As Donald Trump takes a polling lead in a crucial swing state, Clinton campaign dispatches popular progressive senators to speak to young voters

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Senator Elizabeth Warren on Saturday said Donald Trump was “a man with a dark and ugly soul” on Saturday, unleashing some of her most stinging criticisms of the Republican nominee in a state where Hillary Clinton has recently struggled.

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Speaking in Columbus, Ohio, Warren said Trump “has more support from [the] Aryan nation and the [Ku Klux Klan] than he does from leaders of his own party”.

Her criticisms echoed a speech delivered by Clinton’s primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, earlier in the day. Speaking at Kent State, Sanders said: “The cornerstone of Donald Trump’s campaign is bigotry.”

The Clinton campaign dispatched two of its most popular progressive surrogates after a rocky week of polls showed Trump gaining on Clinton in Ohio, a critical swing state, and among voters nationally. Sanders and Warren were slated to make some half-a-dozen stops over the weekend.

The senators stumped for Clinton as new polls showed that roughly a third of voters under the age of 35 plan to vote for someone other than Trump or Clinton. Only about 30% of such voters support Clinton, or half the number of young and millennial voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012.

On Saturday, both senators touted the benefits of Clinton’s platform for young people before audiences of mostly college students. Sanders spoke about Clinton’s support for pay equity and raising the minimum wage, and about the large sums of money conservative donors such as the Koch brothers have fed into the election.

Both senators reserved large portions of their speeches for excoriating Trump over his racist statements and insinuations of violence and the bigoted tone of his campaign.

The events of this past few days supplied them with plenty of new material. This week, Trump’s long-time and false assertion that President Obama was not born in the US was thrown back into the spotlight after top aides said Trump had come to “believe” Obama was born in Hawaii.

Trump, when questioned by the Washington Post, refused to say as much. “I’ll answer that question at the right time,” he said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

The Republican nominee finally acknowledged that Obama was born in the US at the tail end of an event on Friday. He also falsely stated that the “birther” movement began with Clinton’s campaign in 2008.

Warren’s remark that Trump enjoys more support from white supremacists than GOP leaders echoed Clinton’s recent statement that “half” of Trump supporters are “deplorable”.

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton said. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic. You name it.”

Trump and his team have sought to turn those remarks against Clinton. But Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, raised eyebrows when he refused to say whether he considered David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and a vocal supporter of Trump, “deplorable”.

“I’m not in the name-calling business.” Pence said, “We don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of the people who think like him.” In a response, Duke said he was gratified that Pence had stopped short of a full-on attack.

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Critics called Pence’s answer the kind of dog-whistling that has made the Trump campaign tick.

“Donald Trump launched one racist attack after another against President Obama,” Warren said on Saturday, to boos. “Only when his handlers tied him down and forced him did he grudgingly admit” that Obama was born in the US, she said.

“Let me very clear about what the birther movement was,” Sanders told his crowd. “What they were trying to do – led by Donald Trump – is to delegitimize the presidency of the first African American president we’ve ever had. That is what that effort was. What an outrageous, racist attack against the president of the United States.”

Now, Sanders continued, Trump “has told us we’re suposed to hate Muslims. He’s told us we’re supposed to hate Mexicans”.

Sanders closed with an overture to young voters who didn’t like either candidate and planned to sit the election out, saying the election was too important for them not to participate.

“I know, and you know, this nation has struggled too far and too long to overcome bigotry and discrimination,” he said. “We are not going back.”