[N]EW YORK — Bernie Sanders lost the critically important New York primary on Tuesday night by a wide margin, suffering a major blow to a campaign in need of big wins to sustain legitimacy.
With virtually all precincts reporting, Hillary Clinton won 57.6 percent to 42.4 percent of the vote.
A native of Brooklyn, Sanders didn’t even clinch his home neighborhood of Flatbush. Clinton beat him there by double-digit margins, and in most sections of the city. The Vermont senator also lost in the neighborhoods where he had held record-breaking rallies days earlier, in Washington Square and Prospect parks.
Sanders’ strongest showing in a Big Apple borough came in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, where he netted roughly 64 percent of the vote.
He performed well in many districts upstate, though Clinton, a former New York senator, came up ahead in the large western districts with populous cities, like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. Sanders won Albany, and cleaned up in the eastern counties bordering Lake Champlain.
Sanders left for Vermont before the results were tallied, while Clinton stayed in New York, and ventured out of her home in Chappaqua for a celebration party near Times Square.
“The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch and victory is in sight,” she said, to raucous applause.
Sanders, homesick and tired, spent Wednesday night back home in Burlington.
“I miss Vermont,” Sanders told a small scrum of Vermont reporters in Burlington. “And we need to get recharged and take a day off.”
Before Sanders returned to the Green Mountains he stopped off in Pennsylvania, where voters go to the polls on April 26. A number of other states vote that day too, including Connecticut, Delaware and Maryland.
The Empire State defeat was Sanders’ toughest of the campaign. In a delegate race where Clinton was already way ahead, Tuesday’s results make Sanders even more dehydrated.
In New York, Sanders also lost his most valuable asset: the mantle of momentum.
In order to catch up to Clinton in pledged delegates, Sanders would need to win virtually every remaining contest by double-digits margins. The polls right now don’t suggest a winning spree. Clinton won roughly 30 more delegates than Sanders out of a total of 247 and had a lead of more than 200 as of Wednesday.
The campaign had an uphill battle in New York. Clinton’s popularity as a former senator made her a formidable foe, and she did very well among women and minority voters.
The closed primary system also gave Clinton an advantage. Independent voters who may have been more likely to support Sanders had to register in advance to vote in the Democratic primary.
In Burlington late Tuesday, Sanders broadly criticized New York’s voting regulations.
“I am really concerned about the conduct of the voting process in New York state, and I hope that process will change in the future,” he said.
The New York strategy
The Sanders’ campaign had 11 field offices from Brooklyn to Buffalo, though they were relatively ad hoc operations, all set up within the last few weeks.
Staffers were brought in from Burlington, and the campaign received organizing support from Occupy Wall Street organizers and the small but powerful Working Families party, among others. The campaign also brought in Deputy National Field Director Robert Becker, a potent organizer who was key in Sanders’ strong showings in Iowa and Michigan.
The campaign deployed a cast of famous surrogates with deep New York roots, including Spike Lee, Rosario Dawson and Danny DeVito.
Most of Sanders’ work this week went into energizing his base of young, white voters. He held huge rallies in college towns upstate as well as events in more affluent, homogenous boroughs in the city.
He went to a Sunday service in Harlem, held a roundtable with faith leaders in a Brooklyn and spoke with Puerto Rican leaders.
On Sunday, he toured low-income housing projects in the Bronx and released a comprehensive plan to enrich affordable housing across America. The Vermont senator, who created the first municipally funded housing trust in the nation as mayor of Burlington, promised to repair crumbling buildings, restrict predatory loan practices and support first time homebuyers through federal assistance.
“This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” Sanders said Sunday. “People should not be forced to live in dilapidated housing.”
On Tuesday, the Vermont senator endorsed a high-profile picket of Verizon workers, who were demanding a stop in outsourcing and improved working conditions. Visiting protests periodically throughout the week, Sanders offered harsh words for the company.
“We will not tolerate large profitable corporations sending jobs to low-wage countries … throwing American workers out of the streets,” he said.
The union representing the Verizon workers, the Communications Workers of America, has endorsed Sanders and organized to get their members to the polls.
Sanders also touted the state’s official passage of a $15 minimum wage this week, a policy the Vermont senator has been supporting for months.
Clinton managed to blunt Sanders’ cozy connection to both causes, visiting the Verizon picket lines and also attending the signing ceremony for the wage bill following an invitation from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
