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Despite Michigan, Sanders faces uphill climb

The night before the Michigan Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton sounded as if Bernie Sanders soon would be in her rearview mirror for good.

The night before the Michigan Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton sounded as if Bernie Sanders soon would be in her rearview mirror for good.

"I hope to work with him - the issues he has raised, the passion he has demonstrated, the people he has attracted - are going to be very important in the general election," Clinton said, calling the Vermont senator an "ally" during a Fox News town-hall meeting Monday.

That seemed inartful Tuesday as Sanders won the Michigan race, defying polls that had shown Clinton with a lead of as many as 17 percentage points.

The win was a political and moral victory for Sanders, who invested heavily in Michigan in the hope that the industrial Midwest would become a launching pad to regain his early momentum and begin cutting into the huge delegate lead Clinton has built up.

"What we have done is create the kind of momentum that we need to win," Sanders said.

Michigan is the biggest and most diverse state Sanders has won in the campaign, and he improved his performance among black voters. He also attracted independents, who can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary.

Clinton had hoped a clear win in Michigan would prove she could be competitive in Rust Belt states with large populations of white working-class voters, a group she has struggled to win, to go along with her dominance among African American voters.

Sanders pounded away at the free-trade agreements Clinton has supported over the years, pacts that have cost millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs. He also ripped Clinton's well-paid speeches to Wall Street interests who have bankrolled her campaign.

"Michigan is the perfect kind of state for Sanders' economic message," said Susan Demas, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics.

Indeed, exit polls indicated that by roughly 2-1, Democratic voters in the Michigan primary said that international trade cost American jobs. Sanders won the support of 60 percent of those voters, to 39 percent for Clinton.

NAFTA was championed by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, though she has said she opposes the pending free-trade agreement with Asian nations.

Clinton had won the support of 80 percent or more of African American voters in other states. Exit polls showed she was on track to win two-thirds of black voters in Michigan.

She overwhelmingly won the Mississippi primary Tuesday, again carrying women, African Americans and older voters.

Despite Sanders' strong showing in Michigan, it still would be a steep climb for him to win the nomination.

Democrats award national-convention delegates proportionally. So, even though she lost, Clinton will still reap nearly half the 130 Michigan delegates, and Sanders will not be able to cut deeply into her overall lead.

Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman estimates that Sanders would have to win three-fifths of the remaining delegates at stake in primaries and caucuses just to draw even with Clinton. She enjoys large polling leads in upcoming delegate-rich states, including Florida, Ohio, and Illinois.

Sanders has the money and the message to keep going; he raised $40 million last month, for instance.

Some of his advisers have said Sanders would stay in the race through the June California primary, when 475 delegates are at stake, but senior strategist Tad Devine suggested this week that the campaign might reassess its position a little sooner.

"We're going to try to beat her in pledged delegates . . . [but] it's going to be hard. It's going to be tough," Devine said in a Politico podcast Monday. "Now, you know, we're not going to know the answer to that, really, until, I'd say, maybe the middle of April, OK? Not the middle of March. You know, we'll see where we are then, to make that decision."

tfitzgerald@phillynews.com

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@tomfitzgerald

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