Another answer:It’s an exercise in plausibly deniable voter suppression
It targets prospective voters in the remaining states, tells them the election is decided, that once again those who live in late-voting states don’t matter, you should go on about your lives, don’t bother voting, there’s nothing to see here, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for <waves hand, uses force>, go on about your lives.
The election stands right now at a point that neither candidate has the magic number of pledged delegates, their tallies are close enough that the remaining votes matter, and the superdelegates don’t vote until the convention.
But the superdelegates, right? They’re all committed, right? So it’s not misleading to count them now, right? No, they’re not, and it is. Not only don’t they vote until the convention, they’ve flipped before, away from Hillary Clinton just 8 years ago.
Declaring the entire thing ‘finished’, at this point tells you that they’d rather it was done already. It’s not a guaranteed win, and they’d rather not risk a vote they might lose, as that could alter the situation at the convention, when the superdelegates’ votes really do come into play.
Sigh.
Well, it’s not the Washington Post’s fault. The Associated Press broke the story and WP had an obligation to run it or get scooped by other news outlets. That being said:
AP claims that they didn’t learn that HRC had enough Superdelegates publicly committed to her to put her over the top until Monday, and that they are obligated to report the news as soon as they verify it. HOWEVER
The timing is extremely suspicious. Several days earlier, all media outlets were reporting that Hillary was a handful of votes short. The AP’s “discovery” of the missing delegates and splashing Hillary as the Presumptive Nominee hours before hundreds and hundreds of delegates came up for grabs in states like California and New Jersey is incredibly suspect. It certainly looks like the so-called “liberal media,” planned a little “June Surprise” for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, dropping a bomb and him and his supporters at the worst possible moment, suppressing voter turnout by leaving the average voter foolish enough to trust traditional news sources believing the primary was over already.
The AP claims that not running the story when they did would have been tantamount to “suppressing the news.” But everyone knows that’s bullshit.
Shame on you, Associated Press. Shame on you.