BIAS ALERT: Professor says Trump is so bad, class doesn't have to be balanced

Gettysburg College Prof. Kathleen Iannello

Critics have accused academia of subtly indoctrinating students with a liberal agenda for years, but the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency has brought one Pennsylvania political science professor out into the open.
Gettysburg College Prof. Kathleen Iannello announced in an Op-Ed penned for Philly.com that she will not even try to treat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and GOP choice Trump equally because, in her mind, Trump is a “lightning rod for promoting further hate.”
“My approach for the fall semester will be boldly honest: It is a disservice to students to attempt to provide balance when I know that balance is an offense to the truth,” Iannello wrote.

School officials are confident the class will be fair.

In the column, titled “Balanced Presentation A Dishonest Exercise In Presidential Race,” Iannello admits that, “as a liberal, [she has] no problem extolling the virtues of Democrats.”
To prove her fairness, Iannello notes that she has assigned readings of moderate Republicans and has even offered praise for Ronald Reagan. But Trump is another story, she claimed.
“His harsh and distasteful commentary regarding religious and ethnic groups, as well as women, only serves as a lightning rod for promoting further hate,” Iannello wrote. “He displays neither a record of public service nor an understanding of the word statesmanship. In the history of our country, it is hard to recall anyone less prepared to take office.”
When asked by The College Fix if her stance would be fair to students who might not share her politics, Iannello said it would.
“I can assure you that all students will have a voice in my classes,” she told the site.
Officials at Gettysburg College said they believe the class will be fair, too.
“It’s an important part of our mission as a liberal arts institution to ensure that ideas can be shared openly, and we have every confidence that students will be given opportunity to express their views freely in their classes,” a spokesperson told the site.
Students who claim to have taken Iannello’s classes in the past may doubt her ability to tolerate dissenting opinions.
“Professor Iannello means well and is a decent teacher, but she preaches her liberal propaganda way too much in class,” read a 2008 entry on Ratemyprofessor.com, adding, “she is not open to new ideas and is very closed-minded on her beliefs.”
Other entries described her as “intimidating if you lean right” and a person who gives “conservatives a hard time.” “If you’re a right-winger, be prepared to walk into a brick wall whenever you enter the classroom,” one review states.

Multiple donors to Clinton Foundation met with her while at State Department

More than half of the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was serving as secretary of state gave money to the Clinton Foundation, either personally or through or companies or groups, according to a review of State Department calendars released to the Associated Press.
At least 85 of the 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to the documents obtained by the AP.
The 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million combined, and at least 40 donated more than $100,000 each while 20 gave more than $1 million.
Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence reacted Tuesday to the AP report while campaigning in Pennsylvania, saying it was not a "laughing matter."
"Hillary was on Jimmy Kimmel last night, joked about it, said her emails were boring. Hillary Clinton this is not laughing matter, nobody is above the law," Pence said. "American people are sick and tired of pay to play."
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called for a special prosecutor to look into pay for play allegations in reaction to the AP report.

