Jan.8
Political News, Now.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Hold Big Leads in New Hampshire Poll
Donald J. Trump trails Senator Ted Cruz in Iowa but has a commanding double-digit lead in New Hampshire with less than a month to go before voting begins in the first contests in the Republican presidential nominating fight, according to new Fox News surveys.
Mr. Cruz received 27 percent of support in Iowa, while Mr. Trump, who has sharpened his attacks on the senator from Texas in recent weeks, got 23 percent. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is next, at 15 percent, followed by Ben Carson (9 percent); Jeb Bush (7 percent); Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky (5 percent); and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey (4 percent).
In New Hampshire, however, Mr. Trump received 33 percent support from likely voters in the Republican primary, which is more than double the amount of his closest rival, Mr. Rubio, at 15 percent. Mr. Cruz got 12 percent. And despite a sense that Mr. Christie is on the rise in the state, he was at 5 percent in the Fox News poll, in sixth place. Both Mr. Bush and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio are ahead of him, with Mr. Bush at 9 percent and Mr. Kasich at 7 percent.
The Republican polls were conducted Jan. 4-7; Iowa has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points, and New Hampshire four percentage points.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic contest, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a 13-percentage point lead over Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to her 37 percent. Mr. Sanders’s lead has grown since a one-point lead in a similar poll in November. Martin O’Malley, the third candidate in the race, is at 3 percent.
That poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.
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Ted Cruz’s Iowa Bus Tour: You Going to Eat Those Fries?
Ted Cruz is on a six-day, 28-town swing through Iowa. These are the places, faces and culinary selections of 2016’s first proper bus tour.
EVENT 22
Time: 6:06 p.m., Jan. 8
Place: Cresco, Iowa (population: 3,868)
Site: Teluwut Grille House and Pub, for the second time in about four hours
Mood: Groundhog Day, with a full bar
Food: Big Mouth Vinnie Burger, Porker 2, Cheesy Eggie Bacon Burger
Ad airing on the televisions: Bernie Sanders for President
Confusing wall fixture: giant pair of pajamas
Dizzied traveler: Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, a supporter who has traveled with Mr. Cruz all week. “Sometimes I have to stop and ask,” he told the crowd, “Where, really, am I?”
Highlight: Mr. Cruz, rarely distracted in the throes of a stump speech, stopped himself at the sight of two fish platters. “That looks delicious,” he said as the waitress carried them to a table in back. “Would they be upset if I ate their fries?”
Ted Cruz’s Iowa Bus Tour: Benghazi, and the Benefits of Spanking
Ted Cruz is on a six-day, 28-town swing through Iowa. These are the places, faces and culinary selections of 2016’s first proper bus tour.
EVENT 21
Time: 3:55 p.m., Jan. 8
Place: Charles City, Iowa (population: 7,652)
Site: Aromas Coffee, packed so tight that sweat-soaked patrons shed several layers
Mood: Highly caffeinated, boiling hot
Stage: Mr. Cruz delivered his speech standing on a chair.
Drink order: “If you guys could maybe make espressos all around,” Mr. Cruz began. “Someone said a politician who’s known for being long-winded is going to be talking, so I think caffeine will be helpful.”
Reporters’ typical questions, according to Cruz: “Please insult Donald Trump. Please say something nasty about Donald Trump. Can you do a Donald Trump impression?”
Highlight: Mr. Cruz, asked about the Benghazi attacks of 2012, deployed an analogy from his home while suggesting that Hillary Clinton had engaged in a cover-up. “In my house, if my daughter Catherine, the 5-year-old, says something that she knows to be false, she gets a spanking,” Mr. Cruz said. “Well, in America, the voters have a way of administering a spanking.”
Obama’s Pledge on Gun Control Sets Off Skirmish Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
Mrs. Clinton called on Mr. Sanders to admit he was wrong for having supported legislation that shields gun makers and dealers from liability lawsuits.
Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager hit back by accusing Mrs. Clinton of flip-flopping on the subject by favoring expanded gun control measures as a Senate candidate in 2000, then positioning herself alongside gun owners in opposition to Mr. Obama during their 2008 primary, before arriving at her present position favoring strict new measures.
