtown Philadelphia with his husband, Jefferson Grubbs, 27, a writer. 'It's been a long time since I've voted or wanted to vote in a Democratic primary.”

Both men cast ballots for Sanders but are well aware of the long odds he faces.

'I just feel like I can't not support him,” Grubbs said. 'I can't vote for the status quo anymore.”

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(Halper reported from Washington and Lee from Philadelphia. Times staff writer Kate Linthicum contributed to this report from Philadelphia.)