Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) finally came out and said it. He admitted for the first time that he probably wasn't going to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination after all.

AP/John Locher - apimages.com

The Vermont senator made the admission in an interview with C-SPAN on Wednesday. Asked whether he'd give a speech at the Democratic National Convention, where the party's presidential nominee will be officially selected on July 25, Sanders said this:

"Well, it is hard to say. It doesn't appear that I'm going to be the nominee, so I won't be determining the scope of the convention."

This development comes about two weeks after his opponent Hillary Clinton secured enough pledged delegates to be named the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, according to a projection by the Associated Press. Clinton has 2,200 pledged delegates and nearly 600 confirmed superdelegates. (She needs 2,383 to secure the nomination.)

Sanders wasn't exactly holding out hope that the tides would shift in his favor, but some of his supporters were.

Sanders has now verbally and publicly acknowledged that he's unlikely to advance to the general election. That's only surprising because he's avoided doing so explicitly in the weeks since Clinton won a majority of states in the June 7 primaries in California, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, and South Dakota.

Instead, Sanders has implied that the reason he's declining to concede is to further shape the progressive agenda heading into the convention, as ATTN: recently reported.

[h/t Business Insider]

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