Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton Making California a Toss-Up State

LOS ANGELES, CA -- California's primary, it seems, will matter after all.

If Sen. Bernie Sanders wins, it will likely guarantee that the nomination fight goes all the way to the Democratic Convention in late July as the two candidates fight over superdelegates.

And all he may need for this to happen is high voter turnout.

Sanders, speaking to a Southern California radio station Thursday, seemed convinced of this and a new poll released Thursday backs him up.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows Sanders besting Hillary Clinton by 1 percentage point -- well within the margin of error.

Clinton, however, can still pull it off. The poll has Clinton leading among likely voters, 49 percent to 39 percent.

Sanders seemed to recognize this. He told KNX: “If the voter turnout is high, we’re gonna win. If the voter turnout is low, we are going to lose.”

Dan Schnur, the poll director, agreed. He noted that Sanders supporters are mostly low-propensity voters.

“If he’s going to win California, his campaign will have to pull off the most massive voter education project in California history between now and Tuesday morning,” Schnur, who heads USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, said.

Some political analysts are worried that the Sanders campaign will lead to the fracturing of the Democratic Party, Sanders said his campaign is actually helping the party. He claims his campaign has registered more than 1 million new voters in California, many of them young voters.

"I think that at the end of the day, when we involved more people in the democratic process and, in fact, in the Democratic Party -- cause they’re registering in the Democratic Party -- that is not only good for democracy, it is good for the Democrats,” he said.

During the interview, Sanders was asked about Susan Sarandon’s comment on MSNBC, in which she said that it was inevitable Clinton will be indicted over her use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State. Sanders largely sidestepped the issue, sticking to his campaign message. When pressed he said, “I have no idea whether or not there will be an indictment.”

Sanders, however, seemed poised to take the fight all the way to the convention.

“Nobody, not Secretary Clinton, not myself, will have the all of the pledged delegates that we need -- regardless of what happens in California and the five states on June 7 -- to win the Democratic nomination,” he told KNX.

Vince Vasquez, a senior policy analyst at National University System Institute for Policy Research in San Diego, said that’s the problem Clinton is facing.

“That’s the real problem in California,” he said. “The fact that this is a toss-up state after all these months and she has not sealed the deal yet.”

Sanders, ironically, is counting on superdelegates to win the nomination. The superdelegates will be the one deciding the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he said.

While most of the superdelegates are pledged to Clinton, Sanders and his surrogates have suggested that they will be able to convince enough of them to change their mind and swing the nomination to him.