Turnout is name of the game in Monday’s Iowa caucuses

In testy statements, the Clinton and Sanders campaigns publicly aired their demands for site locations, underscoring tensions between the two sides in the days before Monday’s leadoff Iowa caucuses. The poll also gives a clear lead to Republican Donald Trump.

Ten Republicans and three Democrats were campaigning in Iowa for their parties’ nominations but much of the focus was on the fight between Cruz and Trump.

Democrat Clinton was only just ahead of self-declared socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, at 45 percent to 42 percent. Bernie Sanders’ message of income equality and free college tuition.

The Times said “some of the campaign attacks (against Clinton) are outrageous, like Donald Trump’s efforts to bring up Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity”.

Meanwhile, Clinton, who according to a RealClearPolitics average of the latest polls leads Sanders 51.6% to 37.2%, cautiously suggested she would perform well in the Hawkeye State, but repeatedly stopped short of predicting victory.

“Nope, nope. That is not, I think, a fair assessment”.

She was introduced by former US Representative Gabby Giffords and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly.

Trump used stagecraft and blasted Cruz to enliven a crowd in Dubuque as he barnstormed through eastern Iowa.

The influential Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa poll released on Saturday showed a tight race, with Trump receiving 28 percent of the support of likely Iowa caucus-goers and Cruz 23 percent. “I stand by what I said in the first debate”, Sanders said, referring to a moment in the first Democratic debate in October when he told Clinton that Americans were “sick and exhausted of hearing about your damn emails”.

“Trump is leading with both the inner core of the caucus universe and the fringe – that’s what any candidate would want”, said veteran Iowa pollster J Ann Selzer, who conducted the survey.

The threshold could be a problem for former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is polling below 15 percent in pre-election polls in Iowa.

Asked Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” whether voters should interpret his refusal to engage Clinton on the email issue to mean that Clinton did nothing wrong, Sanders replied with a firm, “No”.

-What’s a caucus? It’s a bit complicated. For results among the sample of likely Republican primary voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points, it is 5.3 for results among likely Democratic voters. A classic example: Barack Obama in 2008.

Unlike past years, Iowa’s GOP rules require delegates to support the candidate who wins them, unless only one candidate is nominated at the convention.

Mrs Clinton received a boost on Saturday when the New York Times endorsed her. The newspaper described her as “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history”.