Former President Bill Clinton is urging Florida voters to get to the polls as the state’s presidential primary nears. He spoke Monday at Florida A&M University.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to hold a strong lead going in to Florida’s presidential primary. But after a narrow and unexpected loss in Michigan, Clinton’s campaign is lobbying young, African American voters to hit the polls. They’ve been a key constituency in Clinton’s bid to be the Democratic nominee. And Monday her husband talked about Clinton’s work as a young lawyer with the children’s defense fund.
“She went to South Carolina to find out why African American teenagers were being kept in prisons with adults for years,” he said of her tenure, “and they changed that and reformed the juvenile justice system and gave more young people a chance to have a good life.”
Clinton’s points about criminal justice resonate with an attendee named Demetry Frazier.
“Being a former felon,” Frazier says, “being in the system with the job change that they’re trying to do, make it easier for us to get jobs, and to try to create a way for us to get jobs and to knock down that discrimination barrier that there is.”
“Because a lot of us, you know, we’re not bad people.”
But political science sophomore Patricia Brathwaite believes Bernie Sanders has been a more reliable advocate for civil rights.
“I don’t think that her heart is in the right place,” Brathwaite says of Clinton, “she’s not too honest and I don’t feel like she’s been with us. Being African American I don’t think that she has been with us as long as Bernie Sanders has.”
There are 214 delegates up for grabs in Florida’s Democratic primary—the biggest prize until New York’s primary April 19.
