With less than a week until the New York primary, Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House is clear — as long as black voters pave her way.
It’s a familiar position for the former senator, who was hailed as the “inevitable” Democratic candidate early in the 2008 race.
Competing against a charismatic but fairly unknown young senator from Illinois, Clinton and her supporters turned increasingly bitter as her voting base among blacks gradually drifted away.
It was Barack Obama who got to make history as the Democratic nominee and later the nation’s first African-American President.
But it appears to have been a lesson well learned for the 68-year-old Clinton — who yearns to be the first woman President.
Faced again with a progressive Democratic rival — Bernie Sanders, whose stirring calls for social change contain echoes of Obama — Clinton is taking nothing for granted, especially the black vote.
Hillary Clinton has campaigned heavily in black communities ahead of the New York primary.
Sanders, a Vermont senator who identifies as a democratic socialist, needs to take the same “big tent” approach Obama did for his first landmark win: energizing blacks and Latinos, plus young voters. But according to the latest Quinnipiac University Poll, released Tuesday, Sanders is scoring with only one of the big three — young voters.
Clinton has a stranglehold on the rest — and in the case of the state’s black vote, she’s trouncing Sanders, 65% to his 28%.
Yet even with that commanding lead, Clinton is devoting a huge chunk of her schedule to stumping in black communities — including visits to three black churches last Sunday.
At each one, Clinton wooed audiences with glowing mentions of Obama — perhaps to ease the sting of her brutal assessment of him eight years earlier.
“I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves,” she said, praising the Affordable Care Act and the rebooting of the economy.