The back-and-forth between the two leading Democrats vying to succeed Mr. Obama came after the White House stopped conspicuously short of affirming that the president would campaign for Mr. Sanders if he became the Democratic nominee.
“If Democratic voters across the country confirm that he is the Democratic nominee, then I’m confident that we’re going to spend some time here learning about his record and learning about what is on his agenda to make that decision,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said of Mr. Sanders.
A more customary response would be to say simply that the president would support whoever won the Democratic nomination.
Mr. Sanders’s mixed record on gun control has been one of his major vulnerabilities in the Democratic primary, especially as Hillary Clinton has embraced the issue of gun violence as one of the animating causes of her campaign.
In an Op-Ed article published by The New York Times on Thursday night, Mr. Obama pledged that he would not “campaign for, vote for or support any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun reform.”
Among other issues, Mr. Obama lamented that Congress had “guaranteed that manufacturers enjoy virtual immunity from lawsuits, which means that they can sell lethal products and rarely face consequences.”
Mr. Earnest said that the president’s mention of the immunity issue in his Op-Ed “was not any sort of secret or subtle signal to demonstrate a preference in the presidential primary.”
But the issue has provided a clear distinction between Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton in the race so far.
In 2005, as a House member, Mr. Sanders voted in favor of legislation to shield gun makers and dealers from liability lawsuits. Mrs. Clinton, then a senator from New York, voted against the bill, and she has promised to seek its repeal.
On MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Friday, Mrs. Clinton asserted that Mr. Sanders “has been wrong on gun safety,” and said the issue “represents a very clear choice in a Democratic primary.”
She pointedly criticized him over his vote on the immunity legislation.
“When it really mattered, Senator Sanders voted with the gun lobby and I voted against the gun lobby,” Mrs. Clinton said. “So this is a significant difference, and it’s important that, you know, maybe it’s time for Senator Sanders to stand up and say, ‘I got this one wrong.’ But he hasn’t.”
Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, asserted earlier Friday that there was “about zero daylight” between the senator’s position and the president’s on gun control.
In a statement issued Friday night, Mr. Weaver portrayed Mrs. Clinton as having trimmed her sails on gun control for political expediency.
“Today she’s attacking Bernie on guns,” he said. “Eight years ago she attacked Barack Obama on guns.”
The Sanders campaign said that as a Senate candidate in New York in 2000, Mrs. Clinton favored licensing all gun buyers and establishing a registry of all handgun sales, but that, running for president in 2008, she said she no longer believed such “blanket rules” made sense at the federal level.
Also in 2008, the campaign noted, Mrs. Clinton accused Mr. Obama of being “elitist and out of touch” for making “demeaning remarks” about gun owners – prompting Mr. Obama to suggest she was acting like Annie Oakley “packin’ a six-shooter.”
“As is the case with so many issues on which she has flip-flopped, voters have to ask themselves which Hillary Clinton is asking for their vote,” Mr. Weaver said.
Mr. Sanders has repeatedly faced questions about his record on guns, and, specifically, his vote on the immunity legislation.
“If somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer and that murderer kills somebody with the gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible?” he said on CNN in July. “Not any more than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beats somebody over the head with a hammer.”
But he has since backed away from his vote for the measure, at least to some extent. Asked in a debate in October if he wants to shield gun makers from lawsuits, he responded, “Of course not.” He called the 2005 legislation “a large and complicated bill” and suggested his intent was to protect gun shop owners, not manufacturers.
In an interview on CBS in December, Mr. Sanders said that he was “willing to rethink that piece of legislation and make it more effective.” But he added that “there were elements in that vote back then that did make sense.”
“If a small gun shop owner in the state of Vermont sells a product, a gun, legally to somebody else who then goes out and does something crazy, do I think that that small gun shop owner should be held liable for legally selling the product?” he asked. “No, I don’t.”
Donald Trump’s Son to Hunt Deer in Iowa
Donald J. Trump’s son is going hunting for votes — and for deer.
While Mr. Trump is elsewhere in Iowa on Saturday, his son, Donald J. Trump Jr., will take part in Gov. Terry Branstad’s Annual Deer Hunt in the southern part of the state.
“For a guy like me from New York, where we don’t have quite the quality that you guys have, I wanted to come out early and make sure we got a few good days in there,” the younger Mr. Trump said in an interview with O. Kay Henderson, an Iowa radio host and reporter who is often a touchstone for candidates in both parties. “If you don’t put in the time, you’re not going to do well.”
