Suffering from walking pneumonia, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will not be in California today and Tuesday as scheduled after falling ill at a 9/11 ceremony in New York.
Clinton had been scheduled to attend fundraisers in California to benefit her Democratic presidential campaign and to tape an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” Her spokesman, Nick Merrill, said in remarks reported by the Los Angeles Times that she plans to teleconference in to a fundraiser today in San Francisco, “which is proceeding as scheduled in her absence.”
News footage showed Clinton’s abrupt departure from the Sept. 11 ceremony and the difficulty she had walking to an SUV, her legs appearing to buckle before she reached the vehicle.
Her campaign initially blamed the incident on overheating but later disclosed that Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday and that she’s taking antibiotics. Until now, her bouts of occasionally heavy coughing had been blamed on seasonal allergies.
The Republican presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, reacted to Clinton’s health scare this morning in seemingly non-adversarial language, telling CNBC that he hopes she gets better and that he plans to release a report on his own health this week.
“I saw what was going on with her and I said, you know, I’m going to go do something and I actually took a physical last week and probably, I guess this week, will release the results of it,” he told “Squawk Box” in a telephone interview.
“It’s quite sad,” he said of Clinton’s diagnosis. “I hope she gets well soon.”
Also reacting this morning was the Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, a physician.
“…It can be easy to forget that presidential candidates are human beings too I sincerely extend my best wishes to Secretary Clinton for a full and speedy recovery,” Stein said in a statement. A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of registered voters, meanwhile, found that Clinton holds a lopsided lead over Trump in Democrat Party-dominated California, but weaknesses with younger voters suggest problems that could thwart her campaign in more contested states.
Clinton led Trump by 25 points, 58 percent to 33 percent, when the two candidates were matched head to head in the poll, The Times reported.
When the choices were expanded to include Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, Clinton lost more support than Trump, and the gap between the two narrowed to 20 points. Johnson picked up 11 percent and Stein 6 percent.
“In a state that is more closely contested than California, the Johnson and Stein candidacies have a potential to cause a problem for Clinton,” poll director Dan Schnur, who heads USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, told The Times. “Out here, it’s probably not going to make a difference.”
Trump appears to have no shot at moving California and its 55 electoral votes into contested territory, as he had said he would, according to The Times. Indeed, he creates a significant drag on Republicans down the ballot here.
In every part of the state, voters said they would be less inclined to side with a congressional candidate who had endorsed Trump; statewide, 40 percent said they would be less likely to vote for such a candidate, and 15 percent said they would be more likely.
