The senator has surged ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire, and Clinton leads Sanders by only 2 percentage points in the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, down from 9 percentage points last month. The impression Clinton and her insurgent challenger, Sanders make on Sunday could presage their performance on February 1. The former secretary of state couldn’t hide the truth of the matter.
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Since then, there have been two more debates – neither of which was memorable.
During campaign swings last week, Bill Clinton appeared at tightly-controlled events and didn’t give interviews.
Team Sanders is taking a cautious approach heading into the fight.
“She has more experience from being the first lady and seeing what he went through”, she said. “He’s going to engage on it and he’s going to be forceful”.
Clinton reveals that she likes to “be able to fast forward” through the Republican debates and that her husband holds a “running commentary” while they’re watching.
The Sanders campaign’s decision came after David Brock, the head of a Hillary Clinton super PAC able to coordinate with the campaign, telegraphed his plans to call for the medical records this weekend. For the record, Sanders proposes a single-payer health care plan, but has yet to offer details on how he would fund it.
The Clinton campaign, however, has distanced itself from Brock’s attack.
“I wish that we could elect a Democratic president who could wave a magic wand and say, ‘We shall do this, and we shall do that, ‘ ” Clinton said this week in Iowa.
Sanders, for his part, has accused the former first lady of having cozied up to billionaires and said she would not be tough enough on Wall Street banks. Both candidates have found their voices by pitting themselves as the underdogs battling the elites in their respective parties in addition to the other side – an ironic twist on the “triangulation” strategy that Bill Clinton used in his re-election campaign in 1996.
Tobe Berkovitz, a professor of communications at Boston University who specializes in political communication, said for Clinton and Sanders it will be “how far and how fast can you run to the left”.
Citing the aspirations of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Sanders said that all Americans have a right to health care.
Of course, winning the polls in Iowa is not the same as winning the caucuses.
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More recently, a November New York Times/CBS News poll showed 56 percent of Democratic primary voters nationally said they had a positive view of socialism.