Mr. Trump described hunting as “relaxing.”
“Being from my family and New York, in a city like that, I think the fact that I was in a tree stand or a duck blind on many mornings probably kept me out of a lot of other trouble I would have gotten into growing up, and I love the lifestyle,” said Mr. Trump, calling hunting “an important tradition, a very American position.”
Mr. Trump and his younger brother Eric have been traveling on behalf of their father, and making news media appearances on his behalf. The two men have drawn criticism in the past for big-game hunting in Africa.
Donald J. Trump Jr. said he thought one reason his father didn’t run for president in 2012 was because he was worried that his children “were too young” to take over Trump enterprises then. The candidate said last spring that he was now ready to hand his company over to Donald Jr., Eric and his daughter, Ivanka.
The first-born Trump — the sportsman in the family — tried to get the tags to hunt deer in Iowa last year but wasn’t successful. He got the tags this year and has long planned to “put in a solid week” on the hunt here. Mr. Trump said he’d been sleeping “in a buddy’s basement” in southern Iowa, with plans to leave after, with a little luck, having bagged a deer.
As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has gained steam in Iowa polls recently, the elder Mr. Trump has sharpened his language about his main rival. And having Donald Jr. appear at an event hosted by the state’s Republican governor is the sort of retail campaigning that Mr. Trump has not done this cycle.
Ted Cruz’s Iowa Bus Tour: Off-Color Question Draws Roar From the Crowd
Ted Cruz is on a six-day, 28-town swing through Iowa. These are the places, faces and culinary selections of 2016’s first proper bus tour.
EVENT 20
Time: 2:01 p.m., Jan. 8
Place: Osage, Iowa (population: 3,619)
Site: Teluwut Grille House & Pub, stuffed with T-shirts and assorted images of adult beverages.
Mood: monkey-business casual
Food: breaded broccoli, loaded criss cuts, hog wild wings
Emotionally conflicted sign: “Do one brave thing a day … and then run like hell”
Ominous sign: “If these walls could talk …”
Highlight: An attendee, capping an occasionally profane preface, asked Mr. Cruz if he had “the brass ones” to effect change. The crowd roared. “I want to thank you for what is officially the most colorful question we’ve had on the bus tour,” Mr. Cruz said. “I have to say, it’s hard to know where to start.”
After some well-worn stump-speech fodder, Mr. Cruz got around to his central thought: In the Republican race, he suggested, no one could match him “when it comes to strength of spine, or other body parts.”
Ted Cruz’s Iowa Bus Tour: ‘Benny Youngman’ Was ‘Before My Time’
Ted Cruz is on a six-day, 28-town swing through Iowa. These are the places, faces and culinary selections of 2016’s first proper bus tour.
EVENT 19
Time: 12:40 p.m., Jan. 8
Place: Manly, Iowa (population: 1,323)
Site: Casey’s General Store, a convenience-store chain and semi-pizzeria
Mood: Crowded aisles, large beverages
Food: taco pizza, meat galore, wedgie fries
Drinks, in a well-stocked wine display: ringneck red, autumn hush, peach be with you
Repeat customer: Mr. Cruz approached a woman who said she had seen him speak before. “You’re a glutton for punishment,” he said.
Service: Mr. Cruz, greeting workers behind the counter, offered to fetch some items. “Anyone need some gas? Gas? Powerball ticket? I recommend the Slushies, the Slushies are really good.”
Highlight: It seems Mr. Cruz has been reading up. As he brushed past a New York Times reporter beside the register, he paused to comment on a detail in a post from Thursday night, when Mr. Cruz referred to the comedian Henny Youngman as “Benny.”
“Henny? Benny? O.K.,” he said playfully. “You know what? It was before my time.”
The reporter confessed that the fact-check had required an Internet search.
“You had to look it up?” Mr. Cruz said with a grin.
Ted Cruz’s Iowa Bus Tour: A Prayer a Day Until the Caucuses
Ted Cruz is on a six-day, 28-town swing through Iowa. These are the places, faces and culinary selections of 2016’s first proper bus tour.
EVENT 18
Time: 10:22 a.m., Jan. 8
Place: Mason City, Iowa (population: 28,078)
Site: Praise Community Church, a modest space with clear square windows and a drum set onstage.
Mood: Sunday best, with Cruz lapel stickers
DVDs available: “Ben Hur” (animated version); “The Ten Commandments” (animated version); “Left Behind II: Tribulation Force,” starring Kirk Cameron
Iowa dining appreciation, via Representative Steve King: “If you can get it down, it’s good. If you can keep it down, it’s better.”
Best prop: “Our whole family unicycles,” Christa Hanson, 21, said, rolling her single wheel through the church.
Runner-up: “Did she say I’m the fastest juggler in the world?” Ms. Hanson’s father, Mark Hanson, asked, clutching five balls. (News clips attest to his prowess.)
Highlight: Mr. Cruz, who places faith at the center of his campaign pitch at all stops, took particular care to project a preacher’s cadence in his closing. He asked the crowd to spend one minute a day in prayer until caucus day. “One minute, lifting our country up in prayer,” he said, his eyes narrowing as the cheers swelled. “Father God, please, keep this awakening going.”
Charles Koch Knocks Positions of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz
The billionaire Koch brothers have long been power brokers within the Republican Party, using their wealth to steer candidates and their policies. But this election season is turning out to be a different story, with a billionaire celebrity and a firebrand senator from Texas taking the political debate in directions that Charles G. Koch finds worrisome.
In an interview with The Financial Times, Mr. Koch bemoaned the state of the field of Republican candidates seeking the nomination and suggested that big money was losing its influence in politics these days. His concern over the policies of Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was especially clear.
“It is hard for me to get a high level of enthusiasm because the things I’m passionate about, and I think this country urgently needs, aren’t being addressed,” said Mr. Koch, 80, the chairman of Koch Industries.
Asked about Mr. Trump’s plan to bar foreign Muslims from entering the United States, Mr. Koch said that such a policy was antithetical to what America represents.
“Well, then you destroy our free society,” Mr. Koch said. “Who is it that said, ‘If you want to defend your liberty, the first thing you’ve got to do is defend the liberty of people you like the least?’”
Mr. Koch also said that Mr. Cruz’s plan to “carpet bomb” the Islamic State militants would be fruitless, wondering if the next step would be to go country to country bombing Muslims.
“I’ve studied revolutionaries a lot,” Mr. Koch said. “Mao said that the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims. Not that we don’t need to defend ourselves and have better intelligence and all that, but how do we create an unfriendly sea for the terrorists in the Muslim communities? We haven’t done a good job of that.”
Last year, the Koch brothers signaled that their network of political nonprofits, “super PACs” and like-minded donors would spend almost $900 million advancing conservative candidates and policies through the 2016 election. Mr. Trump, who is mostly self-financing his campaign, has mocked their influence and called those who take their money “puppets.”
But Mr. Koch does not seem to feel like much of a puppet master. He told The Financial Times that “it doesn’t seem to faze them much” when he and fellow donors have presented candidates with a list of important issues to focus on. The return on investment of political spending might not be what it once was.
“I’m not confident,” Mr. Koch said. “I’d say there are some benefits. Ask me in 10 years.”
Martin O’Malley Could Get Excluded From the Next Democratic Debate
Former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, who has argued most strenuously for more Democratic debates, is at risk of not qualifying for the next one under criteria laid out by NBC, the network hosting the Jan. 17 debate in South Carolina.
In a statement released on Friday, officials with NBC said that “to qualify, candidates must reach an average of 5 percent either nationally or in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina in the five most recent polls recognized by NBC News” published before Jan. 14.
In only one state, Iowa, is Mr. O’Malley polling at an average of more than 5 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls. But NBC is not considering some of those Iowa polls in which he is doing well in its data used for qualifying for the debate.
And in South Carolina and New Hampshire, as well as nationally, Mr. O’Malley is averaging below 5 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics averages.
If he fails to make the cut, NBC would be able to advertise the debate as a two-way contest (between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) — which might be better for ratings for an event being televised on Sunday, but it would be a huge blow to Mr. O’Malley two weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
In Iowa on Friday, Mr. O’Malley condemned NBC for the criteria it used to determine eligibility.
