Dave Burggren of Asbury, Iowa, a precinct leader for his local Republican caucus, has been to seven or eight candidate events, checking out Trump, Rubio, former business executive Carly Fiorina, and even Sanders, but said he still did not have “any idea” which candidate he would support.
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“There’s nothing about this campaign that’s like all the rest or any of those in the past”, he said. “From my experience, when people start attacking you it’s because you’re doing something right”.
“If people come out to vote, I think you’re going to be looking at one of the biggest upsets in modern political history”, Sanders said on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning.
With few details emerging from the campaign, there is only anecdotal evidence gleaned from voters, many of whom still report never having received phone calls from the campaign or guidance on how to caucus.
Trump, the showman of the Republican race, made a dramatic entrance to a Dubuque rally as his jet flew low over a hangar half-filled by the waiting crowd and music played from the movie “Air Force One”.
But Trump isn’t Cruz’s top target any more. “He’s got to do whatever they want him to do”.
“There’s no question we are feeling some wind at our back”, he told The Associated Press.
“Donald’s the greatest show on Earth”. So we feel very confident that what we need to do here is finish a strong third.
He said if enough people turn out to caucus, then “we have got a real shot to win this”.
But Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was closing strongly and nipping at the heels of Cruz, a fellow first-term senator and Cuban-American.
In the last major preference poll before the caucuses, Trump had the support of 28 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers, with Cruz at 23 percent and Rubio at 15 percent.
With polls showing Sanders in a nail-biter with frontrunner Hillary Clinton, the Vermont candidate earned cheers from the more than 1,700 who packed a Des Moines gym with promises of a massive federal jobs program, an expansion of health insurance, tuition-free public higher education and a new infusion of funding for infrastructure projects. 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.
Cruz took to the airwaves to challenge the conservative credentials of Rubio, the Floridian running third in Iowa, according to the polls.
“The desperation kicks in”, Rubio said in response. There’s “no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting”, he said, and insinuating otherwise is “not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa caucuses”. Sanders could be at a disadvantage here because his support has been heavily concentrated in college towns and urban areas, although the Sanders campaign has been trying to expand its reach to rural areas. That, Trump said, allowed him to grow up “working with people that worked on building houses and building whatever”.
Two super PACs – the pro-Cruz Keep the Promise I and the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC – have leveled similar attacks in ads posted days before Mondays’ caucus. “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”. “Because if I’m our nominee, we’re going to win”.
On Friday, the State Department disclosed that Clinton’s private server held 22 e-mails that included top-secret information and are being withheld from release.
That heat was coming from Republicans; Sanders earlier declared the email flap a nonissue in his mind.
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The 2016 Iowa caucus is now here, and final polls point to what could be game-changing victories for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. “I’m extremely angry. We’ve got politicians who are just there for their own gain”.
