Clinton ahead on final day of US primaries

NEW YORK

The last major primaries of the 2016 White House race kicked off on Tuesday in New Jersey and California, hours after US delegate counts showed Mrs Hillary Clinton clinching the Democratic nomination.

The first polls opened at 6 am (1000 GMT) in New Jersey, with voting beginning four hours later in California, the country’s most populous state.

Passing the milestone of 2,383 delegates late on Monday secured Mrs Clinton’s status as the presumptive Democratic nominee, and she becomes the first female standard-bearer of a major US political party.

It’s a dramatic political resurgence for a highly experienced but controversial candidate who lost to Barack Obama in their 2008 battle for the Democratic nomination.

This time the 68-year-old former secretary of state survived an extraordinarily strong grassroots campaign by her party rival Bernie Sanders and is set to go head-to-head with Republican real estate tycoon Donald Trump in an unprecedented showdown for the White House.

But Mr Sanders was not ready to capitulate, insisting the Democratic nominee will not be chosen until delegates vote at the party’s national convention in late July.

And while her campaign acknowledged the US network tallies that pushed her over the line were “an important milestone,” Clinton said the Democratic race was not yet over.

“We are on the brink of a historic, historic, unprecedented moment,” she told a rally in Long Beach, California.

HECTIC PUSH

“But we still have work to do, don’t we?” she said, referring to Tuesday’s primaries in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Clinton has mounted a hectic push in California, keen to finish strong and end any argument for Sanders to remain in the race.

Nancy Worley, chair of Alabama’s Democratic Party, is one of the so-called super-delegates — current and former elected officials and political activists who are not bound to vote for a specific candidate — who in a last-minute flurry pushed Clinton over the threshold.

She explained how she had yet to commit to a candidate until Monday, when she received phone calls from three US news outlets.

“If the popular vote is overwhelming and the delegates are very much in her camp, in my opinion, it’s kind of crazy not to unify the party and move forward to defeat Donald Trump,” Worley told AFP, noting how Democrats in her state chose Clinton by a wide margin.

Clinton pointed out Monday that she has earned three million more votes than Sanders and is well ahead in the pledged delegate count.

But Sanders has long argued the system is tilted against him, with hundreds of super-delegates aligning with Clinton before he even entered the race last year.

BIG VICTORIES

The Vermont senator, looking for big victories Tuesday, contends he will use the coming weeks to try and flip many of Clinton’s super-delegates in his favour.

Clinton has been a polarizing figure over her three decades in the public eye, and lingering scandals include her use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state. Questions about her transparency and honesty have pushed up her unfavourability numbers to levels that rival Trump’s.

On Monday she vowed to “do everything I can to unify the Democratic Party,” saying she would reach out to Sanders.
Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee last month.

But the provocative billionaire has stirred controversy since then, including belligerent attacks on a judge presiding over a case against the Trump University real estate program.

Trump has claimed the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, is a “Mexican” who is biased against him because of Trump’s call to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Curiel was born in the US state of Indiana to Mexican parents.