Moments ago, Hillary Clinton made history by becoming the first woman to head the ticket of a major party when moments after Bernie Sanders moved to nominate Hillary by acclimation…

… she secured the Democratic Party’s 2016 nomination for the White House on Tuesday.

In a symbolic show of party unity, Clinton’s former rival, Bernie Sanders told the chairwoman from the convention floor that Clinton should be selected as the party’s nominee during a state-by-state roll call at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

 

The former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state, cleared the penultimate hurdle in her second run for president after Vermont, the home state of her opponent Bernie Sanders, carried her over the 2,383 threshold. There were huge cheers on the floor of the Democratic convention as Mrs Clinton officially became the nominee, ending what had been a bitter and unexpectedly close battle over the past year with the socialist Mr Sanders.

Earlier, delegates from South Dakota had given Clinton 15 votes, ensuring that she had more than the 2,383 votes needed to win the nomination. She emerged with a total of 2,842 votes to Sanders’ 1,865 votes.

Delegates chanted “Hillary, Hillary” as U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland formally put forward Clinton’s name for the alphabetical roll-call vote.

“Yes, we do break barriers, I broke a barrier when I became the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right,” Mikulski said. “So it is with a full heart that I’m here today to nominate Hillary Clinton to be the first woman president,” Mikulski said.

As the FT reports, the mood on the convention floor was electric as Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the mayor of Baltimore and secretary of the convention, called on the states to announce their primary votes. As the Oklahoma delegation declared their results, just minutes before Mrs Clinton clinched the nomination, one woman in the group who was born in 1929, nine years after women were given the right to vote, said: “I never thought that I would live to see this day.”

But while each delegation cheered loudly as their states were called, many Sanders fans remained dismayed at the outcome of the primary, which they said had been rigged against the Vermont senator.

To some, Sanders’ act was the ultimate show of unity.

Others disgreed. Jill Dunham, an AT&T project manager from Michigan who supports Mr Sanders, said she had been disappointed by the lack of unity in the Democratic Party, and angered that Mrs Clinton’s supporters had not done more to recognise Mr Sanders’ primary achievements.

“I was really hoping that we could have unity. In my head, I know that we need to vote for Hillary, but my heart is having trouble getting there,” said Ms Dunham, 56. “But the attitude of the delegates is making it worse . . . It is just hurtful when people don’t respect and appreciate all that Bernie has done.”

Elsewhere in the Michigan delegation, two delegates held up banners reading “Election Fraud”. Yet overall the mood appeared calmer than the previous night when virtually no convention speaker had been able to endorse Mrs Clinton without prompting jeers from some corners of the hall.

And now that history has been made, it is up to Hillary to catch up to Trump.

Clinton had been leading Trump in national opinion polls in recent weeks but the New York businessman got a boost from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland where he was formally nominated last week. 

Trump had a 2-point lead over Clinton in a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday, the first time he has been ahead since early May.  The July 22-26 poll found that 39 percent of likely voters supported Trump, 37 percent supported Clinton and 24 percent would vote for neither. The poll had a credibility interval of 4 percentage points, meaning that the two candidates should be considered about even in support.

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