US ELECTIONS: Hillary Clinton vows to 'call out bigotry' as feud with Trump grows

US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has said she will keep "calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric" as a feud with Donald Trump escalates.

The Democrat made the promise in a statement where she apologised for suggesting half of the Republican's supporters were "deplorable" people.

Mr Trump had responded by saying the comment was "insulting" to "millions of amazing, hard working people".

Mrs Clinton accepted that she had been "grossly generalistic".

She added "I regret saying half", but stressed it was "really deplorable" that her Republican opponent was linked to people from the right-wing "alt-right movement".

"David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values," she said in the statement.

Polls released earlier this week suggest Mr Trump is gaining on Mrs Clinton, and the rivals are neck and neck in the key battleground states of Ohio and Florida.

'Basket of deplorables'

Speaking at a fundraiser in New York on Friday, Mrs Clinton called half of Donald Trump's supporters a "basket of deplorables".

They were, she told the LGBT event, "racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it".

The rest of the Republican nominee's supporters, according to Mrs Clinton, were "just desperate for change".

"I think it will cost her at the polls!" Mr Trump responded in a tweet.

Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, also described Mrs Clinton's description of Trump supporters as "insulting".

The Democrat, he argued, had shown "her outright contempt for ordinary people". Millions of Americans, he said, supported the Republican nominee because they were "sick of corrupt career politicians like Hillary Clinton".

Other Republicans mocked Mrs Clinton, sharing photos of crowd in the Florida venue where Mr Trump spoke on Friday.

 On Saturday, Mrs Clinton said: "Last night I was 'grossly generalistic' and that's never a good idea. I regret saying 'half' - that was wrong."

But she went on to attack her rival, accusing him of building "his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia" and giving a national platform to "hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people".

"As I said," she added, "many of Trump's supporters are hard-working Americans who just don't feel like the economy or our political system are working for them."

Americans go to the polls on 8 November to elect a successor to President Barack Obama, who is standing down after two terms in office.