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Sanders, Surging, Returns To Stump In Iowa

Matt Rourke
/
Associated Press
Sen. Bernie Sanders, seen here at an event in New Hampshire on Thursday, is in Iowa this weekend for a spree of campaign stops.

DES MOINES – About a year and a half ago, months before he would announce his candidacy for president of the United States, Bernie Sanders addressed a small group of political activists, labor leaders and other organizers at a private meeting in Iowa City.

Sanders told the group he was contemplating a run for the nation’s most powerful office, according to a retired farmer who was at the meeting.

“And he said he wasn’t going to engage in it unless he knew – unless he knew that we were going to stand up for that man,” says Larry Ginter, a 76-year-old resident of Rhodes, Iowa.

Ginter is a barrel-chested man of modest stature with a trim, gray mustache. In the tiny kitchen of his single story home off a board-flat stretch of highway in central Iowa, he gets emotional recalling the encounter.

Credit Peter Hirschfeld / VPR
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VPR
Larry Ginter, a retired farmer from Rhodes, Iowa, has been campaigning for Sanders for more than a year.

“Excuse me for getting weepy here, but by God, this is a fight, it really is," he says. "Democracy is too damn important. This inequality that’s going on here pisses me off."

Ginter says Sanders got the assurances he needed. And when Sanders last year formally launched what at the time seemed a long shot bid for the presidency, Ginter became one of the Iowans the Vermont senator would count on to lead his “political revolution.”

“I’ve been praying for this guy for a long, long time. We need a political revolution. We need to get social democracy going in this country,” Ginter says.

When Sanders first spoke to Ginter, the senator was still barely a blip on the national presidential scene. Earlier this week, a poll conducted by CNN showed Sanders with an eight-point lead over Hillary Clinton. The survey is an outlier, and most believe the race is far closer than that.

Ann Selzer, a highly regarded public opinion researcher based in Iowa, conducted a poll two weeks ago that showed Sanders within two points of Clinton.

Credit Patti Daniels / VPR
/
VPR
Des Moines pollster Ann Selzer says anti-establishment sentiment is buoying Sanders in Iowa.

"We have an electorate that is unsettled about the status quo, to put it mildly. This is why outsider candidates are doing well,” Selzer says. “So you have Donald Trump, who is the ultimate outsider - never held office, never run for office. You have Ted Cruz, that has taken on an internal war with Washington as a senator. And you have Bernie Sanders who is an anti-establishment guy that nobody thought could do very well anywhere.”

Sanders returns to Iowa on Saturday for a four-day swing that will include town meetings in more than  dozen cities across the state. It’s Sanders' 17th trip here since he announced his candidacy, and his campaign has invested heavily in time and resources in the Hawkeye State.

Sanders’ ascension, however, is due in large part to the corps of diehard Sanders supporters who have made it their mission over the last year to introduce their neighbors to the Democratic socialist from Vermont. 

Ginter says he’s knocked on doors, manned phone banks, and driven people to Sanders’ rallies in Des Moines.

Jean Ross, a nurse, has only been in Iowa since Jan. 18. But the 64-year-old Minneapolis resident, and president of the 185,000-member National Nurses United, is part of a push by organized labor here that has given Sanders a formidable ground game in a state where retail politics still reign.

Credit Pete Hirschfeld / VPR
/
VPR
Registered nurses Chris Dixon, left, of Ankeny, Iowa, and Jean Ross, of Minneapolis, Minn., are members of a labor union crossing the state to campaign for Sanders in advance of the caucuses.

“We keep talking about, there’s got to be someone, there’s got to be someone. We finally have someone,” says Ross. “And not the savior that’s going to take care of us, but a guy who really understands movement politics, which we in our union really believe in.”

Ross is riding on bus tour that began in Des Moines Wednesday then went east, hitting Iowa City on Thursday, and Dubuque on Friday. Chris Dixon, a registered nurse from just outside Des Moines with two college-age children, is also on the tour.

She helped organize an afternoon event for Sanders at a meeting room at a community center in Iowa City. The event drew about 30 people – a third of which were members of the bus tour. Dixon says she was late to the Bernie bandwagon.

“You know, I was a little slower getting on board,” she says. “But the first time I heard him and really looked at his policies, it just made me feel good and feel like there was a promise again for America.”

Now that she’s aboard, Dixon says she’s ready to help him win her home state, one caucus-goer at a time.

“I’ve done phone canvassing. I’m a precinct captain for my town that I live in in Ankeny,” Dixon says. “So I’m really excited to be involved in that.”

Credit Peter Hirschfeld / VPR
/
VPR
On Thursday, the front page of The Daily Iowan newspaper explored Sen. Bernie Sanders' appeal to youth.

With Sanders now running neck and neck against a candidate whose nomination was once viewed as presumptive, signs of his surge have become more visible in Iowa. On Thursday, the front page of the Daily Iowan featured large color pictures of Sanders and Clinton alongside a lone, above-the-fold headline: “Young Voters Turn To Sanders.”

It was among the images that greeted Clinton when she arrived in Iowa City Thursday evening to deliver a short address at Memorial Union, on the campus of the University of Iowa, where enrollment tops 30,000 students. Clinton, of course, isn’t ready to concede that narrative, and neither are many of the young voters who turned out to listen to her speak.

In Brothers Bar & Grill, a local establishment a few block away from the Clinton venue, the Sanders campaign scheduled a “Beers for Bernie” for the same 7:30 start time as Clinton's event.

That’s where Rhonda Habbal, an 18-year-old freshman with platinum blond hair and skinny jeans, showed up to sign a “pledge” indicating her intent to caucus for Sanders.

Habbal says she isn’t following the race extremely closely.

Credit Peter Hirschfeld / VPR
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VPR
Students from the University of Iowa turned out to a 'Beers for Bernie' event in an Iowa City bar to sign pledges saying they'll caucus for Sanders.

“I just like him better. I just have a better feeling about him. I don’t know, I like hearing him talk better than I like Hillary,” Habbal said. “I know so many people that support him. He’s a really liked person on this college campus.”

Sanders is hoping his anti-establishment appeal will deepen as the Feb. 1 caucus nears. Selzer says polling hints at the possibility it could happen.

"Anecdotally I hear it and you can just see little flecks of it in our polls - people feel like they've nominated the traditional kind of candidate again and again and again and then they've been disappointed that things aren't changing. So there's a real wish to shake things up,” Selzer says. “And we had a previous poll a few months ago that said, well there's a risk to putting someone in that's from the outside who will really dramatically shake things up, and are you willing to take that risk? Versus the risk of putting the same kind of candidate and not getting change. And they're far more willing to take the risk of putting someone from the outside in, than having the same old, same old, same old."

Sanders is set to arrive in Iowa Saturday morning, and has town meetings scheduled for 3:30 in Clinton, and 7 p.m. in Maquoketa.

VPR’s coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign is made possible in part by the VPR Journalism Fund.

The Vermont Statehouse is often called the people’s house. I am your eyes and ears there. I keep a close eye on how legislation could affect your life; I also regularly speak to the people who write that legislation.
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