Hillary Clinton praised Joe Biden’s “energy” following his strong Super Tuesday performance in the Democratic presidential primary.
The Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee has so far declined to endorse any candidate, but her comments on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show on Wednesday were her warmest embrace of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s main opponent in the 2020 contest.
“Look, I thought it was very exciting,” Clinton said on the NBC show. “Because starting in South Carolina, he had so much energy and what he had to say was, you know, really enthusiastic and positive and about what he was going to do and who he was, and the people of South Carolina, obviously, rewarded that. And then, that kind of set off this momentum. And it carried him.”
“It’s the first time that the real diversity of our country is going to go out and vote, and then that vote will have a big impact on the outcome, as we saw last night with Joe Biden,” the former secretary of state added.
Biden swept 10 states on Super Tuesday while Sanders only clinched three states. California also appears to be on the verge of delivering a victory to the Vermont senator.
Clinton ran and won against Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, and she has been heavily critical of the Vermont independent, blaming him in part for her general election loss. “All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with his campaign were urging people to vote third-party, urging people not to vote,” she said in January about Sanders.
On Super Tuesday, Clinton called the socialist’s campaign a load of “baloney.” “That was my authentic opinion then. It’s my authentic opinion now,” she said about Sanders.