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“The evidence is clear – it’s time a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the growing proof of pay-to-play at Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” he said in a statement. “This is among the strongest and most unmistakable pieces of evidence of what we’ve long suspected: at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, access to the most sensitive policy makers in U.S. diplomacy was for sale to the highest bidder."
Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton's help with a visa problem and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm's corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the AP story relied on "utterly flawed data," in a statment released Tuesday afternoon.
"It cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary Clinton's schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation.
"The data does not account for more than half of her tenure as Secretary. And it omits more than 1700 meetings she took with world leaders, let alone countless others she took with other U.S government officials, while serving as Secretary of State.
"Just taking the subset of meetings arbitrarily selected by the AP, it is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton's basis for meeting with these individuals. Melinda Gates is a world-renowned philanthropist whose foundation works to address global health crises and eradicate disease in the developing world. Meeting with someone like Melinda Gates is squarely in the purview of America's top diplomat, whose job involves confronting these same global challenges."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Tuesday night at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas that Clinton is "unfit to hold office."
"It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and where the State Department begins," he told supporters. "Its clear the Clintons set up a business to profit off of public office, they sold specific actions by and for large amount of money."
The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.
The AP's findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.
The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or foreign government representatives. Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP's calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.
The review presents an extraordinary proportion of visitors indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
Last week, the Clinton Foundation moved to head off ethics concerns about future donations by announcing changes planned if Clinton is elected.
On Monday, Bill Clinton said in a statement that if his wife were to win, he would step down from the foundation's board and stop all fundraising for it. The foundation would also accept donations only from U.S. citizens and what it described as independent philanthropies, while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, U.S. companies or corporate charities. Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its international aid program, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programs to other charities.
Those planned changes would not affect more than 6,000 donors who have already provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000.
"There's a lot of potential conflicts and a lot of potential problems," Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who previously directed Columbia University's graduate fundraising management program, told the AP. "The point is, she can't just walk away from these 6,000 donors."
Former senior White House ethics officials said a Clinton administration would have to take careful steps to ensure that past foundation donors would not have the same access as she allowed at the State Department.
"If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she's tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done," said Norman L. Eisen, who was President Obama's top ethics counsel and later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that at a minimum, Clinton should retain the Obama administration's current ethics commitments and oversight, which include lobbying restrictions and other rules. Richard Painter, a former ethics adviser to President George W. Bush and currently a University of Minnesota law school professor, said Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership roles, but he added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy decision affecting past donors.
Some of Clinton's most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband's political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton's calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.
S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton's planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast issues.
Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, AP's review showed.
Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest "microcredit" for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank's board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.
American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Global Initiative programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, the bank's nonprofit U.S. flagship, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation -- a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution's annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton, as well as then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and two other senators in 2007 sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Yunus. He got one but not until 2010, a year after Obama awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yunus first met with Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department's foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2 million over Clinton's tenure.
By September 2009, Yunus began complaining to Clinton's top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh's government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money -- a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet with him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.
"Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be raised in a friendly way," he asked Verveer. Yunus sent "regards to H" and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to attend.
Clinton ordered an aide: "Give to EAP rep," referring the problem to the agency's top east Asia expert.
Yunus continued writing to Verveer as pressure mounted on his bank. In December 2010, responding to a news report that Bangladesh's prime minister was urging an investigation of Grameen Bank, Clinton told Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her East Asia expert "ASAP."
Clinton called Yunus in March 2011 after the Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen Bank. Yunus had told Verveer by email that "the situation does not allow me to leave the country." By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had forced Yunus to step down from the bank's board. Yunus sent Clinton a copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Verveer, Clinton wrote: "Sad indeed."
Clinton met with Yunus a second time in Washington in August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012. Clinton's arrival in Bangladesh came after Bangladesh authorities moved to seize control of Grameen Bank's effort to find new leaders. Speaking to a town hall audience, Clinton warned the Bangladesh government that "we do not want to see any action taken that would in any way undermine or interfere in the operations of the Grameen Bank."
Grameen America's Asch referred other questions about Yunus to his office, but he had not responded by Tuesday.
Earlier this month, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau acknowledged that agency officials are "regularly in touch with a range of outside individuals and organizations, including nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks and others." But Trudeau said the State Department was not aware of any actions that were influenced by the Clinton Foundation.
In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009 breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman's firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast, according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman's request. In December that same year, Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke.
Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone's charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials did not make Schwarzman available for comment.
Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention. The public-private partnership was formed to fight gender-based violence in South Africa, the State Department said at the time.
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered with two other organizations to beef up a USAID program in Malawi and Ghana. And in 2011, the fund was one of eight organizations to pledge a total of $2 million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa. The fund has not made a commitment to CGI since 2011.
Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Schwarzman. Later that month, Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Clinton and a U.S.-China trade group. Estee Lauder has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The company made a commitment to CGI in 2013 with four other organizations to help survivors of sexual slavery in Cambodia.
MAC AIDs officials did not make Mahon available to AP for comment.
When Clinton appeared before the U.S. Senate in early 2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then- Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about the foundation and potential conflicts of interest. His concerns were focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Lugar wanted more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation and Obama's transition team.
Now, Lugar hopes Hillary and Bill Clinton make a clean break from the foundation.
"The Clintons, as they approach the presidency, if they are successful, will have to work with their attorneys to make certain that rules of the road are drawn up to give confidence to them and the American public that there will not be favoritism," Lugar said.

Where's Hillary? Clinton off campaign trail as Trump seeks comeback

Hillary Clinton is riding a summer wave in the polls – yet the Democratic nominee has left the campaign trail in recent days to fundraise in America’s wealthiest enclaves, potentially giving rival Donald Trump the opening he needs as he works to regain his political footing.
While Trump was balancing his fundraising Tuesday with a public rally and a town hall in Texas, Clinton once again was courting donors. Her fundraiser at the Hollywood Hills home of movie stars Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel follows a weekend fundraising spree in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
In the weeks following last month's Democratic National Convention, Clinton has made only a handful of public campaign stops -- and held one quasi-press conference.
Her most recent rally was almost a week ago, on Wednesday at a Cleveland high school, followed by a roundtable discussion the following day in New York with law enforcement officials.
Meanwhile, Trump has been essentially non-stop on the campaign trail, trying to re-ignite his White House bid and woo voters in battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia with his law-and-order message.
"Hillary Clinton is in hiding because she doesn't want to face voters or even the press,” Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Tuesday. “Her scandal-plagued time at the State Department was an ethical disaster, not to mention a failure by allowing the rise of radical Islamic terrorism. With a track record like that, you'd be in hiding too."

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Strategists on both sides of the aisle seem to agree -- though for different reasons -- that the Democratic nominee’s limited campaign schedule is for now perhaps her best strategy.
“Every page of her playbook says avoid the public at every opportunity,” Republican strategist and Vox Global partner David Payne said Tuesday.
“It’s more choreographed than a Broadway musical, but without the fun. Warm, approachable -- Clinton doesn’t have those qualities. What she does have is message discipline, a dedicated staff and a disciplined campaign. So why should she do rallies or town halls?”  
Douglas Smith, a Democratic strategist and managing director at Kent Strategies, in Washington, D.C., disagrees with the idea that Clinton is missing opportunities.
"She has built a robust campaign that is using her in very strategic ways," he said. "They have all the resources they need for after Labor Day. They’re just going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump. Nobody makes a better case for Hillary Clinton than him."
Right now, Clinton leads in most battleground state polls, and the RealClearPolitics average shows her with a roughly 5-point lead nationally.
But amid a string of politically damaging reports about the alleged overlap between her family foundation and tenure at the State Department, Republicans hope to use this opportunity to close that gap. As Trump shakes up his campaign leadership and aims for a reset, GOP party boss Reince Priebus reportedly predicted Tuesday the nominee could catch up with Clinton by Labor Day.
Clinton isn't entirely out of the public eye.
She appeared to use a Monday night appearance on ABC’s “Live with Jimmy Kimmel!” to respond to rumors about her health, dismissing the allegations as “wacky” and opening a jar of pickles to try to discredit critics.
While Clinton has been off the campaign trail for about a week, running mate Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine has been making almost daily stops in battleground states. Clinton’s next campaign event is scheduled for Thursday in Nevada, where her campaign says she’ll deliver a speech that will outline “The Dangers of Trump's Divisive ‘Alt-Right’ Candidacy.”
Clinton also has faced criticism for not hosting a full-blown press conference for roughly the past eight months.
The Washington Post and the Republican National Committee are each counting the number of days she has gone without what they consider a real press conference -- 262.
In early August, the former secretary of state took questions from reporters following a speech at a National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in Washington.
Some national news media and others complained that two of the five reporters who asked questions were also event moderators and that the other three were invited guests.
"Pretty sure she is standing at a podium taking questions on a broad range of topics from national print and TV reporters," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted.

Clinton Foundation Cartoons

Clinton Foundation executive left 148 phone messages for Hillary Clinton's top aide

EXCLUSIVE: A senior executive at the Clinton Foundation left almost 150 telephone messages for Hillary Clinton’s top aide at the State Department within a two-year time frame, according to previously unpublished documents obtained by Fox News.
A review of State Department call logs for Cheryl Mills, the longtime Clinton confidant who served as chief of staff for the entirety of Clinton’s four-year tenure as America’s top diplomat, reflects at least 148 messages from Laura Graham – then the Clinton Foundation’s chief operating officer – between 2010 and 2012. No other individual or non-profit appears in the logs with anything like that frequency or volume, the review found.
One of the messages Graham left for Mills, in August 2011, referenced “our boss” – without further identifying that individual. Another, from January 2012, appeared to reference former President Clinton, using his initials: “Please call. WJC is looking for her [Graham] and she wants to talk to you before she talks to him.” 
The telephone records were released by the State Department to the conservative advocacy group Citizens United as part of a long-running lawsuit over the Freedom of information Act.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said he could not provide “a read-out of every one of those messages or every one of those calls,” nor estimate how many of them were returned. But he acknowledged that Mills and Graham never shared the same boss and insisted the department “always” acted under Clinton to advance U.S. foreign policy interests, “with no other intent in mind beyond that.”
“Secretary Clinton's ethics agreement at the time [she assumed office] did not preclude other State Department officials from engaging with, or having contact with, the Clinton Foundation,” Toner said. 

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Absent additional detail, there is no evidence of any misconduct in the calls or contacts between Graham and Mills. But the records surfaced amid mounting questions about the relationship between the Clinton State Department and the Clinton foundation, and particularly about the role played by Mills.
“It's an amazing thing that the State Department spokesperson would actually make an argument,” said Citizens United President David Bossie, “that Hillary Clinton would be obligated under an ethics agreement that the White House made her sign with the foundation but her top employees would not be under that same agreement. I find it’s just very Clintonesque.”
Last week, the State Department acknowledged that in June 2012, Mills spent two days traveling to New York to interview job applicants at the foundation. The State Department said Mills “volunteered” to do so, but neither the department nor a spokesman for the Clinton presidential campaign, nor Mills’s attorney, would say whether Mills used annual leave or unpaid days to perform that work – or whether it was done on the taxpayers’ time. 
The call logs reflect a wide cross-section of individuals angling for the secretary’s ear, from celebrities like Sean Penn to elder statesmen of the Democratic Party like Vernon Jordan. The messages include a number averring to irksome home-renovation issues Mills was facing, and even one left by the chief of staff’s mother, who told her daughter, through the intermediary of a State Department secretary, in September 2011: “Please call. Hadn’t heard from you in so long and was wondering if you are out of town.”

Huma Abedin worked at a radical Muslim journal for a dozen years

Hillary's Best Bud.

Hillary Clinton’s top campaign aide, and the woman who might be the future White House chief of staff to the first female U.S. president, for a decade edited a radical Muslim publication that opposed women’s rights and blamed the US for 9/11.
One of Clinton’s biggest accomplishments listed on her campaign Web site is her support for the U.N. women’s conference in Bejing in 1995, when she famously declared, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Her speech has emerged as a focal point of her campaign, featured prominently in last month’s Morgan Freeman-narrated convention video introducing her as the Democratic nominee.
However, soon after that “historic and transformational” 1995 event, as Clinton recently described it, her top aide Huma Abedin published articles in a Saudi journal taking Clinton’s feminist platform apart, piece by piece. At the time, Abedin was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs working under her mother, who remains editor-in-chief. She was also working in the White House as an intern for then-First Lady Clinton.

Donald Trump blasted top aide to Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedine’s husband Anthony Weiner on Monday calling him a “pervert sleaze.”

Appearing on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Trump to comment on the report that Clinton’s aide Huma Abedine wrote for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which has a message that is as “anti-woman as you can get.” The report notes that Abedine’s mother is the editor and that in 2002, the journal wrote that the US was to blame for the 9/11 attack.
Kilmeade noted that the Clinton campaign said that Abedine’s name was “just on there. She didn’t really do anything. She had ‘no formal role’… [at] the radical Muslim journal.”
Trump responded, “You know it’s interesting because of course that’s terrible. And it shouldn’t happen. It’s a lie, another lie that they tell. But what about the fact that Huma Abedin who knows every single thing about Hillary Clinton — she knows more about Hillary than Hillary knows and she’s married to a pervert sleaze named Anthony Weiner who will send anything that he has out over Twitter or any other form of getting it out.”

Latinos turning Republican stronghold Arizona into shades of purple

Carmen Maldonado, a Mexican-American, has proudly voted for the Republican presidential candidate since former president George W. Bush ran for re-election in 2004.
The 55-year-old grandmother is a staunch Catholic who considers herself strongly pro-life, and pro-military. She decorates her home with American flags and lives with her husband, Vince, a former gold glove boxer, on their ranch in the Arizona desert.
This year, for the first time in years, she is leaning toward voting for the Democrat in the presidential race, even though she is not eager to do so. She said she is “sorry to say” she will support Hillary Clinton this November.
"I am very undecided" She added with a sigh. "Gosh, I can't remember the last time I voted Democrat."
Arizona, once a fortified stronghold for the Republican Party, a border state that spawned the candidacies of conservative Republican nominees like Senators Barry Goldwater and John McCain, is turning from shades of deep red to purple, to perhaps, even blue, according to recent polls that show a close race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 
The growing Latino voter demographic has been a major reason why Arizona is turning into a surprising potential pick up for Hillary Clinton this November, experts say. Hispanics now make up 30.5 percent of the population, with a whopping 21 percent being eligible to vote, according to Pew Research statistics.
And to many Latinos in the Grand Canyon state, both Democratic and Republican, the reason behind their surging interest in the presidential election is the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who many perceive as anti-Hispanic.
"Everything that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth is against everything I believe in," Maldonado says. "He brings out all the negativity in people."
Patricia Beckley, also 55, who is Mexican-American and a registered Republican, tells Fox News Latino that she is also undecided because she has serious reservations about Trump.
"I don't like his views," Beckley says." There is a lot of division with him and the in the things that he says, and I am not sure we want him as our leader."
Hispanic voters in the desert have been mobilized to vote. During the March primary, a record 600,000 votes were cast in the Phoenix-area alone – almost double the amount in 2012.
The last time Arizona went for a Democrat candidate another Clinton was running for president: Bill Clinton in 1996.
But a lot has happened in Arizona since then. It is now known for one of the most stringent immigration laws in the country, called SB1070, and for one of the strictest implementers of the laws, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, an avid Trump supporter.
According to members of the Clinton campaign, efforts to win Arizona have increased recently with a new push to pull in Latino voters following recent polls that show Clinton in a dead heat with Trump.
A CBS poll earlier this month has Trump at 44 percent, with Clinton only 2 points behind him at 42 percent.
Publicly, the Clinton campaign says Arizona is part of a 50-state strategy. But the fact that one of the most fervent Republican bastions of support like Arizona and Georgia may flip has many Democrats excited.
“We’re bullish on Arizona, but we’re not taking anything for granted," Walter Garcia, Western Regional Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee told Fox News Latino. “We’re going to work hard to hold Donald Trump accountable for his divisive and dangerous rhetoric."
"We are running a 50-state strategy, including Arizona, and that includes engaging with Latino communities in every state to show the contrast between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump," Lorella Praeli, the head of the Latino vote operation for Hillary for America tells Fox News Latino."  Hillary Clinton has spoken directly to Latinos, laying out an agenda that will create good-paying jobs and pass comprehensive immigration reform to keep families together. This stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump's offensive rhetoric and policies that would rip families apart."
Republicans in Arizona are not ceding any ground, and point to a GOP sweep in 11 statewide elections as evidence that the Republican grassroots operations runs deep. Trump met with Hispanic leaders this past weekend to figure out ways to engage the Latino community.
"We never take anything for granted," said Arizona GOP spokesman Tim Sifert. "We take every election seriously and we know every election is going to be different but we are pretty confident."
When asked about Trump’s chances in Arizona, Sifert said: "I would characterize it as cautiously optimistic."
"He is an unconventional candidate, so as a political scientist it can be frustrating to try to rely on your traditional measurement tools because Donald Trump is such an untraditional and unconventional candidate," Sifert said.
"He has been very disruptive and we think that is a positive thing, and we think that the think the voters think that is a positive thing in Arizona."

Trump calls for special prosecutor to look at Clinton Foundation, clarifies immigration stance

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for an “expedited investigation” by a special prosecutor into “pay-to-play” accusations involving the Clinton Foundation while reiterating on Monday he plans to have a “firm, but fair” stance on illegal immigration.
“The Clintons' made the State Department into the same kind of Pay-to-Play operations as the Arkansas Government was: pay the Clinton Foundation huge sums of money and throw in some big speaking fees for Bill Clinton and you got to play with the State Department,” Trump said at a campaign rally Monday night in Akron, Ohio.
“The amounts involved, the favors done, the significant amount of time, require an expedited investigation by a special prosecutor immediately, immediately,” he added.
Trump also called the investigation by the FBI and Justice Department into Clinton’s private email server a “whitewash,” and said that the two agencies “cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton’s crimes.”
The billionaire businessman also expanded on earlier comments he made in the day on “Fox and Friends” about being “fair, but firm” on illegal immigration in an interview on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor.”
"I just want to follow the law,” he told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

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"The first thing we're gonna do, if and when I win, is we're gonna get rid of all of the bad ones. We've got gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country. We're gonna get them out," he said.
"As far as everybody else, we're going to go through the process," he said, while citing the policies of President Obama and former President George W. Bush as examples.
“I’m going to do the same thing. We’re going to do it in a humane manor,” Trump said, adding that the “bad ones” are known by law enforcement.
Asked whether Trump's plan still included a deportation force, his new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said Sunday it was "to be determined."
"Even Sen. Jeff Sessions," a hard-liner on immigration, "he doesn't deport 11 million people in his plan," Conway said on CNBC.
Trump had been scheduled to deliver a speech on the topic Thursday in Colorado, but has postponed it.
There have been signs for weeks now that Trump may be shifting course. Hispanic business and religious leaders who would like to see Trump move in a more inclusive direction have reported closed-door conversations with Trump in which they say he has signaled possibly embracing a less punitive immigration policy that focuses on "compassion" along with the rule of law.
At last month's GOP convention, the Republican National Committee's director of Hispanic communications, Helen Aguirre Ferre, told reporters at a Spanish-language briefing that Trump had already said he "will not do massive deportations" — despite the fact that Trump had never said so publicly.
Instead, Aguirre Ferre said, "he will focus on removing the violent undocumented who have criminal records and live in the country."
Indeed, Trump's first television ad of the general election specifically singles out illegal immigrants with criminal records, claiming that, if Clinton is elected, "Illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay."
Trump's campaign has pushed back on the notion that he's reversing course. "Mr. Trump said nothing today that he hasn't said many times before, including in his convention speech," rapid response director Steven Cheung said after the meeting.