CULVER CITY, Calif. — Hillary Clinton exhorted California Democrats on Friday to quickly mail back ballots for Tuesday’s primary as she races to hold off a strong surge from rival Sen. Bernie Sanders that would sully the nomination victory she expects to claim the same day.
Both Sanders and Clinton are urging supporters to turn out for what each calls a crucial symbolic vote that caps the long and increasingly contentious Democratic primary. Front-runner Clinton, however, is focusing on California’s high percentage of voters who mail in their ballots rather than cast them in person.
“We have to, starting with the California primary on Tuesday, send an unmistakable message we are stronger together,” Clinton said. “We’re going to work together for a better and fairer nation, and that’s why I need all of you to send in those ballots that are sitting on your kitchen table. Send them in today; send them in tomorrow. Make sure everybody you know who has a ballot sitting around sends them in,” Clinton said.
Sanders’s campaign spent months registering voters, and informing those with “no party preference” that they could request Democratic ballots. At his rallies, however, Sanders stays away from the nitty gritty of the system and focuses on getting people out on election day, June 7.
“If there is a large voter turnout, we will win,” Sanders said to thousands of supporters in Chico on Thursday night. “If there is a very large voter turnout, we will win by big numbers. If there is a low voter turnout, we will lose.”
Mail-in ballots, which have accounted for more than half of all ballots cast in recent elections in the state, may favor Clinton because they are often requested by the kind of older and reliably Democratic voters who have been her strongest supporters this year. But a large number of ballots that were requested have not been returned, leading to worry among Clinton backers that voters have disengaged.
Clinton leads Sanders by just two points – a statistical tie – in three recent California polls. She did not mention Sanders in upbeat remarks to a women-themed rally here that included many Hollywood figures.
“California votes in huge numbers, as you know, by mail, right? And so we need all of you to join with the hundreds of thousands of Californians who have already voted,” Clinton said.
For those who have not found the time to send in a ballot, Clinton said, “we need everybody to show up on June 7.”
California voters can exchange an unused mail-in ballot for an in-person one on Primary Day.
“If all goes well, I will have the great honor as of Tuesday to be the Democratic nominee,” Clinton said Friday, the rest of her words drowned out by cheers.
Clinton and former president Bill Clinton are separately zig-zagging across California in a five-day push to salvage what had been a commanding lead for Clinton in the nation’s most diverse state.
She focused Thursday on Hispanic voters in El Centro, and on Friday sought out Asian-American voters in Westminster, where the local president of the Vietnamese-American Democratic Club was among the speakers who welcomed her.
Clinton does not need to win California to win the nomination, but a loss here would highlight weaknesses, including a lack of strong support from younger voters.
Sanders maintains that California can still deliver him the delegates he needs to win, although that remains prohibitively unlikely. At the least, a Sanders victory in California would strengthen his leverage to demand policy, procedural or other changes from a Democratic Party he has claimed has stacked the deck against his insurgent candidacy.
On Thursday, Sanders was introduced at rallies by the actress Susan Sarandon, who said that voters needed to resist any attempts to deny them the vote.
“You can tell people you went to the polls, and you brought your friends, you brought your parents – you brought everybody,” Sarandon said in Chico. “And if there was any problem at the polls, you stayed there until you fixed it. You are not going to back down. You are not going to be cheated.”
Earlier in her address at a community college here, Clinton joked that her long career in public policy leads to periodic reexamination of positions on children’s welfare and other issues she said she has held “for what, 40 years?”
“People keep discovering me. I’m like an archaeological dig,” she joked.
Some of the more than one dozen introductory speakers who welcomed Clinton here highlighted elements of that record while blasting her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. None dwelled on Sanders and the challenge he still poses for Clinton.
“She has been scrutinized, dissected and vetted more than anyone in this country and for more years,” actress Sally Field said, before zeroing in on one of Clinton’s weak points as a candidate – the large number of people who say they don’t like her.
“Over the past months, I have hear the word ‘likability’ used so often,” Field exclaimed. “What is this? A high school popularity contest? She’s not running to be everybody’s friend. She’s running to be the president of the United States.”
dems-calif
———-
Keywords:
