Biden launches Iowa trip with focus on Trump, rural America

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Joe Biden launched an eight-day bus tour of Iowa projecting confidence, ignoring his many Democratic presidential competitors and pledging that he will unseat President Trump in 2020.

The former vice president pledged first to win the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses, despite recent polls suggesting his standing there has slipped in recent months.

“I promise you, I promise you,” Biden told a few hundred supporters outside his Council Bluff campaign office, “we’re going to win this race, and we’re going to beat Donald Trump, and we’re going to change America.”

Behind the optimism, Biden aides acknowledge he must sharpen his message and bolster his voter outreach operation ahead of the caucuses that start Democrats’ 2020 voting.

“We’re going to touch on what we think is a forgotten part of this campaign,” Biden said Saturday, bemoaning the effects of Trump’s tariffs on Iowa farmers and highlighting his own rural policy plans shaped with the help of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. The former Obama agriculture secretary recently gave Biden his most high-profile Iowa endorsement.

Iowa polls suggest that Biden, while a front-runner nationally, is in a jumble near the top. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 37, of South Bend, Indiana, appears to hold a narrow edge over Biden, 77; Warren, 70; and Sanders, 78. The senators have animated the party’s left flank, while Buttigieg joins Biden in Democrats’ center-left wing but is calling for generational change.

In rural Denison, Iowa, Vilsack touted Biden as the best option for any Democrat, regardless of ideology. “You can’t do any of that unless you win,” he said of candidates’ various policy pitches. “You’ve gotta win.”

Thus far, Buttigieg, Warren and Sanders have drawn consistently larger Iowa crowds than Biden, while some party activists criticize his campaign as insufficiently aggressive.

Bobbie Moore, a party volunteer and Biden supporter who came to see him Saturday, stopped short of criticizing the campaign. But she noted the crowd “isn’t one-10th of what was here for Pete” Buttigieg just days ago.

Another Biden volunteer, Phyllis Hughes Ewing, said outside media underappreciated Biden’s appeal. “I’m on the phones with voters two nights a week for several hours at a pop,” she said. “I’m a boot on the ground … and everyone has good things to say about Joe.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2Lc3bmM