There is little doubt that Hillary Clinton will come out ahead, overall, in the five Northeast contests Tuesday that have been dubbed the “Acela primary” by the press. The Democratic front-runner leads in nearly every poll over the intransigent Bernie Sanders, and whether or not she sweeps all five, Clinton is practically guaranteed to extend her commanding delegate lead, bringing her within arm’s reach of the presidential nomination. Still, with Sanders hitting her daily on the campaign trail for her Wall Street ties and impugning her qualifications for the nation’s top job, Clinton will be under pressure to ensure her victories are landslides, bringing the increasingly ugly Democratic race to a close so that she can begin the hard work of unifying the party behind her.

Because Democratic primary states award their delegates proportionally, narrow victories (or losses) are unlikely to move the needle significantly for either candidate. Sanders has already telegraphed a stubborn insistence on remaining in the race until the Democratic National Convention this summer, in Philadelphia, where his campaign hopes to sway Clinton’s super-delegates by arguing that the populist, independent-minded Vermont senator is a better fit to take on Donald Trump. The argument is buoyed in part by Sanders’s string of seven consecutive primary wins before New York—a hot streak that resulted in another surge of fundraising. His team wrote off their substantial loss in the Empire State victory as not reflective of the true groundswell of support for Sanders, since it was closed to people not registered as Democrats.

The latest polls indicate that Clinton may not get the overwhelming victories she needs to shut Sanders down for good. The former secretary of state leads by double digits in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but the races are much closer in Delaware and Connecticut. Sanders may beat her in Rhode Island, a state where independents are allowed to vote in party primaries.

Looking at the Democratic race purely as a numbers game, Clinton should have the nomination in the bag. Acording to one recent FiveThirtyEight analysis, Clinton only needs to win 41.6 percent of the remaining state delegates to lock up the nomination, preventing a contested convention where Sanders could test his “appeal to the unpledged super-delegates” strategy. But at a more symbolic level, Clinton’s inability so far to leave the unexpectedly contested primary behind and move on to the general has begun to cost her. For weeks, Sanders has been amping up more negative, personal attacks against the front-runner, weakening her public image in ways that threaten to affect her performance in a general election—particularly against Trump, whose own broadsides align closely with the self-described socialist. Clinton’s favorability rating has been in free fall, dropping nearly 5 points since the beginning of the year. Even one victory Tuesday night would bolster Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver’s vow to stay in the race, even if his side ultimately loses the delegate race and the popular vote. While Sanders’s chief strategist, Tad Devine, was more conservative last week, saying that the campaign would “reassess” their situation after this round of primaries, a few close races would be enough to fuel their endurance.

“If we are sitting here and there’s no sort of mathematical way to do it, we will be upfront about that,” Devine told The New York Times Tuesday afternoon. “If we have a really good day, we are going to continue to talk about winning most of the pledged delegates because we will be on a path toward it.”

In the event that Clinton doesn’t get those landslides, she must have a sharper, and more subtle, message ready for the next day, as she aims to do away with Sanders while simultaneously winning over his younger, left-leaning supporters. Otherwise, the nail she is attempting to drive into his electoral coffin might not be enough, leaving him alive and well enough to drag her down with him. And even if Sanders eventually bows out, his campaign promises his message will live on. “Reassess does not mean that he’s not going to be part of this race,” Devine noted in his remarks to the Times. “Reassess does not mean that his message, that we think is the most powerful message, is going to change.”

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