Hillary Clinton Takes Campaign To Cafeteria n Church

Clinton spoke at a United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. on Sunday as news came out that her numbers are tanking in key early battleground states

The series behind the scenes of the 2016 US election continues………

In the backrooms of Sin City – In between big rallies, Hillary Clinton’s team invites only a handful of journalists to follow her on the campaign trail, so a group of US and international media have set up a pool system similar to the one used to cover the White House to split reporting duties and share output each day.

The print news seat rotates between 14 media outlets, from The Washington Post and The New York Times to The Guardian and AFP.

This time, it is our turn to join Clinton in Las Vegas as she courts the Hispanic, African- and Asian-American communities who make up around half of Nevada’s population — and whose support she crucially needs to bounce back from her crushing loss to Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary. We are told to turn up Saturday morning at 7:30 am.

Traveling with us is the ABC television network, a reporter from Bloomberg, two local journalists and several photographers. We’ll spend the day together, bundled from place to place in a van full of “clean” press meaning we have been searched by the Secret Service.

First stop: the rear entrance to Harrah’s casino, in the heart of Sin City, where the black-suited security officers are already in place as we arrive. We make our way through a maze of corridors and stairways, led by Clinton’s team who scouted out the premises earlier on reconnaissance.

Our destination, deep in the belly of the casino, is the windowless employees’ cafeteria.

“Hi everybody!” Clinton beams, as she finally makes her appearance to cheers and applause from the 80 or so people gathered there in kitchen aprons or waiter’s uniforms — who recognize “Hillary” at once, and yank out their smartphones to snap a memento. “Good to see you,” she enthuses as she makes her way from table to table, shaking hands and posing for selfies. “With your help Saturday we can make it happen.”

Agence France-Presse has launched a weekly series of reporters’ blogs taking readers behind the scenes of the 2016 US election for a look at the events and attitudes shaping the White House race.

The fourth post in the series comes from Las Vegas in Nevada, which stages its Democratic nominating caucuses on Saturday, the next step in the party’s months-long primary contest.