As California prepares to vote, Clinton

Californians geared up Monday for their state's high-profile primary, the last major vote in a process all-but-certain to culminate with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump facing off in the US presidential election.

Clinton was mounting a hectic 48-hour campaign push before Tuesday's primary, hoping to finish strong and end any argument for her nomination rival Bernie Sanders to remain in the race, as he has pledged to do until the Democratic national convention in July.

"It's not over until it's over, and tomorrow is a really important day particularly right here in California," the former secretary of state told reporters at a community center in Compton, near Los Angeles.

An hour later, standing out in the bright southern California sunshine, she told a few hundred supporters at a bilingual rally in the heavily Hispanic town of Lynwood that she would be "deeply honored and humbled for it to be Hillary day" on Tuesday.
"But that all depends on all of you," she said as she encouraged her supporters to help get out the vote.

Polls show a very tight race in California. But regardless of the outcome here Clinton appears assured of winning the number of delegates necessary to clinch her party's nomination.

Trump did so last month on the Republican side, becoming his party's presumptive nominee.

- Unprecedented matchup -

Six states hold Democratic primaries Tuesday including New Jersey, where polls close earliest and which will likely push Clinton over the threshold.

The victory -- to be made official at the nominating convention in July -- would make Clinton the first female nominee of a major US political party, and set the stage for an unprecedented matchup with real estate tycoon Trump, a political neophyte who turned American campaigning on its ear during an extraordinary primary season.

Clinton sought to downplay the historic nature of her accomplishment, saying she wanted to "stay focused" on Tuesday's contests.
"I was delighted to win Puerto Rico, delighted to win Virgin Islands," she said of her weekend victories in two US territories that pushed her to the brink of the nomination.

"We are moving forward every day and by tomorrow night I'll have more to say about it."

Clinton is scheduled to hold a primary event Tuesday in Brooklyn, New York.

Her surrogates were eager to highlight history in the making, after the former first lady came up short in her 2008 challenge against Barack Obama.

"Let's make sure those 18 million cracks that this woman put in the glass ceiling eight years ago shatter once and for all," actor Tony Goldwyn said in Lynwood.

- 'Have to be unified' -

Sanders still stands in Clinton's way -- at least regarding party unity -- by repeatedly stating he will take his fight to the convention in Philadelphia, regardless of Tuesday's outcome.

Clinton vowed Monday to "do everything I can to unify the Democratic Party," saying she would be reaching out to Sanders.

"And I hope he'll join me in that. We have to be unified going into and out of the convention to take on Donald Trump and to repudiate the kind of campaign he's running."

Clinton offered her familiar support for expanding renewable energy, enshrining equal pay for equal work, improving gun safety and ensuring greater rights for immigrants, including a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented.

Trump, she said, was opposed to all of the above.

"So when I hear Donald Trump attacking people based on their immigrant status, their religion, their disabilities, their gender, whatever the reason he attacks people, I am so upset because that is not who we are as Americans," said Clinton. 

"We need to stop this divisiveness, this bullying and bigotry."

Clinton has sharpened her attacks on Trump, using a foreign policy speech last week to declare him "temperamentally unfit" to lead the world's most powerful nation.

Trump blasted back Sunday.

"Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president. She has bad judgement, poor leadership skills and a very bad and destructive track record. Change!" he posted on Twitter.

Source: AFP