As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) looks to score a momentum-building victory in the Iowa caucuses just 10 days from now, the progressive populist is ramping up his attacks on rival Hillary Clinton for delivering paid speeches before Wall Street banks after leaving the State Department, seizing on Clinton’s hefty fees to depict her as a creature of the financial establishment.
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The Sanders campaign attributed her attacks to the latest poll numbers in a state where she was once expected to win easily.
She says she is, “torn between [Clinton] and Bernie”. “He just can not defeat a Republican candidate in a general election”.
These scandals, and the Clinton camp’s failure to foresee a Sanders surge, can account for the Vermont senator’s momentous rise in the polls. Iowa holds its caucuses on February 1, and New Hampshire voters go to the polls on February 9.
“He had his moment and he blew it”, Trump said at an event in a casino in Las Vegas Thursday after a reading a series of polls showing him surging in states around the country. Some Republicans, reports USA Today, are using his success to embarrass Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic front-runner told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” that Sanders’ charge that Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign support Clinton because they are all part of the establishment didn’t make sense to her.
Some independent voters said that in addition to Sanders, they were also considering voting in the Republican primary for either Ohio Governor John Kasich or NY businessman Donald Trump.
He was topping the Iowa polls with 37 per cent, according to CNN/ORC poll. These voters remember his donations to Democratic candidates (which he has since disavowed as a business necessity) and support for abortion rights (which he has rationalized as trying to fit in with left-leaning New Yorkers).
Ms Clinton made this one of her main lines of attack at a rally at a liberal arts college in Indianola, Iowa. According to data from RealClear Politics, Sanders leads Trump 46.8 to 41.5 percent nationally.
The Suffolk poll was conducted January 19 to 21, making it the first survey to take place entirely after the last Democratic debate on Sunday.
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The Vermont senator is leading Clinton by 27 percentage points in New Hampshire, a new CNN/WMUR poll has found. Sanders is the favorite choice of 60 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire compared to 33 percent for Clinton.
