“Being herself is so appealing,” she added.

The speech was widely considered to be a watershed moment for Clinton and her campaign, marking their decision to take on Trump, head on. But has also infused her supporters with new enthusiasm.

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Sherry E. Sherry, 65, has backed Clinton since 2008, and expected Clinton to largely ignore Trump — sticking to a strategy in the general election centered heavily on what Clinton describes as her “wonkish heart.”

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“She is who she is: she's going to be straight-forward and put out policy and what she plans to do, because she knows that stuff,” Sherry said. “That’s what I thought she would do.”

But Sherry didn’t quite expect her to deliver the performance she saw on Thursday.

“I was really proud of her for doing that,” she added. “I’ve never seen her do that.”

At times dead panned, other times incredulous, Clinton delivered a cutting 35-minute assault on Trump that read like a greatest hits of his most controversial comments.

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One aide described Clinton as being initially “reluctant” to go on the attack, worrying as many of her supporters do, that when she goes on the offense, it is often interpreted as overly negative.

Clinton delivered it soberly, reading from a teleprompter, and all the while her campaign wasn’t always sure of how it would be received. Inside the room at the Balboa Park Ballroom a mixture of invited guests and rank and file supporters created gave it a raucous reception. They cheered, laughed, and whooped in agreement.

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On the campaign trail in the days that followed, Clinton has regularly reprised some of her “favorite” lines from the speech with more than a little glee.

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“Earlier this week I gave a speech in San Diego,” Clinton said in Sacramento on Sunday, prompting cheers and applause from the crowd. “Outlining why I believe that Donald Trump is not qualified or temperamentally fit to be the president of the United States.”

“I didn’t make these comments up, I just repeated the ones he’s made. I just read chapter and verse,” she added.

During the nearly two-week process of crafting the speech with her speechwriters, there were times when staffers added more of Trump’s lines to the remarks and Clinton balked.

“I’d see a suggestion to be added, I’d say, did he really say that?” Clinton told supporters. “There came the clip!”

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It drew condemnation from Trump, who called it a “hate speech,” even while his conservative allies remained largely silent.

But the key for Clinton, the aide said, was that she believes that the speech was grounded not just in Trump’s own words, but also in a coherent vision for her foreign policy.

“You could take out the Trump references and find, as you do with most Clinton speeches, a very coherent, substantive set of ideas about foreign policy,” said Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia who served at the State Department under Clinton.

Meanwhile, Clinton is closing out an at-times contentious Democratic primary in California, a state where victory is far from a certain outcome.

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Yet she has seemed relaxed on the campaign trail, going from small-group meetings to rallies of thousands. In some ways, Clinton seems to have already psychologically gone beyond the primary. She urged her supporters to look across the horizon to the general election and beyond.

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“What I want to talk about is what we have to do together after the voting is done,” Clinton said to congregants at Greater St. Paul Baptist Church in Oakland on Sunday. “After the votes are counted, that’s when the real work starts.”

But before then, she faces the prospect of a Democratic primary that will continue on until the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July. On Tuesday, she is likely to clinch the nomination with delegates from New Jersey’s primary. But she has still urged Californians to deliver her a psychological victory in the Golden State, where Sen. Bernie Sanders believes he has his best chance.

“I want to finish strong here in California,” Clinton said. “It means the world to me.”