Front-runner pulls away from Sanders, sets eyes on November
PHILADELPHIA — After months of trying to sideline an unexpectedly deft and well-financed primary opponent, Hillary Clinton on Tuesday got the results she needed to declare a de facto victory against Sen. Bernie Sanders and shift her attention decisively toward the November election.
Clinton was dominant in four of Tuesday’s five Democratic races — Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut. She ceded only Rhode Island to Sanders.
Now all but certain to clinch the Democratic nomination, Clinton is expected to move swiftly to claim an early advantage against the leading Repub-
lican candidate, Donald Trump. Her advisers and allies say she will spend the coming weeks honing her message for the general election and stepping up fundraising efforts that have lagged in the face of Sanders’ challenge.
After a landslide win in New York last week, Clinton had already begun to treat Sanders as a greatly diminished threat, concentrating her fire on Trump and, to a lesser degree, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. A powerful showing in the states that voted Tuesday will only accelerate that shift.
In recent days, she sharpened her pitch about the general election’s stakes, heading off Republican attacks on her record as secretary of state under President Barack Obama and delivering a more forceful message about the economy and the need to create jobs and lift wages.
“Donald Trump actually says wages are too high in America,” Clinton said at a rally in Rhode Island, on Saturday. “Honestly, I don’t know who he spends his time talking to, but I recommend he get out of one of those towers and actually go down and talk to some of the folks who are working as hard as they can.”
Clinton is not expected to publicly pressure Sanders to quit the race. Clinton advisers say that any efforts to muscle him out could backfire, angering his supporters and making it harder to unite the party for the fall.
But a “super PAC” supporting Clinton’s candidacy, Priorities USA Action, may start running general election ads even before the nominating contest ends.
Guy Cecil, the group’s chief strategist, said it might run ads against Trump or Cruz, “depending on how the Republican primary develops and whether they decide to launch attacks against Hillary.”
In coming weeks, Clinton will campaign in states with looming primaries, but she will also recharge and spend time in New York plotting a generalelection strategy with advisers. “She needs to be smart and calculated and prepare herself for a tough general election,” said Thomas Nides, a friend who worked for Clinton at the State Department.
After months of focusing on the 2,383 delegates needed for the Democratic nomination, her campaign has begun to analyze the Electoral College, working out potential races against Trump and Cruz.
The Clinton campaign will begin polling in traditional battleground states like Ohio and Florida. But it will also pore over data in traditionally Republican states like Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia that could be in play, particularly if Trump is the nominee, and focus on demographics beyond the Democratic primary electorate.
“Realistically, the most important part in all of this are white working-class women,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster and strategist on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, citing Clinton’s emphasis on issues like equal pay for women and an increase in the minimum wage.
Sanders’ campaign vowed Tuesday to remain in the fight through the California primary June 7, and perhaps until the party’s convention in July.
Clinton’s aides and allies are pressuring Sanders to run on issues rather than continuing to attack Clinton’s ties to Wall Street or her previous support for global trade deals — attacks that Republicans are likely to use in the fall.
It is a message Sanders’ campaign has resisted. As voters went to the polls Tuesday, the campaign blasted out a fundraising email. It contained an image of Bill and Hillary Clinton at the 2005 wedding of Trump to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, and accused Clinton’s allies of being “traitors” in their treatment of Sanders.
Tad Devine, a senior aide to Sanders, played down the possibility of Sanders’ withdrawal but said the campaign would not mislead voters about his chances of winning the nomination. “If we are sitting here and there’s no sort of mathematical way to do it, we will be upfront about that,” he said.