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Clinton stuck in neck-and-neck race with rival in Democratic Kentucky primary

Xinhua, May 18, 2016 Adjust font size:

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was locked in a tight contest in the Kentucky primary on Tuesday with Bernie Sanders, as she was eyeing a victory in a state historically favoring the Clinton family to blunt Sanders' momentum.

With 99.8 percent of all votes counted, Clinton and Sanders were still neck-and-neck in the race, with Clinton leading by merely 0.4 percent of supports.

However, according to CNN, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky's secretary of state, told the U.S. TV network that Clinton was the "unofficial winner."

With such a razor-thin margin, the question of who won the race became mathematically insignificant and did not change the contour of the Democratic race where Clinton continued to hold a strong delegate lead.

Unlike Republican contests in the nomination contests, all Democratic races allocate pledged delegates proportionally.

Clinton entered the Kentucky primary on Tuesday with 1,716 pledged delegates, 283 more than Sanders, according to a delegate count by The New York Times.

Also, Clinton was currently being supported by an overwhelming majority of superdelegates, a group of about 700 Democratic party leaders who could vote for any candidate in the Democratic convention in July.

However, the failure to notch a decisive win in a state where she and her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, had win easily three times in primary contests in 2008, 1996 and 1992 delivered a blow to Clinton, as she was scrambling to turn the page on the primary race and focus the energy on the almost certain match-up with Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Clinton and Sanders were also competing on Tuesday in Oregon, where the voting ended at 11:00 p.m. ET (0300 GMT).

Given Oregon's overwhelming proportion of white and liberal voters, Sanders was widely expected to win there, and early results with 20 percent of all votes counted showed that Sanders led Clinton with 57.8 percent to 42.2 percent.

On the Republican side, the party's presumptive nominee Trump won the sole GOP contest in Oregon. Endi