LOS ANGELES — Bernie Sanders won California's Democratic presidential primary on Super Tuesday.

The state has 415 delegates at stake, the biggest haul on the electoral map. 

The projection came just minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m. with many voters still waiting in line to cast their ballots at voting centers.

ELECTION RESULTS | California Super Tuesday Latest

Sanders' campaign has long seen the nation's most populous state as a critical early contest and has had droves of volunteers organizing events across the state.

Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton and was hoping for a comeback that would be a capstone moment for the state's progressive wing.

In the years since the last presidential election, the Sanders campaign invested heavily in expanding its appeal to California voters. In SoCal neighborhoods like East L.A., the campaign worked around the clock to court the youth and Latino vote in the build-up to the California primary.

RELATED | California Primary Live Blog

The Vermont senator has also won Utah, Vermont and Colorado. Joe Biden has won Massachusetts, Arkansas, Minnesota, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Virginia. 

About a third of all pledged delegates in the Democratic primary are up for grabs on this Super Tuesday.

Although Super Tuesday will not necessarily determine who wins the nomination, it has historically been difficult for a candidate who performs poorly on the day to recover. The Democratic Party will now have weeks, or even months, to pick either Sanders or Biden to go up against President Trump in November

Apart from California, the other states participating are Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, North Carolina, Virgina, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma.

With reports of many Los Angeles voters still waiting in line to cast their ballots, the Bernie Sanders campaign has filed papers in federal court requesting that vote centers in L.A. County remain open to anyone who is in line by 10 p.m. The county has said that anyone who was in line by the regular closing time of 8 p.m. will be allowed to vote.

The Associated Press has contributed to this report.