‘WHAT A SUPER TUESDAY’: CLINTON CRUISES IN SOUTH
Front-runner has started turning focus to Trump
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton campaigned on Super Tuesday with the political wind at her back, grabbing seven victories in Virginia, Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, Massachusetts, Texas and Tennessee, and losing Vermont, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota to her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The races were called by the Associated Press and major networks shortly after the polls closed in those states.
“What a Super Tuesday!” Clinton said shortly before 9 p.m. in Miami. “Democrats voted to break down barriers, so we can all rise together.”
Sanders spoke to supporters early in the evening in Essex Junction, Vt., evoking loud cheers with a familiar refrain: “This is not just about electing a president. It’s about making a political revolution!”
He said that given Democratic primary rules, which provide for proportional allocation of delegates rather than winner-take-all, “by the end of tonight, we are going to win many hundreds of delegates.” That sparked frenzied chants of “Bernie! Bernie!”
Clinton seemed confident that a series of primary victories would cripple Sanders’ nomination hopes, and as votes were being cast Tuesday, she increasingly focused on her likely opponent in November — Donald Trump.
Trump and the other Republican candidates “are now running their campaigns based on insults. It’s turned into a kind of one-upmanship on insulting, and I don’t think that’s appropriate in a presidential campaign,” she said. She faulted the GOP candidates for “a lot of … bigotry and bullying.”
That night, speaking to a women’s group in the affluent South Florida enclave of Bal Harbour, she said, “I do think we need more love and kindness.”
Her greatest challenge might not have been to beat Sanders as much as to avoid alienating his many enthusiastic, young supporters.
To that end, here was Brian Fallon, Clinton’s spokesman: “Sen. Sanders has done a great job of extending the Democratic brand.”
Even as the Clinton camp extended the olive branch to Sanders, it braced for blows from Trump, who stressed in an interview on ABC’s Good Morning
America that he had not yet begun to fight: “I haven’t even focused on Hillary Clinton. … I can tell you the one person that Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to run against is me.”
But a new CNN/ORC poll found that Trump was the only major GOP contender Clinton would beat if the election were held now. And Sanders beat them all.
Clinton poked at Trump’s slogan — “Make America Great Again” — in her victory speech, saying “America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole.”
Unlike some of Trump’s fellow Republicans, Clinton did not say his recent comments about the support he received from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke disqualified him from the presidency.
She said the statement should be “repudiated upon hearing it. .. We can’t let organizations and individuals who hold deplorable views about what it means to be an American to be given any credence at all.”
In Virginia, Clinton had people such as Roberto and Baljn Narneta, who voted at a Newport News community center, to thank for her victory. “I came to America during Clinton time and the economy was good,” said Baljn, 44.
And though the couple said they liked Sanders’ policies, she described them as unrealistic — “kinda good, but kinda imaginary,” she said. “I can dream like that, too, but what he’s proposing is not a clear-cut plan.”
Clinton hoped the year’s biggest single-day delegate haul — 865 of the 2,383 needed to nominate — would put her on a path to becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole.”
Hillary Clinton, taking a jab at Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”