Hillary Clinton claimed the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday night after decisive victories in the California, New Jersey and New Mexico primaries, and she quickly appealed to supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to unite with her against Donald J. Trump.
The Associated Press reported early Wednesday that Mrs. Clinton had won California, but Mr. Sanders gave no indication that he would yield, insisting earlier that he would continue his campaign and barely acknowledging her achievement.
With the 14-month Democratic race nearing a close, Mrs. Clinton savored the biggest night of her extraordinary journey from lawyer, wife and first lady to senator, secretary of state and, now, the first woman to win a major party’s nomination. At a rally in Brooklyn, she took the stage with her hands clasped over her heart in gratitude, then threw open her arms in joy and savored a long moment as a jubilant crowd waved American flags and chanted “Hillary.”
Reaching for history, Mrs. Clinton pledged to build on the achievements of pioneers like the 19th-century leaders at Seneca Falls, N.Y., who began the fight for women’s rights in America.
“Tonight caps an amazing journey — a long, long journey,” she said, nearly a century after women won the right to vote nationwide. “We all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you.”
As six states voted on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders’s political lifeline frayed with each loss. He was left hoping for a long-shot victory in the California primary, to justify staying in the race and lobbying Democratic officials to support him in a contested convention next month.
In a speech in Santa Monica, Calif., late Tuesday night that felt much like a valedictory, Mr. Sanders told supporters he was determined to stop Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, from winning the presidency. Yet he spoke of their cause as much larger than his candidacy. “You all know that it is more than Bernie — it is all of us together,” he said.
He vowed to “fight hard to win” the final primary, in the District of Columbia next week, and to continue “our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice” at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
But he also recognized cold political reality. “I am pretty good in arithmetic, and I know that the fight in front of us is a very, very steep fight,” he said. “But we will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate we can get.”
While Mr. Sanders noticeably ignored Mrs. Clinton’s triumph, only crediting “her victories tonight,” she lavished praise on him earlier at her Brooklyn rally. She said their “vigorous debate” had been “very good for theDemocratic Party and America.”
Mr. Sanders won the North Dakota caucuses and the Montana primary, while Mrs. Clinton won the South Dakota primary. Republicans also voted in several states.
Though Mr. Sanders made plans to lay off much of his campaign staff, he appeared reluctant to let go completely after months of political warfare against a Clinton machine that he holds in thinly veiled contempt.
Democrats Vote in Six States
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
President Obama plans to meet with Mr. Sanders at the White House on Thursday at the candidate’s request, an administration spokesman said, adding that Mr. Obama had called both Democratic candidates Tuesday night to congratulate them on “running inspiring campaigns.”
As Mrs. Clinton sought to turn her attention to the general election, Mr. Trump, who had a weekslong head start, was busy reckoning with problems of his own making. His criticism of a federal judge, Gonzalo P. Curiel, for the judge’s Mexican heritage continued to inflict damage on his campaign, as the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, called Mr. Trump’s remarks racist and other Republicans piled on. One Republican senator rescinded his support.
Mr. Trump, speaking in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., pledged to make Republicans “proud of our party and our movement,” though he did not try to defuse the controversy. Instead, reading carefully from a teleprompter, he mounted a lengthy attack on Mrs. Clinton’s record, saying she had “turned the State Department into her private hedge fund.” And he teased a speech, “on probably Monday of next week,” that he said would delve into “all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.”
Mr. Trump explicitly reached out to Sanders supporters, who he said had been “left out in the cold by a rigged system.”
“We can’t solve our problems by counting on the politicians who created our problems,” he said. “The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.”
Mrs. Clinton returned fire at Mr. Trump in her remarks, charging that he “wants to win by stoking fear and rubbing salt into wounds.”
Graphic: If You Think the Democratic Primary Race Is Close, the 2008 One Was Even Tighter
Yet she avoided the sort of slashing attacks and ridicule that she used to great effect in her indictment of Mr. Trump and his temperament last week. Scarcely raising her voice on Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton again looked to the example of an influential woman, this time tenderly invoking her mother.
“She told me to never back down from a bully, which it turns out was pretty good advice,” she said.
