Clinton takes on Sanders over guns, to appear with Giffords

Sanders’s coalition is similar coalition to the one that backed Obama, who focused significant resources on turning out younger voters.

“It’s harder and harder to believe in an establishment guy who’s so polished”, said Wayne Magoon, a 72-year-old from Exeter, New Hampshire, who described himself as a lifelong Republican.

Numerous large unions, that Bernie has championed for decades, have endorsed Hillary, known for her job-destroying support for NAFTA and the World Trade Organization and her very late involvement in working toward a minimum wage increase. “So I want action, not gridlock, I want progress not regression”.

The antiquated system has been progressively phased out of the American presidential cycle, with the Democratic Party making significant strides in 1968 when it shifted many caucuses to primaries. Things in SC probably won’t get as nasty as they did in 2008, granted.

As Sanders has risen in the polls, Clinton has kept her cool.

He’s almost matched Clinton now on the ground.

They seem willing to entrust their hopes of retaining the presidency to a candidate envisioning change far more radical than anything Obama ever dangled before them.

Tom Clark, a 60-year-old county maintenance worker in Maple River, had never considered volunteering for a politician until he heard Sanders on a local radio show.

“He plans on going after the drug companies, whereas I don’t think she will”, he said. “I said, ‘God, nobody’s talking about this my whole life, and this guy’s talking about it.’ It inspired me”.

Sanders often describes his campaign as a revolution, as he did before thousands of people crammed into Music Man Square in Mason City. Now, though, his camp carries iPads and asks attendees to register electronically.

Polls show a tight race between Clinton and Sanders in Iowa.

I joined them on their first canvassing route together in a Des Moines neighborhood.

“We started out organizing in Iowa a lot later than Senator Clinton did”. She’s done this before, we didn’t.

Even more, Sanders’ confidence that the American people are overwhelmingly on board with his program – that the only thing blocking its enactment are those billionaire donors – is misplaced.

Since Bruce Rauner’s win in 2014, Democratic campaign operatives and lawmakers have invested much faith for 2016 in the “Democratic presidential turnout” theory as a fire-wall against Rauner’s expected money tidal wave that will crash against them.

One major unknown that has Iowa Democrats buzzing is the race’s third candidate: former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

If a candidate wins all of the Republican convention delegates, he or she will have a total of 30 out of 2472 votes – 1.2 percent of the total.

With the Republicans, it gets a little more complicated, as each state has different rules.

Clinton: “Gosh, [In 2000] we went off and we elected another Republicans-no, the Supreme Court went out and elected a Republican!”

Even while the candidates’ aides bicker on the sidelines, Clinton and Sanders have both largely avoided hammering each other in speeches, signaling a break in tone from the last couple weeks when Sanders criticized Clinton for taking Goldman Sachs’ cash and Clinton suggested Sanders would make a feckless president. He portrayed Sanders as “the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before”.

But caucuses – typically held in churches, school gymnasiums, libraries, community centres and, increasingly rare, at people’s homes – meet to openly discuss the candidates before voting.

Each of Iowa’s 1,681 precincts has delegates to win – and the caucus results are based on who nets the most delegates, not who gets the most overall supporters.

Clinton was due to appear on Saturday morning in Ames, Iowa, with Giffords and her husband, the astronaut Mark Kelly. But Trump leads Cruz by 11 percentage points in that poll, mostly thanks to a 24-point lead among first-time caucus-goers.

The phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.