Trump duels Clinton and Sanders in North Carolina
USA - Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigned head to head in North Carolina on Thursday, holding competing rallies only 30 miles apart in a state where polls show the Republican gaining on the Democrat five days before the presidential election.
North Carolina has a large and growing African American population and a growing number of young, white and college-educated voters, which means it has long figured in Clinton’s plan to win states where Barack Obama lost in 2012. On Thursday evening she tried to appeal to those voters in Raleigh, alongside her former rival, Bernie Sanders, and the singer Pharrell Williams. The trio appeared before a raucous crowd of about 5,200 people at an outdoor amphitheater, where Sanders drew an especially strong response from the largely young crowd, who broke into chants of “Bernie”. The Democratic nominee largely let her surrogates argue for her, underscoring the Vermont senator’s continued popularity among a demographic with which Clinton has struggled. “This is not a personality contest,” Sanders implored voters. “We’re not voting for high school president. We’re voting for the most powerful leader in the world.” Sanders told the crowd that Trump represented an unacceptable option, and that the “cornerstone” of his campaign was bigotry. “We are not going back to a bigoted society,” Sanders said. “We’re not going to allow Trump or anyone else to divide us up.” The senator’s remarks returned to familiar themes from his former stump speech, from addressing income inequality to reducing the amount of money in politics, in a bid to persuade supporters to cast their ballots for Clinton if they wished to see his agenda realized. (Theguardian.com)