Although Tuesday had promised to be a watershed moment in the nation’s political history, it proved anticlimactic after The A.P. reported Monday night that Mrs. Clinton had secured enough delegates to clinch the party’s nomination. But she stuck to her plan to use her rally, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, to celebrate her achievement with some of the same New York Democrats who helped her win a Senate seat in 2000, beginning her career in elected office.
The unexpected news on Monday set off conversations within the two campaigns, with Clinton representatives preparing to make overtures to the Sanders camp as early as Wednesday.
Sanders advisers were on edge over the declaration that Mrs. Clinton had locked up the nomination, worried that it would depress voter turnout in California. And Mr. Sanders told NBC on Tuesday evening that he was “upset” and “disappointed” that The A.P. had made its call based on a survey of superdelegates, party officials who can shift their allegiances as late as the convention.
Mr. Sanders said that his aides were “on the phone right now” with superdelegates, including those supporting Mrs. Clinton.
Senator Bernie Sanders greeted people on Tuesday in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
“Defying history is what this campaign has been about,” he said of his bid, which was initially seen as a long shot. “I am going to be meeting with our supporters to figure out the best way forward so that we have a government which represents all of us, and not just the 1 percent.”
His campaign also emailed supporters late Tuesday asking them to commit to vote for him in the final Democratic primary, in the District of Columbia next Tuesday, suggesting that Mr. Sanders was not calling it quits just yet.
Still, he planned to let go a large number of workers on Wednesday, according to current and former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Part of Mr. Sanders’s challenge is that his justifications for continuing his campaign are increasingly thin.
Mrs. Clinton has now won a majority of the 4,051 pledged delegates at stake in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, crossing what Mr. Sanders had long held up as a critical threshold. She also has support from 571 superdelegates to Mr. Sanders’s 48; only about 100 uncommitted superdelegates remain.
The campaign managers for Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton have been speaking recently, including early on Tuesday, about the future of the race and about policy priorities for the party’s convention platform in July, according to two Democrats close to the candidates. So far, the discussions have not included the possibility that Mr. Sanders will concede to Mrs. Clinton or endorse her, the Democrats said, but the groundwork has been laid for an eventual conversation or meeting.
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Several advisers to Mr. Sanders said Tuesday that he had not been inviting opinions or holding meetings about whether to withdraw from the race, nor had he sketched out a speech announcing the suspension of his campaign. They said he had been wholly focused on winning the California primary in hopes that a victory in such a politically important state would help him lobby superdelegates to shift their support.
“Moving a lot of superdelegates into our column will require a big campaign of persuasion, a nationwide logistical effort, but we believe we have a strong case to make to them — especially if we do very well in Tuesday’s primaries,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders.
Other campaign advisers said they expected Mr. Sanders to consider his options during his flight from California to Vermont on Wednesday. One recalled that Mrs. Clinton did much the same when she found herself in a similar situation eight years ago.
The day after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in June 2008, Mrs. Clinton huddled with her advisers and debated whether to hold on to her delegates and try to force a contested convention. She decided to endorse Mr. Obama instead. The two had a tense but productive meeting that Thursday night, and two days later she delivered a speech thanking her supporters and urging them to unite around the party’s presumptive nominee.
The resistance of many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters to Mrs. Clinton is likely to soften once Mr. Sanders leaves the race, and especially if he endorses her. But Clinton advisers and allies say they will need his help to bring around the many younger voters and liberals who prefer him.
If Mrs. Clinton is beginning the general election with many Sanders supporters incensed at her, Mr. Trump is in the midst of his own self-made crisis. He is forcing Republicans to confront a painful choice: Embrace his brand of racial politics, one that could taint the party’s image well beyond this election, or abandon their presumptive nominee and hand the White House to the Democrats for another four years.
But Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, pointing both to the threat from Mr. Trump and to her chance at making history, predicted that she would have an easier time bringing her party together than Mr. Trump would his.
“I think that will sink in over the next few weeks and months and will go a long way to helping unite the party,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said. “I was on the bike this morning and saw on TV that Monday night, Hillary had won the nomination, and I got teary-eyed. From a 10,000-foot perspective, it’s an amazing accomplishment.”
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