Bill and Chelsea Clinton stump in Nevada, Sanders accuses rival of pandering to black Americans, while Trump urges South Carolina to war against Apple
The Clintons on stage in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph: Mike Nelson/EPA
Maria L La Ganga in Las Vegas, Sam Levin in Reno,Paul Lewis in Henderson, Nevada; Ben Jacobs in North Charleston, Matt Sullivan,Scott Bixby and Sabrina Siddiqui in Columbia, South Carolina
In Nevada, where the white population is 51% and shrinking, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders bickered about race on Friday while trying to woo Hispanic and African-American voters.
Two thousand miles away in South Carolina, where some of the white population cling to “Bibles and guns”, the six men vying for the Republican presidential nomination stewed over dirty tricks on the campaign trail.
On the eve of the Democratic caucuses in Nevada and the Republican primary in South Carolina, Clinton and Sanders appeared to be running neck-and-neck, while billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump slipped in the polls and support for Texas senator Ted Cruz surged in the comfort of the evangelical south.
Clinton brought out her entire famous family for a chilly evening rally in Las Vegas as part of a last-ditch effort to get Nevadans out to the caucuses on Saturday morning. Chelsea Clinton, visibly pregnant, lauded her mother the role model.
Former president Bill Clinton announced that the Latino Victory Project had changed its bylaws to endorse his wife, its first time supporting a non-Hispanic candidate.
But earlier in the day Sanders picked a fight over the issue of race, accusing Clinton of cozying up to Barack Obama, not because she admires him but because she wants to use him to win the black vote.
“Hillary Clinton now is trying to embrace the president as closely as she possibly can,” Sanders said, according to excerpts from an interview with BET that will broadcast on Sunday. “Everything the president does is wonderful. She loves the president, he loves her and all that stuff.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Bernie Sanders sings on stage with performers at a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters
“And we know what that’s about,” the Vermont senator continued. “That’s trying to win support from the African-American community where the president is enormously popular.”
Clinton responded via Twitter: “@POTUS’ achievements speak for themselves. The idea that supporting him is a ploy to win black votes is baffling.”
The Clintons were introduced by Hispanic actors America Ferrera and Eva Longoria and joined at the rally by former interior secretary Ken Salazar and Marcia Fudge, an African American member of Congress from the crucial swing state of Ohio.
Stepping away from her usual policy-wonk style, Clinton exhorted her supporters to imagine a tomorrow “where we finally pass comprehensive immigration reform”, “where we knock down every barrier that stands in the way of Americans getting ahead and staying ahead”, “where the minimum is not a poverty wage”.
Meanwhile the state department released another batch of Clinton’s emails, including 64 now deemed “classified”.
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But Sanders, who was expected to face challenges among minority voters as the Democratic nominating contest headed from Nevada southward, got a boost to his image as a long-time advocate and protester for civil rights: late Friday the Chicago Tribuneunearthed a photo of Sanders as a 21-year-old activist facing arrest.
As has become custom for his closing rallies on voting eve, more than 2,000 Sanders supporters showed up in Henderson for an event that felt more like a rock concert than a political campaign. Sara Hughes and her boyfriend Michael Darata, both with giant mohawks, said they showed up because Sanders’s message resonated with them: “Bernie says F-you to the system, like I feel,” said Hughes. “He’s calling people out. They don’t want to hear it. They feel threatened by him.”
Sanders added to his stump speech lines aimed at diversity – that “we are listening to our brothers and sisters in the Latino community”, “we are listening to our African-American brothers and sisters” and “we are listening to the women”.
And he laid into the other other opposition: “Not only will we fight the racism and the xenophobia and the bigotry of Donald Trump,” Sanders said to cheers of his name at the mention of another, “together we are going to demand that Congress pass comprehensive immigration reform and a path towards citizenship.”
In South Carolina, Trump’s support in one poll dipped below 30% for the first time this year as Cruz climbed within five points in another. The real estate mogul has been courting an evangelical state long dubbed “Bush country” by adding to his brash populism a confrontation with the pope and a political dynasty.
Trump walked back his defense against Pope Francis earlier on Friday. Then he proceeded to double down against Apple, reiterating his calls for a boycott of the company’s products over an encryption row surrounding the investigation into the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Sanders dominates Nevada airwaves
“Apple computer, boycott Apple,” Trump said at a closing rally in North Charleston. “We want the secrets. They don’t want to open up the phones.”
