Ahead of today’s primaries [April 19], the front-running Presidential candidates made some last-ditch attempts to gain support from New York voters. Was it enough to gain your vote?
Female Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, rallied in Midtown Manhattan, alongside Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Gabrielle Giffords and Cecile Richards (president of Planned Parenthood) in a bid to secure the women’s vote. She also visited the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village, nurses in Yonkers and grabbed a sundae from Mikey Likes It Ice Cream in the East Village. The sundae was named after her as thanks for her support of the small ex-con owned business, which is now a staple of the community for its Hip Hop themed ice cream.
She included all ethnicities in her campaign, sampling dim sum and celebrating the businesses of Mexican immigrants. She drummed in messages of support for hard-working citizens and of the popular bill to help terror victim families sue foreign governments through the US courts, which Senator Sanders also supports. She was confident, but not complacent about her popularity in New York: “I know we’re going to win because we’re on the right side of history.”
Fellow Democrat, Bernie Sanders, spoke at Prospect Park in his hometown of Brooklyn and held an evening rally at Hunters Point in Queens. He received an overwhelmingly positive response when he went to greet supporters in Midtown, Manhattan. He walked fourteen blocks to interact with his fans and the local businesses in the area.
Along the way, he met with Verizon workers and cheered for the 1,101 union members of the Communications Workers of America Local Union. He thanked people for taking a stand against corporate greed and spoke on unemployment and health care benefits. His supporters are typically liberal white people, so his rallies were targeted on gaining the minority vote. He was also optimistic about the NY vote: “We are going to win this thing.”
Controversial GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, rallied in Poughkeepsie and Buffalo; where he mistakenly referred to the 9/11 tragedy as 7-Eleven (the convenience store), but managed to bounce back. It’s not been a great week for the business mogul with his National Field Director, Stuart Jolly, resigning and the Republican Consultant, Cheri Jacobus, filing a multi-million dollar libel suit against him and campaign Manager, Corey Lewandowski.
Jacobus is claiming personal and professional damage to her reputation after their comments about her being “a real dummy” and someone that “begged my people for a job.” These comments resulted in an onslaught of online abuse from Trump’s supporters, who described her in pornographic terms and said that she deserved to be raped. She also claimed that Lewandowski was bragging about yelling at a female reporter, which comes following accusations that he manhandled a reporter during a battery case.
He also managed to annoy the press, when he failed to show up for their questions after his short speech on race in a meeting with his selected ‘diversity coalition’ at Trump Towers. The aim of the meeting was to distance himself from his racist reputation. Not sure that tactic really worked (scratches head). Who will get your vote?
