SACRAMENTO, Calif.— When Hillary Clinton took the stage here at a local community college on Sunday night, the former secretary of state was technically campaigning against her Democratic rival Sen. Bernie Sanders in Tuesday’s unexpectedly close primary.
But in a blistering 25-minute speech, which was filmed by her campaign’s ad makers, Clinton aimed her remarks entirely at the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, insisting he “is not qualified or temperamentally fit to be president.” Sanders never came up.
Clinton ticked through a litany of issues. Reprising the theme of her widely praised speech on foreign policy last Thursday, she reminded voters that he has “insulted our closest allies,” “praised dictators,” and acted in “very cavalier ways” that would make the country unsafe if he were to be elected.
“We are going to have a very contentious campaign because I am going to point out every single moment that I can why I believe the Republican nominee should never get near the White House,” Clinton said.
Since arriving back in California last week in the face of unexpected weakness in the polls against Sanders, Clinton has appeared to finally find her footing against Trump as she closes in on the Democratic nomination. In her hectic barnstorming schedule across the state, she shifted from primarily painting the real estate tycoon as an out-of-touch billionaire to mocking him as a thin-skinned “fraud” whose lack of political experience would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous.
The shift in tone began with her speech Thursday in San Diego. Clinton dryly stated Trump’s past positions on various foreign policy issues, one by one, as the audience laughed. (“He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or our admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has — quote — ‘a very good brain,’” was one of her laugh lines.) As she crisscrossed the state over the weekend, making dozens of appearances, Clinton joked that she couldn’t believe Trump had really said the things she mocked in her speech. “By the end of working on that speech, even I was saying, ‘Did he really say all of this?’” she told a few hundred supporters in Culver City on Friday. Each time she mentioned her San Diego speech, her audiences cheered.
Sanders, meanwhile, drew crowds of thousands in California at dozens of rallies as he continues to make the pitch that he would be the better candidate to run against Trump, despite significantly trailing Clinton in pledged delegates, superdelegates and the popular vote. His camp feels confident he can win in California, pointing to a 650,000-strong surge in voter enrollment in the past six weeks and polls that show him within the margin of error against Clinton.
Speaking to a few thousand people in Cloverdale, a rural community about 90 miles north of San Francisco, Sanders on Friday mocked Clinton’s unplanned return to the state. “She looks nervous already,” Sanders said. “She was supposed to be campaigning in New Jersey, but suddenly, she and Bill got on a plane, and here they are in California. Sounds like the campaign is not quite over.”
Sanders held a press conference Saturday in downtown Los Angeles to make the case to his dwindling press corps that the media should not declare Clinton the presumptive nominee once she gains the 2,383 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination, which will almost certainly happen Tuesday. (Clinton is only 26 delegates short of that total, and California alone awards 475 delegates Tuesday night.) Sanders argued that Clinton would only become the presumptive nominee once she has won that total without the help of superdelegates, who could switch their votes at the convention. But few of the hundreds of superdelegates who back Clinton have shown any indication of flipping to Sanders.
“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,” Sanders said.
If the race in California is close, state officials could be collecting and counting mail-in ballots for days. In Kentucky last month, the Sanders campaign demanded a recountbecause of the state’s close results. Sanders spokeswoman Symone Sanders said they are expecting a win in California, but will “cross that bridge when we come to it” on a potential recount.
It’s clear that the senator’s persistence in the face of Clinton’s near-certain win is irritating at least one of the Clintons. At an event in East Los Angeles on Sunday, Bill Clintonresponded to Sanders supporters who were heckling him. “If I were them, I’d be screaming too because they know they will be toast by Election Day,” he said.
Clinton, meanwhile, has barely mentioned Sanders during her dozens of campaign stops in the Golden State. But she made an appeal to voters here as they prepare to vote Tuesday. “I can’t do any of this alone,” she said. “I want to finish strong here in California. It means the world to me.”
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