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Trump also added a debunked urban legend to his stump speech. This one was about John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I who, in Trump’s telling, “took 50 terrorists, and took 50 men and 50 bullets”. The American war hero, whom Trump described as “a rough guy”, apparently then dipped the bullets in pig’s blood.
“We better start getting tough and we better start using our heads,” Trump said, “or we are not going to have a country, folks.”
The story seems to stem from Pershing’s stint commanding an American garrison in the Philippines where he helped put down a rebellion on the island of Mindanao. It also seems to be entirely untrue, despite Trump’s pledge that “this is something you can read in the history books”.
Trump repeated a supporter’s comment at his final rally before the New Hampshire primary, saying that Cruz was “a pussy” for not calling to reinstate waterboarding. He won in the Granite State, and on Friday in the Palmetto State he described the torture tactic as “borderline minimal, minimal torture”. He also said Cruz “lies more than any human being I have ever seen”.
Cruz reportedly met with longshot candidate Ben Carson in a South Carolina storage closet to settle a dispute over allegations that Carson’s campaign had engaged in “dirty tricks” in Nevada.
And as the race has entered comfortable territory for him – the Bible belt – he has fully embraced America’s culture wars, ratcheting up his usual rhetoric on second-amendment gun rights and abortion.
Donald Trump sidesteps supreme court dispute, while Ted Cruz goes all in
The Texas senator, who has a history of arguing before the US supreme court, went all-in this week on his qualifications to select the successor to Antonin Scalia after the justice died on 13 February.
He told a rowdy audience standing under an American flag at an airplane hangar in West Columbia that “we are one justice away from the supreme court striking down every restriction states have placed over the last 40 years on abortion”.
Later, Cruz expressed disdain for the notion that the second amendment does not guarantee the individual right to bear arms. In response, a man in the crowd shouted “my cold, dead hands!”, quoting the famous words of the late actor and NRA activist Charlton Heston.
“You and me both, my friend,” Cruz responded.
On Friday, the reality-TV star Phil Robertson joined Cruz as a warm-up act with a sermon that returned to the country’s revolutionary roots of how “we won” because of two things alone: “Bibles and guns.”
But Cruz, in a tacit acknowledgment that he was polling behind another reality show veteran, broke his own southern-comfort comedy routine by slipping into a line from Trump: “We’ll be winning so much we’ll be tired of winning,” he said.
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Charles Starling, the 63-year-old pastor at Hidden Valley Baptist Church in nearby Gaston, repeated Cruz’s lines like the rally was a revival.
Afterward, he said it didn’t take a papal entrance into politics to trust Cruz’s moral values over Trump’s questionable religious devotion. “I do not know who is saved or who is not – same goes for Trump, and neither does the pope,” he said. “Trump’s been saying a lot of the right things, but as far as sincerity, I have a lot of doubts.”
Undecided voters had even more doubts. And there will likely be a lot of them; South Carolina election officials are predicting a record turnout.
Patsy George, of Columbia, had just sat through Florida senator Marco Rubio’s final pitch during a rally at the downtown Marriott hotel on Friday, and she said her decision was “a toss-up” between Rubio and Cruz.
On the one hand, George said she found Rubio’s push for a comprehensive immigration reform bill two years ago to be troubling – even though he has disavowed his prior stance in favor of a more hardline approach.
“Hopefully he’s learned from what he did before,” she said. “I’ve liked him for years.”
At the same time, George said she was not a fan of what she had heard about Cruz in recent weeks – including reports that the Texas senator’s campaign had spread rumors on the night of the Iowa caucuses that Carson was dropping out of the race in an effort to peel away the retired neurosurgeon’s supporters.
“He’s apologized, but I didn’t like that,” George said of Cruz. “I’m a little concerned about his presentation. I don’t know how genuine he is.”
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Rubio’s campaign is locked in an ongoing feud with Cruz, as the two senators vie for a crucial second-place finish against Trump’s insurgency.
Earlier this week, the Cruz campaign circulated obviously Photoshopped images of Rubio shaking hands with Barack Obama – an anathema in conservative circles. The Florida senator has warned of more shenanigans beyond those pictures.
This is amid a political climate where Jeb Bush’s Super Pac is spending big on opposition phone calls – even against the Ohio governor John Kasich who planned to leave the state ahead of Saturday’s results – and the airwaves have been blanketed with ominous messages about the law, guns and money.
As a local poll showed Rubio eclipsing Cruz, a Rubio spokesman suggested a looming Saturday ahead: “We fear the worst dirty tricks are yet to come.”
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