Hillary Clinton is bailing on a New Jersey appearance to campaign in California with little over a week to go before both states’ primaries, a move that some speculate is in response to the threat in the Golden State posed by rival Bernie Sanders.
On Monday, the Clinton campaign announced in a pair of emails sent out less than five minutes apart that the former secretary of state is cancelling an event in New Jersey that had been scheduled for Thursday, while committing to a last-minute campaign push in California from Thursday until Monday. Both states hold their primaries June 7. Polls have shown Clinton comfortably ahead in New Jersey, but the race in California is tight.
Clinton still has one other campaign event scheduled in Newark, N.J., for Wednesday, and another New Jersey appearance for Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, is scheduled late for Wednesday in Cranford.
With the cancellation of Clinton’s Thursday plans in New Jersey, some in the media began making guesses Monday about why Clinton is traveling to the Golden State.
“@HillaryClinton taking @BernieSanders threat in California seriously cancelling Thursday in NJ adding California swing til election eve,” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell tweeted.
.@HillaryClinton taking @BernieSanders threat in California seriously cancelling Thursday in NJ adding California swing til election eve
— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) May 30, 2016
Sanders himself has said he thinks he can win California.
“What I want to do, and I think we can, is win California here, and win under the big vote, do very, very well in the other five states,” he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The senator from Vermont, who trails Clinton by hundreds of pledged delegates and superdelegates, has been campaigning in California almost non-stop since mid-May.
A RealClearPolitics average of polls shows that while Clinton leads Sanders by 8 percentage points in California (50 to 42 percent), Sanders does come pretty close in a couple of those polls. The Public Polling Institute of California found in a survey conducted in May that Sanders trailed Clinton by 2 percentage points, within the 4.3 percent margin of error.
A total of 475 pledged delegates are up for grabs in California, more than enough to put Clinton over the threshold to clinch the party’s nomination. Sanders has said he will fight for as many delegates as possible in California, hoping to make a strong case for himself before the Democratic convention in July, which he pledges will be a “contested convention.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Hillary Clinton’s event Wednesday was canceled.
