Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Saturday expressed “regret” for saying half of Republican presidential rival Donald Trump’s supporters could be put into a "basket of deplorables", Fox News reports.
Clinton admitted in her apology that she was “grossly generalistic” in criticizing Trump supporters, using that same phrase Friday night when attacking them at a New York fundraiser.
“That's never a good idea,” she also said Saturday.
On Friday she said, according to Fox News, “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. There are people like that, and (Trump) has lifted them up.”
Clinton, in her apology, also said, “I regret saying ‘half’ -- that was wrong. But let's be clear, what's really ‘deplorable’ is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values.”
Her comments are being compared to those 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney made at a private fundraiser about “47 percent of people voting for (President Obama) no matter what.”
Romney in his comments, which were also made public in mid-September, characterized such voters as those “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”
He later acknowledged to Fox News that the secretly-recorded comments “did real damage to my campaign."
Trump roundly criticized Clinton's remarks, writing on Twitter, “Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard-working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!”
Trump running-mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence followed Trump on Saturday in denouncing Clinton's comments, saying their supporters are “Americans, and they deserve your respect.”
“The men and women who support Donald Trump's campaign are hard-working Americans, farmers, coal miners, teachers, veterans, members of our law enforcement community, members of every class of this country,” he added, according to Fox News.
The latest saga between Clinton and Trump comes as polls show that the Republican nominee has been closing the gaps on his Democratic rival.
Significantly, Quinnipiac University polls released Thursday found close races in the four largest, most consequential swing states on the 2016 map.
Clinton and Trump are running neck-and-neck in Florida, where the race is deadlocked, and Ohio, where Trump leads Clinton by a single percentage point, the polls found, according to Politico.
Meanwhile, Clinton has a 4-point lead in North Carolina, a poll there shows, and a 5-point edge in Pennsylvania.
A CNN poll released last week found Trump in the lead by two percentage points over Clinton among likely voters in the presidential election in November.
The results of the survey represent a sharp turnaround from the situation just a month ago after the Democratic National Convention. In early August, Clinton led by as many as 10 points in some polls, with many pundits saying Trump had lost all his momentum.