Essential Politics: The Democrats’ turn to unify. Or not?

In the end, it wasn’t close.

As he had done in Ohio, then New York, then Pennsylvania, Sen. Bernie Sanders told the large crowds who came to his rallies in California that he could feel the race tightening. But as happened in each of those others states, big crowds did not overcome the far-superior ability of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to organize and turn out actual votes.

The final USC/LATimes poll of the race found Clinton leading by 10 points among likely voters, and as of this morning, with about 6 million votes counted, including about 3.5 million in the Democratic primary, and still waiting for about 2.5 million votes from all contests to be tabulated, Clinton was holding steady with just over a 12-point lead.

Whatever the precise, final tally, the results in California, coupled with big final-week Clinton wins in Puerto Rico, New Jersey and elsewhere, gave the former secretary of State more than enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, which she did Tuesday night.

Now, the question is, will the party unify behind her and how quickly?

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in the presidential campaign and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

DEMOCRATIC UNITY?

Sanders won’t drop out of the race until after the D.C. primary – the last of the season – on Tuesday, but the two most influential Democrats remaining on the sidelines, President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, lost little time in giving Clinton their blessing.

As Mike Memoli noted, Obama’s endorsement video had been recorded on Tuesday, while Californians were voting, but Obama waited to release it until after giving Sanders advance notice in a lunchtime meeting the White House on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, the Vermont senator said nothing about Clinton and little about his future plans, but plenty about the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who, he said, had made “bigotry and discrimination the cornerstone of his campaign.”

That sort of anti-Trump broadside is what Democratic leaders have been hoping to hear from Sanders. Up until the end, the senator and his top aides were sending mixed signals, reflecting the divergent approaches of his two top advisors, as Evan Halper and Kurtis Lee reported. But, at this point, the withdrawal process appears to be going according to script.

Two questions remain: What will Sanders demand in return for his full-throated support for the Democratic ticket? And to what extent will his supporters go along?

Clinton does not need every last Sanders voter to get behind her. In big Democratic states, including California and New York, she’ll have votes to spare.

That’s a good thing, because some share of Sanders’ backers almost certainly won’t head her way, including some on the left who weren’t Democratic voters to begin with, and many of the young, white Bernie Bros, whose often vulgar, misogynistic social media diatribes against Clinton, her supporters and journalists represented the darker side of the Sanders movement.

But in major swing states – Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida – Clinton will need a strong turnout of young, independent-minded voters, the sort who flocked to Sanders rallies. She’ll also need the backing of Sanders’ Latino supporters, many of whom, as Kate Linthicum reported, have a long history of sharply criticizing the Obama administration over its record on deportations.

If Sanders’ backers begin to coalesce behind Clinton, watch for her lead to expand over Trump in the polling averages, which currently give her an edge of roughly four-to-five points. Remember that Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012 by just under four percentage points.

RENEWED ANXIETY IN THE GOP

As Mark Z. Barabak reported, Trump prevailed in the primaries by throwing out the rule book of presidential politics. He seems determined to be his own chief strategist and spokesman. But what worked in a primary, in a rapid series of volatile contests played out among hard-core Republican partisans, could prove far more troublesome in the massively complex, expensive trench warfare that is a general election.

Republicans got a taste of those troubles this week. As Noah Bierman and Lisa Mascaro reported, Republican officials condemned Trump’s attacks on federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over the civil fraud suit brought by former students of the now-defunct Trump University, over the judge’s Mexican heritage. House Speaker Paul Ryan openly called the remarks “racist.”

In hopes of calming the furor and proving he could stick to a script, Trump resorted to reading a speech from a Teleprompter on Tuesday night, something he had ridiculed others for doing in the past.

As Cathy Decker noted, the week’s events marked a sudden shift, as the trajectories of the presumptive nominees’ campaigns flipped: Clinton, who had been struggling to bring her primary battle to an end, finally prevailed, while Trump, who had been buoyed by seeming GOP unity just a week ago, was once again mired in controversy.

CONTRASTS AT THE TOP

Want a quick summary of how the two party leaderships feel about their nominees?

Here’s Obama in his endorsement video: “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office … I am fired up, and I cannot wait to get out there to campaign for Hillary.”

And here’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky in a Bloomberg podcast, also released Thursday: “I think the choice for many Americans is not a happy choice … I think a lot of Americans are not going to be thrilled at the choice. But this is the choice, and, I think for me, and I hope for a lot of others, the question to be dealt with is this: Do we want four more years just like the last eight, or do we want to go in a different direction.”

THE GENERAL ELECTION STARTED ALREADY

Beyond all the other dynamics of the election, Decker noted, Clinton’s nomination sets the stage for a battle about gender that will pit the first woman to head a major party ticket against a man whose career has been marked by an aggressively macho posture toward his adversaries.

Another key topic for the general election campaign will be foreign policy. That’s an area where Trump has decisively broken with much of what his party has stood for over the past two decades. Democrats hope to exploit that division, as Clinton made clear in a speech last weekend in San Diego. As Halper reported, the speech laid out her clearest attack so far on Trump’s lack of experience.

The campaign, already fully engaged, will heat up further next week. Trump promises a speech in Manchester, N.H., on Monday laying out what he describes as a history of misdeeds by the Clinton family, while Clinton will be campaigning in industrial-state battlegrounds in a swing scheduled to culminate in a joint appearance with Obama in Green Bay, Wis., on Wednesday.

Obama already has been using a series of commencement speeches to campaign for his governing philosophy, as Memoli reported. Part of that is a warning to his fellow Democrats against following the path he says the GOP has taken:

“If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want,” Obama said at Howard University’s graduation last month. “I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.”

MONEY AND POLLS:

Halper profiled Susie Tompkins Buell, one of Clinton’s biggest backers in California, who has given her some $15 million over the years.

The first time Buell met Bill Clinton, she was so taken that she wrote him a $100,000 check the next day. His campaign staff quickly called. “They asked me what I wanted,” she told Halper. “I remember saying, ‘I want him to be president.’ I had no idea about how the money part of this worked.”

Speaking of money, Seema Mehta and the Times data team put together an unprecedented look at who Bernie Sanders’ donors are and where they’re from. Many of his donations come from people who are retired, disabled, unemployed or otherwise out of the workforce but who scraped together $5 or $10 at a time to send him contributions.

And, as I noted at the outset, our poll proved very accurate in its forecast of the Democratic primary. We also polled California voters on some major issues. Read what they had to say about healthcare and about their support for the state’s minimum wage increase, despite qualms about the possible impact.

LOGISTICS

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That wraps up this week. My colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in the 2016 campaign with our Trail Guide, at our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

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