Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Sunday she isn’t sure if she could catch up to opponent Sen. Bernard Sanders going into the New Hampshire primary.
Mr. Sanders is leading Mrs. Clinton in the polls, and she said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that she didn’t know if she would be able to win the state’s primary.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just going to work as hard as I can. I love the New Hampshire primary.”
She said she appreciates the “biggest job interview in the world” in a state where voters came back multiple times to check out each candidate, and said the involved process in the Granite State is something she loves, even if it doesn’t swing her way.
Mrs. Clinton won the New Hampshire primary in 2008, when she was running against then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. But she said, “I am a different person than I was back in ’08,”
After Mr. Obama took the nation’s highest office, he named Mrs. Clinton his secretary of state — a position she said gave her a “deep” understanding of the country and its problems. She said she understands how people feel about the economy and the government, saying they feel that officials “aren’t working for them … and that’s causing a lot of the anger and frustration. I totally get that. I feel it.”
Mrs. Clinton said as soon as she was done with the CNN interview, she would be taking a short break from campaigning in New Hampshire to fly to Flint, Michigan, and address the lead-tainted water crisis the city is going through.
The trip also will give her an opportunity to focus on African-Americans, a group she needs support from as she trails Mr. Sanders in New Hampshire. She said she will be meeting with Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver.
Flint has a majority-black population, and Mrs. Clinton has said several times on the campaign trail that had it been a majority-white city, such as a Detroit suburb, the situation would never have been allowed to continue as it did. Mr. Sanders has made similar comments.
Mrs. Clinton said that the problems of race and the environment are not unique to Flint.
“It’s not the only Flint in our country,” she said. “We do have to open this inquiry more broadly. We’ve got places in our country where the asthma rates are 500 times higher, killing young children of color because of where they live and what they’re exposed to.”
“I’ll keep doing this, to keep beating the drums on this,” she said.
• Anjali Shastry can be reached at ashastry@washingtontimes.com.
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