Clinton and Trump seek convention bounce
DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE VOWS TO WORK FOR FURTHERING ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY, DIVERSITY AND NATIONAL SECURITY
With 101 days to go before Americans elect a new president, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hit the campaign trail yesterday hoping to secure a poll bump from their duelling party conventions.
In the last fortnight Republicans and Democrats have gathered to select their presidential nominees and tee-up what is already one of the most fractious and vitriolic presidential campaigns in living memory.
Clinton, fresh from becoming the first woman in history to win the nomination of a major US political party, will take her running-mate Tim Kaine on a bus journey through Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The so-called “rustbelt” states are vital parts of almost any strategy to garner the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.
Accepting her party’s nomination, Clinton vowed to be a president for all Americans “for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. For the struggling, the striving and the successful. For those who vote for me and those who don’t.”
In an hour-long primetime address, she laid out plans to boost the US economy, stressing that “my primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages.”
Trump meanwhile will be in Colorado, another battleground state, where his plan to build a wall on the Mexican border could resonate with angry white voters but turn Hispanic voters away.
H illary Clinton capped a four-day convention celebration with a plea for national unity and tolerance. Now, one of the most divisive and distrusted figures in American politics must convince voters that she, rather than Republican rival Donald Trump, can bring a deeply divided nation together.
“America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart,” Clinton said to a rapt Democratic convention audience. “And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we all will work together so we all can rise together.”
After a convention speech aimed squarely at undercutting Trump, the first female presidential nominee embarks on a bus tour through two Rust Belt battlegrounds, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The shoot-from-thehip billionaire believes he can make headway in those states with blue-collar white men, a demographic that has eluded Clinton and was unlikely to be swayed by a convention that heavily celebrated racial and gender diversity.
Trump’s tweeted response to Clinton’s speech captured his pitch to those voters. He slammed the former secretary of state as an ineffectual defender against terrorism and blasted her judgement.
“Hillary’s vision is a borderless world where working people have no power, no jobs, no safety,” he wrote.
Starting with a rally yesterday at Temple University, Clinton, accompanied by running mate Senator Tim Kaine and their spouses, will focus on economic opportunity, diversity and national security, themes hammered home this week by an array of politicians, celebrities, gun-violence victims, law enforcement officers, and activists of all sexualities and races.
Their goal is to turn out the coalition of minority, female and young voters that twice elected President Barack Obama while offsetting expected losses among the white male voters drawn to Trump’s message.
Democrats contrasted their optimistic, policy-laden message with the darker vision and less specific platform that marked Trump’s turn during the Republican convention a week earlier. Trump is offering “empty promises,” Clinton said, while arguing she has a bold agenda “to keep you safe, to get you good jobs, and to give your kids the opportunities they deserve”. Selling that message will depend on whether Clinton can reach voters walled off by long-standing distrust.