US elections: Hillary Clinton takes the fight to California

As Hillary Clinton landed in California to carry on her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she was pursued by the words of her likely general election rival. On Wednesday, Donald Trump admitted to CNN that he had expected to fight a longer, tougher primary campaign than Ms Clinton, who began the race a prohibitive favourite.

“There’s been a little flip,” said the race-baiting billionaire, shortly after being told that the last of his Republican rivals had withdrawn from the contest. “I thought that I’d be going longer and she’d be going shorter. She can’t put it away… I thought that I’d be out there and she'd be campaigning against me.”

In spite of her overwhelming lead in both votes and party delegates, Ms Clinton has yet to dispatch her challenger, the progressive Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has vowed to continue campaigning at least as far as the California primary on 7 June. California holds 546 Democratic delegates, far more than any other state in the race.

Mr Sanders’s fundraising prowess has faded along with his nomination prospects in the past month, but his campaign has said it will devote the vast majority of its remaining resources to what it hopes will become a competitive primary in the Golden State, where Ms Clinton currently leads the polls by around 10 points on average.

For Mr Sanders to cause an upset here would be a major blow to her campaign’s confidence as she seeks to unify Democrats ahead of their convention in Philadelphia in July. The former Secretary of State is pulling out all the stops to prevent it, telling an audience in Washington DC on Wednesday: “We’re going to be campaigning up and down the Golden State.”

When Mr Trump appeared in California last week, he was met with large protests led by Latino activists opposed to his harsh anti-immigration rhetoric. While she enjoys widespread support in this deep blue state, Ms Clinton is not immune to popular anger. Latino groups planned to picket her first public campaign event in the state, a Thursday rally in East Los Angeles, calling her an enemy of the working class and criticising her Central American policies as Secretary of State.

Speaking in Los Angeles on Wednesday, her husband Bill Clinton insisted that, as President, Ms Clinton would strive on behalf of working-class Americans as well as protecting and promoting American interests overseas. Without naming her prospective opponent, the former President drew a sharp contrast between his wife and Mr Trump, whose policy platform includes building a wall the length of the US-Mexican border and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the US.

“I know there are some people who say we need to build a fence across the Rio Grande,” Mr Clinton said. “You could build a wall across the border with Canada. We could erect vast seawalls along the Pacific and the Atlantic Coast. The next president could send the Navy to the Gulf Coast area to block all entry. [But] we cannot kill our way out of the current international crisis. We have to make more friends.”

Ms Clinton’s campaign also faces other threats, such as the claims of a Romanian hacker who said this week that he had managed to access her “completely unsecured” private email server during her tenure at the State Department. Marcel Lazar, known online as “Guccifer”, told NBC News that the server had been “like an open orchid on the internet”.

Mr Lazar, who was recently extradited from Romania to the US to face hacking charges, presented no evidence to support the claims, which the Clinton campaign said were groundless. “There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell,” said campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.

A federal judge has also ruled that Ms Clinton may have to give a deposition in a lawsuit regarding her private emails, brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch. Judge Emmet Sullivan said this week that it “may be necessary” for Judicial Watch lawyers to question the candidate on her past email arrangements.

Yet while Ms Clinton could face outside distractions from the coming general election, there are plenty of other people lining up to attack Mr Trump on her behalf, as her campaign demonstrated with an ad, released yesterday, which consists solely of top Republican figures criticising their own presumptive nominee.