Hillary Clinton endorsed Joe Biden on Tuesday, saying that she wishes he were in the White House to lead the country through the coronavirus pandemic.
“Just think of what a difference it would make if we had a president who not only listened to the science, put facts over fiction, but brought us together, showed the kind of compassion and caring that we need from our president, and which Joe Biden has been exemplifying throughout his entire life,” Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, said at the start of a live-streamed joint appearance with Biden billed as a discussion of women’s issues during the pandemic.
Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than President Donald Trump nationally, but Trump won in the Electoral College. She remains a controversial figure. Her overall favourability rating was a record-low 36 per cent in a Gallup poll conducted in September 2018. Among Democrats, her rating slipped from 87 per cent just before the 2016 election to 77 per cent in 2018.
Biden called Clinton a woman who should be president of the United States right now.
Biden has already received endorsements from his former primary rivals as well as former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Clinton, a former secretary of state and first lady, had largely stayed out of politics, while making clear in a handful of interviews that she was not a fan of her former rival, Bernie Sanders. And as the field narrowed, she made clear that she preferred Biden.
“He has the experience. He knows what needs to be done, he can repair the damage that he would be inheriting,” she said on Jimmy Fallon Tonight in early March.