Sanders gaining ground on Clinton, in echoes of 2008

At the end of the day, whether it stems from millennial women’s residual dreams of their own shot at being the first female president, or their honest faith in the Bernie Sanders platform, this support could be just what Bernie needs to snatch the nomination right out from under Hillary’s nose.

A small group of Bernie Sanders supporters gathered in a Burlington home Saturday afternoon to call voters in Iowa ahead of the all-important caucus on February 1 and urged them to consider supporting the Vermont senator in the Democratic presidential race.

The Democratic presidential candidates will square off in a live televised debate Sunday night, just two weeks before the first vote in the Democratic contest is held at the Iowa Caucuses.

A targeted strategy by Sanders has been compared to president Barack Obama’s push for the top job when he “swamped” Clinton’s campaign back in 2008. However, Sanders only gets 36 percent support from those ages 26-34.

Clinton accused Trump of sexism, he hit back with “Bill Clinton is one of the world’s great abusers”, Hillary Clinton’s double digit leads over Sanders have all but disappeared and the ghosts from the 1990s are back to haunt her – a scandal churner that nearly destroyed Bill Clinton’s presidency. But the reality in either case is that Clinton’s lead, which many observers believed would be insurmountable, has essentially vanished.

Ferrara said he is still deciding between Clinton and her chief rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of nearby Vermont.

Thursday, the Sanders campaign launched its most robust outreach effort among black voters, kicking off a tour of historically black colleges at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. For example, public attacks on his plan for a single-payer healthcare system appear to have had little effect.

Clinton’s campaign is facing a host of challenges with the Republican candidates raising questions about the past sexual affairs of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as about her use of a private email sever to handle State Department business when she was secretary of state.

In 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama chats with Stacey Snyder, 21, in Ames, Iowa.

While the Sanders campaign is painting his support for the new proposed legislation as a fulfillment of his promise to look more closely at the 2005 law, the Clinton campaign is characterizing it as a last minute, pre-debate flip-flop. “We want to get the word out so people realize this is a viable candidate, an alternative to Hillary who has been fighting for common people his entire career”. He reiterated that in his statement of support for legislation drafted by two of his Democratic colleagues in Congress that they say is aimed at ending legal immunity gun sellers and makers.

A series of interviews and a burgeoning friendship with rapper Killer Mike seemed to help Sanders open up to a new, younger audience.

On the other hand, we might be entering a new era when people are “fed up”, are paying more attention, studying the issues and seeing through the old-style manipulations that have defined our country’s political process for so long.

Clinton’s disappearing lead in early Democratic primaries has prompted her to start going after Sanders in a sustained way for the first time. A latest Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register survey suggests that both Clinton and Sanders are actually in a virtual tie in Iowa. “We are not going to wage our usual mean-spirited, dishonest campaign, and say, they should win the campaign because we know they are the better people”. They are raising tremendous amounts of campaign cash, they have a “SuperPAC” that is raising a tremendous amount more, they have built up a solid “machine” in the states, they are racking up “top-down” endorsements, and doing what they can to bring a sense of “inevitability” to her nomination.

Yet some Democratic Party officials who remain uncommitted said that after nine months of running, Clinton still had not found her voice when it came to inspiring people.