“They’re treating your presidential selection process as if it’s a another episode of ‘The Apprentice,'” he said.
Mr. O’Malley has structured his public criticism of the Democratic National Committee around the party’s decision to allow only six sanctioned debates, with candidates facing strict penalties if they take part in unsanctioned ones.
An NBC executive briefed on the debate criteria said after it was released that Mr. O’Malley would likely qualify, although they won’t be certain until the deadline. But the executive said the network would most likely round up his numbers if Mr. O’Malley moves to 4.5 percent in an average of Iowa polls.
Luis Miranda, the communications director for the Democratic National Committee, said, “We expect all three of our major candidates onstage next Sunday in South Carolina.”
Gov. Paul LePage of Maine Says Racial Comment Was a ‘Slip-Up’
On Wednesday, he said out-of-state drug dealers come to Maine and “impregnate a young white girl” before leaving.
“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty — these types of guys,” he said while discussing the state’s heroin crisis at a town-hall-style meeting in Bridgton, Me. “They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we’ve got to deal with down the road.”
On Friday, Mr. LePage, a Republican, characterized the statement as a slip of the tongue.
“I made one slip-up,” the governor said at a televised news conference at the state capitol in Augusta, organized after the remarks became public Thursday evening. “I made a one-word slip-up. I might have made many slip-ups. I was going impromptu, and my brain didn’t catch up to my mouth. Instead of saying ‘Maine women,’ I said ‘white women.’ I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that, because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essentially 95 percent white.”
After saying he would not apologize, Mr. LePage seemed to do just that. “So if I slipped up and used the wrong word, I apologize to all the Maine women,” he said.
Asked if he was not suggesting that drug dealers with names like D-Money, Smoothie and Swifty were black, he said, “I don’t know if they’re white, black, Asian,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Whether he apologized or not seemed to depend on the listener. Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat, called the comments racist and sexist. “He owes us an apology, and claiming it was just a slip of the tongue doesn’t cut it,” she said.
Amy Fried, a political scientist at the University of Maine, called his remarks “a non-apology apology.”
But Rick Bennett, the chairman of the state Republican Party, said in a statement that “it was right for Governor LePage to acknowledge his mistake and apologize for his ill-chosen, inappropriate words.”
The governor, who won election with Tea Party backing, is serving his second term. He was already embroiled in several battles with the Maine Legislature, including over how to respond to the state’s rising heroin death toll.
An earlier effort calling for his impeachment, prompted by what critics said was an abuse of power when he blocked a political foe from getting a private job, may have run out of steam. But some of his adversaries were still looking to censure him.
At his news conference, Mr. LePage devoted much of his time to one of his favorite themes: castigating the news media. He opened his remarks by saying he was paraphrasing from one of the “Rocky” movies: “Youse don’t like me, and I don’t like you.” He added, “I sincerely mean that.”
Mr. LePage blamed reporters for not helping him combat the heroin crisis. He chastised them for publicizing his Wednesday remarks only after being prodded by one of his political adversaries. And with an air of false humility, he repeatedly bowed to their superior intellect and polish.
“Am I perfect?” he asked. “No. Do I want to be perfect? No, because if I were perfect I would be a reporter.”
The oldest of 18 children with an abusive, alcoholic father, he ran away from home at 11, lived on the streets and, with the help of strangers, managed to go to college and become a businessman. Now 67, he often refers to his biography to explain his behavior.
“If you listen closely in that tape, you could probably find 10, 15, 20 words I used that could have been used another way, better used,” Mr. LePage said. “That’s who I am. You can take the kid off the street, but you can’t take the street out of the kid.”
Mr. LePage’s blunt style has frequently drawn national attention, but many in Maine appreciate his forthrightness, and during his 2014 re-election campaign he traded on it as a political plus. He has said he would tell President Obama to “go to hell” and told the Maine N.A.A.C.P. to “kiss my butt,” a comment he says was mischaracterized. He has compared the I.R.S. to the Gestapo, later apologizing.
Mr. LePage is the most prominent elected official to support Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in the presidential race. Mr. Christie so far has made no comment. A statement from Marlon Marshall, the director of state campaigns for Hillary Clinton, said: “LePage’s racist rants sadly distract from efforts to address one of our nation’s most pressing problems.”
