Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Narrowly Ahead In Final Poll Before Iowa

Just not in the way he had hoped.

A Des Moines Register/Bloomberg News poll of Iowa voters released on Saturday showed Trump in the lead with 28 percent, Cruz second at 23 percent and Rubio in third with 15 percent.

But Clinton’s 3-point lead over Vermont Sen.

Evan Vucci/AP Bernie Sanders has been steadily gaining ground on Clinton, propelled by Democrats drawn to his promise to level the economic playing field. And only Cruz, Carson and Rubio pull together majorities of likely caucus-goers saying they would enthusiastically back them should they win the nomination.

Clinton, a former USA senator from NY, and Sanders are in negotiations to hold additional debates in what’s now expected to be a protracted battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Democratic strategist Jeff Link said that a key figure in the poll was that 34 percent of the people questioned identified themselves as first-time caucus-goers. Cory Booker, and of course, Bill Clinton have been campaigned with her too.

Seated behind Giffords was her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, as well as both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who is joining her mother on the campaign trail Saturday.

If the race is a nail-biter, the O’Malley voters could be particularly influential in precincts with odd numbers of delegates – 11, rather than 10, for example – because they could tip what looks like a tie into a one-delegate victory there.

Since exploding into a national story earlier this month, Flint’s water crisis has been a top-of-mind subject for Democrats and progressives because Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has accepted a major share of the responsibility for lead contamination on his watch. Sanders said the economy has improved under Obama, but added, “what we have got to do is to involve people in the political process in a way that we have not done”.

The details – where and when – remain unresolved, and the Democratic National Committee has not yet agreed to the arrangement, the Clinton and Sanders sources said.

What was attractive about Sanders, Petersen said, was the candidate’s “inclusive message”, which Petersen said never made him feel “more at home” – even when he was volunteering for Romney.

“I am disturbed, I have to say, (that) the tone of Secretary Clinton’s campaign is such that they are just bringing forth a lot of inaccurate statements regarding what I believe”, Sanders told canvassers in Charles City. I’ve seen the news reports about the ones who are killed …

The Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll found several encouraging signs for Clinton. “I mean, if I wanted to beat Secretary Clinton and that was my entire goal, I’d be supporting someone like John Kasich. If somebody has no money and they’re lying in the middle of the street and they’re dying, I’m going to take care of that person”.