Presidential Campaigns Heading To Chicago Area This Week
CHICAGO (CBS) -- With one week until the primary elections in Illinois, presidential candidates from both parties have been focusing more on this state.
Former President Bill Clinton was visiting Evanston on Tuesday to campaign for his wife, Hillary Clinton, at a get-out-the-vote event at Beth Emet The Free Synagogue.
Clinton will urge voters to cast ballots early and show support for the former first lady.
Meantime, Hillary Clinton and fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders were in Michigan, where 130 delegates were at stake in Tuesday's primary. Democratic voters in Mississippi also head to the polls. Clinton holds a wide lead in pre-election polling in both states, but Sanders isn't going down without a fight.
Sanders said the former secretary of state has been intentionally mischaracterizing his record on the 2008 auto industry bailout.
"Of course I voted to defend the automobile industry, and the millions of jobs," he said. "What I did not vote for was a middle-class bailout for the crooks on Wall Street."
Sanders did vote in favor of a $14 billion plan to bail out Chrysler and General Motors in 2008, but that plan didn't get enough votes to go through the Senate, and President George W. Bush instead ended up using $17 billion from a much larger Wall Street bailout to help the two auto giants.
However, Sanders also voted to block the release of $350 billion from the Wall Street bailout in January 2009. A small portion of that money $4 billion – was earmarked for the automobile industry. Clinton voted to release that money, and she said Sanders' vote against that measure was a vote against saving the auto industry.
"Sometimes you don't get perfect choices in life or politics, and so I voted to get that money flowing to save those auto jobs to restructure the auto industry, and if everybody had voted the way he did, we would have lost millions of jobs," she said.
The Sanders campaign also had an event scheduled for Tuesday in Chicago. Cook County Commissioner Chuy Garcia and Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) were headlining a phone bank to urge undecided voters to support Sanders.
Republicans also were turning their focus to Illinois this week. Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich all have scheduled events in the Chicagoland area this week.
Trump was hosting a rally Friday at the UIC Pavilion, Cruz was speaking at an Illinois Republican Party fundraiser for Gov. Bruce Rauner at the Palmer House Hilton on Friday, and Kasich was hosting events in Lisle and Palatine on Wednesday.