Obama and Trump Events Highlight a Central Divide on Guns
As President Obama held a town-hall-style event in Virginia on Thursday evening to discuss his executive actions on gun control, one of his loudest critics, Donald J. Trump, promised a crowd of more than 1,400 people in Burlington, Vt., that he would eliminate gun-free zones in schools on his first day in office.
The two events express the divide between the two presidential primary races on the issue of guns, which have been a focal point since the fatal shooting in June of nine churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., the site of next week’s Republican debate.
Mr. Obama’s proposals for curbing the accessibility of guns — a move he said he was forced to take because previous efforts stalled in Congress — had support from 67 percent of people surveyed in a CNN poll released on Thursday.
But the split-screen debates in the two party primaries tell a different story. Among the three Democratic primary candidates, there has been an effort to talk about the importance of adding gun control measures — and Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have faulted Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a state with a thriving gun culture, for his record on the issue.
Among Republicans, there has been very little distinguishing the candidates in their language about Mr. Obama’s measures. Almost uniformly, they have criticized what they have called a government overreach. Few have gone as far as Mr. Trump did in Burlington, where Mr. Sanders is a former mayor. The general election may tell whether that divide can be bridged.
G.O.P. Senator Summons Loretta Lynch to Testify on Legalities of New Gun Measures
Congressional Republicans seem to be very unhappy with President Obama’s new executive actions on guns, though they are probably quite happy that the actions provided them such a juicy issue with which to stir up voters in an election year.
In that vein, Senator Richard C. Shelby, the veteran Republican from Alabama up for re-election in November, apparently wants first crack at questioning Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on the administration’s rationale and legal justification for moving ahead on its own with the new rules.
Mr. Shelby, chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds the Justice Department, has summoned Ms. Lynch for a Jan. 28 hearing to “discuss the president’s firearms proposals and any potential infringement on law-abiding Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” he said in a letter to the attorney general.
Suffice to say that Mr. Shelby is not going to take any such infringement lightly or refrain from using his spending bill as leverage against the administration. “Let me be clear,” he warned. “I will not sit idly by and allow the department to implement unlawful, unconstitutional actions.”
While the actual reach of the Obama proposals has been judged to be fairly modest, congressional Republicans are going to spend a lot of time talking about them since the issue has conservatives riled up on two fronts: gun rights and perceived executive overreach by the White House.
As he seeks a sixth term, Mr. Shelby is facing a potentially difficult primary challenge from the right, and he is taking no chances. As has been noted earlier, he voted against the recent spending deal passed easily by the House and Senate despite having played a significant role in writing it.
Bernie Sanders Makes Swing Through Iowa to Remind Supporters to Vote
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont begins a four-day swing through Iowa on Friday, hosting multiple events intended in part to motivate people to attend the caucuses in the first state in the nominating process to vote.
A poll conducted for The Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics last month showed Hillary Clinton leading in the state by about 10 percentage points, with 48 percent of likely Democratic caucus participants saying that she was their first choice, and 39 percent saying they would support Mr. Sanders. His campaign, hoping to close that gap, has assembled an extensive ground operation in Iowa with 27 local campaign offices, 101 paid staff members and thousands of trained volunteers for each of the state’s 1,681 caucus precincts.
“From the beginning, Senator Sanders has understood the importance of Iowa in the process, so it’s not surprising that he is returning again,” said Rania Batrice, Mr. Sanders’s communications director based in Iowa. “He has been saying for quite some time that Iowa is one of those places, just like the rest of country, if turnout is high, we are going to win.”
It is the 15th trip to Iowa for Mr. Sanders, who is also expected to discuss a host of economic and social issues that have now become familiar parts of his campaign, including climate change, income inequality and the need to overhaul Wall Street.
Mr. Sanders will keep a full schedule, starting the trip on Friday with a news conference questioning what his campaign says is Mrs. Clinton’s refusal to support the Family Act, a bill dealing with paid family and medical leave. Over the weekend, Mr. Sanders is scheduled to meet with seniors, speak at the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund, host forums on veterans’ issues and climate change, and hold several town-hall-style meetings.
On Monday, Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Clinton, and Martin O’Malley are expected to attend the Iowa Brown and Black Presidential Forum, where each is expected to discuss concerns of African-Americans and Latinos.
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