Campaigning ahead of April 19 New York primary, front-runner Clinton says she needs to ‘win big’ in her home state
Campaigning in New York City Saturday, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders invoked his Judaism as a basis for his understanding of racial injustice.
The Vermont senator spoke Saturday at a forum on race and social justice issues at Harlem’s Apollo Theater ahead of the state’s April 19 primary.
He said he could remember tears coming down his face when he learned as a child that most of his father’s family had been killed in the Holocaust.
He said that knowledge helped him understand that hatred based on the color of someone’s skin or accent is “grotesque and awful.”
Sanders told the crowd that he knew from a young age he wanted to spend his life fighting that type of hatred and systemic racism.
Sanders rarely talks about being Jewish when campaigning. He told the crowd he finds it “uncomfortable” to talk about himself.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was also campaigning in New York Saturday. She told a rally in Brooklyn that she needed to “win big” in her home state’s primary to become the Democratic presidential nominee and “go after Republicans full-time.”
The former New York senator said she wanted to “send a strong message” and start unifying the Democratic Party. She said she was 2.5 million votes and 220 pledged delegates ahead of rival Sanders in the race.
Clinton spoke just hours after losing to Sanders in the Wyoming presidential caucus. The loss had no impact on the delegate race since they split the delegates evenly.
Speaking in a loft space in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood, Clinton also reiterated her support for the DREAM Act and a path to citizenship. She criticized Republicans for making anti-immigration statements a “core of their campaign.”
Earlier Saturday, Sanders extended his seven-state winning streak in his bid to defeat front-runner Clinton, grabbing victory in the Wyoming Democratic caucuses. The Vermont senator won 56 percent of the Wyoming vote to 44 percent for Clinton, CNN projected, with most ballots counted.
Sanders’s wife interrupted his remarks at a campaign rally in New York Saturday afternoon with news of his latest victory.
He quickly relayed the word to the crowd of several hundred people: “All right. News bulletin. We just won Wyoming.”
After a standing ovation, he joked that there are probably more people at his event than live in Wyoming.
Wyoming distributes its candidates by percentage of the vote. Each candidate picked up seven of the state’s 14 delegates.
The victory means Sanders has now won 16 states, seven of them in a row in his longest winning streak yet. Clinton has won 18 states.
But Sanders’s win will do little to change the overall delegate count. To date, Clinton has 1,286 delegates based on primaries and caucuses to Sanders’s 1,037.
Sanders still needs to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates if he hopes to take the Democratic nomination. It takes 2,383 to win.
As reported by The Times of Israel