Hillary Clinton bluntly acknowledged Friday that she is trailing Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, telling an audience at a women’s health dinner in Concord that she’s been here before and knows what it takes to come back.
“I know what it is like to run from behind in New Hampshire and I know what it is like to come from behind and win in New Hampshire,” Clinton said, raising her voice at the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws’ Pro-Choice Roe v. Wade Dinner. “So let’s go make that happen and win on February 9.”
The comment was the 2016 candidate’s starkest assessment of the fact she is looking up at Sanders in the Granite State and a nod to the fact she lost Iowa in 2008 but won the New Hampshire primary a week later.
A series of polls have shown the race in the New Hampshire primary favoring Sanders, the Vermont senator who has made a concerted effort to solidify his base in the state by spending over a month campaigning. A CNN/WMUR poll released Tuesday found Sanders trouncing Clinton in the state, 60% to 33%.
Sanders has responded to his promising polls by arguing that the “inevitable candidate ain’t so inevitable today.”
Clinton’s comment came on her one day of campaigning in New Hampshire this week, as much of her time has been spent focused on Iowa.
Although Clinton avoided directly hitting Sanders earlier in the day, she did comment on the fact that Sanders said earlier this week that groups like NARAL, Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign — all organizations that endorsed Clinton — were part of the “establishment” that he was running against.
“We need somebody in the Oval Office who really understands that NARAL and Planned Parenthood are not part of the establishment,” Clinton said without mentioning Sanders, who backed away from his initial comments on Thursday.
Clinton devoted most of her speech to fighting for women’s health and abortion rights.
She said people “who are so adamantly opposed” to abortion rights “have no regard for what women’s lives are like.”
“I sometimes wonder whether those who are so adamantly opposed to the fundamental freedom to make your own choices on this most personal of issues are just unaware, ignorant, opportunistic, cynical,” she said.
As she had before, Clinton also pledged to overturn the Hyde Amendment, a measure that bars the use of federal funds being spent on abortions in most cases. “As president, I will fight to overturn it,” she said to the receptive audience.