Democratic race down to just two: Clinton, Sanders face off

Their race newly energized, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders head into the first one-on-one debate of the Democratic presidential contest Thursday night in a tussle over their very political identities.

Sanders, an independent USA senator from Vermont who is running as a democratic socialist, is polling more than 15 points ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire, but is trailing her nationally by roughly the same amount. That threat led Sanders to initially say he wouldn’t participate in the debate but he changed his mind Wednesday afternoon.

“Sanders himself is aware of all these incidents or would endorse this kind of conduct”, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told The Associated Press on Thursday.

If he wins in New Hampshire, Sanders hopes to try and continue his momentum as the race heads to Nevada and SC – two states with large minority populations that strongly back Clinton.

“I am not making promises that I can’t keep”, she said at the MSNBC debate.

Clinton, however, is the national front-runner and is looking to the SC primary later this month to start demonstrating that she has wider appeal among ethnically diverse Democratic activists than Sanders. Sanders countered that the ads didn’t say he’d been endorsed but merely passed along “nice” words the newspapers had written about him.

“There’s no cavalry coming – it’s just people like you who are going to decide whether or not to step up to elect the first woman president our country has ever had”, Clinton’s campaign email reads. And days before the February 9 New Hampshire primary.

Asked this week if Clinton is a progressive, he said: “Some days, yes”.

The debate, slotted during the critical week between the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, comes as the candidates have been exchanging fire on who is a real progressive in the race and on who is the bigger underdog.

Clinton fired back, asking who made Sanders the “gatekeeper on who’s progressive”.

Sanders is likely to continue to criticize Clinton for accepting speaking fees from Goldman Sachs before her candidacy.

Sanders stands at 61% support, up slightly from the 57% he held in a late January CNN/WMUR poll conducted before he and Clinton divided Iowa caucusgoers nearly evenly on Monday night. Under an agreement announced Wednesday, there will also be another March debate and two debates in April and May on dates still to be determined.