Skelton: How did Trump become the presumptive nominee? Blame Twitter
So California’s Republican presidential primary will be a dud after all. Fantasizing about playing kingmaker — or crown denier — was fun for a while. But reality reared its head in Indiana.
How an insulting, ill-mannered, public policy ignoramus could be chosen by voters to be the presidential nominee of a major party will be pondered for years, probably decades.
Sure, there’s an anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-politician, even anti-party revolt festering. Many voters feel left out economically. Many think they’re oppressed by a powerful, detached government. Many resent being spun and used by the political system. Many are angry at political paralysis.
Snapshot from the trail: A tiny supporter of Donald Trump?
Mexico’s Vicente Fox: Why a Trump presidency should scare both Mexicans and Americans
Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox isn’t the guy you would expect to see sporting a bright pink Donald Trump brand tie.
Fox has had plenty to say about the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee — and none of it is complimentary. But then he has a point he wants to make:
“Look at the back, hidden here,” he says, pointing to the manufacturer’s label. “‘Made in China.’ So he’s really protecting workers in the United States, protecting jobs in the United States.”
Fox, a rancher and former Coca-Cola executive who served as Mexico’s leader from 2000 to 2006, has long identified with the Republican Party. But in this election, he supports the candidacy of a Democrat: Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton wins Guam, Bernie Sanders picks up delegates in Washington state
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has cut into Hillary Clinton’s lead in the Democratic presidential race by more than two dozen delegates, based on new data from Washington state, but his chances of winning the nomination haven’t gotten much better. Clinton won the Guam caucus.
In Guam, the party said the former secretary of State won 60% of the vote to earn four of the seven delegates at stake. Sanders will pick up three delegates.
The Pacific island is one of five U.S. territories that casts votes in primaries and caucuses to decide the nominee, even though those residents aren’t eligible to vote in November. Often overlooked, Guam drew attention this election cycle from both the presidential candidates, who ran radio advertisements in a bid to scoop up any possible delegates in the final stretch of primaries and caucuses.
Combined with some delegate gains in Washington state, Clinton now has 94% of the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination as she seeks to look ahead to a November matchup against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Sanders has said he will take his delegate fight to the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.
In Washington state, Sanders handily won the caucus on March 26, when the Vermont senator won 25 of the 34 delegates awarded that day. An additional 67 district-level delegates could not be divided up until the state party released vote data broken down by congressional district.
District-level data provided Saturday to the Associated Press show that Sanders will pick up 49 of those delegates, and Clinton will receive 18.
Donald Trump’s latest target includes Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Bernie Sanders pushes ahead, but the math is not on his side
A month before voters in California go to the polls in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, his campaign is lagging in fundraising, and he’s down in the polls.
But a defiant Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders isn’t going anywhere, despite his uphill climb to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner and likely nominee.
“I’m going to fight to see that we can win,” Sanders said in an interview on the PBS NewsHour on Friday evening.
The Vermont senator needs about 1,000 more delegates to clinch the nomination, while Clinton needs fewer than 200.
All but a handful of states have held their primaries or caucuses, and most that remain allocate delegates proportionally, ensuring that both candidates will pick up some delegates.
For Sanders, California’s June 7 primary, in which 546 delegates will be up for grabs, is critical to his underdog candidacy.
Yet the polls are not in his favor.
In each of the last four polls of California Democrats over the last month, Clinton has led Sanders. An average of the polls has Clinton ahead by about 10 percentage points.
This week, Clinton called on Sanders to take a page from her 2008 playbook, when she dropped out of the primary after it became clear that then-Sen. Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee.
“I knew then that whatever differences we might have had in the campaign, they were nothing compared to the differences between us and the Republicans,” Clinton said while campaigning in Los Angeles. “Now if that was true in ‘08, that is true on steroids today.”
Trump calls Hillary Clinton a nasty enabler of her husband’s extramarital affairs
Three days after emerging as the all-but-certain Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump launched a full-scale attack on Hillary Clinton over the way she handled her husband’s infidelity.
Trump, whose derogatory remarks about women have fueled his deep unpopularity among female voters, told supporters Friday night in Eugene, Ore., that nobody “maybe in the history of the country, politically, was worse than Bill Clinton with women.”
“He was a disaster,” Trump said. “I mean, there’s never been anybody like this, and she was a total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives.
“Have you ever read what Hillary Clinton did to the women that Bill Clinton had affairs with? And they’re going after me with women? Give me a break, folks.”
Trump’s comments underscored the volatility of his campaign against his presumed Democratic rival over the next six months, with the celebrity businessman unabashed about bursting through boundaries observed by traditional politicians. They also signaled he will try to force Clinton, and the nation, to relive the low points of her husband’s presidency and tumultuous campaigns.
Earlier in the primary season, Trump made similar remarks after Clinton criticized his attitude toward women. For weeks, he then took credit for muzzling the former First Lady and her husband, suggesting his counterpunch was more than they could handle.
Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson did not respond to an email requesting comment.
At the Oregon rally, Trump said he expected Clinton forces to spend $90 million on ads attacking him for his comments about women. He alluded to crude remarks he’d made years ago on Howard Stern’s radio show. Trump said he would have “talked a little bit differently” if he’d known he was going to run for president some day.
In February, BuzzFeed News published highlights of Trump’s conversations with Stern. “A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10,” he told Stern in one of them.
In Oregon, Trump offered an extended defense of his comment months ago that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had blood coming out of her “wherever” when she asked him in a debate about calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”
When he turned to Clinton, Trump provided no specifics on his charge that she mistreated women who’d slept with her husband.
“She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women was disgraceful,” Trump said. “So put that in her bonnet, and let’s see what happens, OK?”
Clinton ends her swing through California with a visit to Oakland to marshal her troops
Hillary Clinton finished her swing through California on Friday with a rally, a visit to her Oakland field office and a series of fundraisers — a triple-barreled approach to campaigning in the Bay Area.
Hundreds of supporters gathered at a school to hear Clinton rail against Donald Trump, who became the presumptive Republican nominee this week when his final rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, dropped out of the race.
The Democratic front-runner reminded her audience that Trump had pledged to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally and suggested that women should be punished for having abortions, a stance he later reversed.
How many delegates does Hillary Clinton have compared with Bernie Sanders?
Hillary Clinton is the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, but how many delegates does she need to win?
Our Los Angeles Times graphic has the details.