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Iowa Democrats Expect High Turnout for 2020 Presidential Caucus

Kane Farabaugh

   DES MOINES, IOWA - As a crowd filters into the Horizon Events Center in
   Clive, Iowa, on an unseasonably warm winter night, it appears as if
   they are preparing for one of the regular concerts that usually fills
   this cavernous hall.

   But what looks like a concert, and sounds like a concert with popular
   singer-songwriter and Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon headlining the
   event playing an acoustic set, is actually a campaign rally for
   presidential hopeful, U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, one of
   the candidates leading the polls for Democrats in the final weeks of
   the Iowa caucuses campaign.

   The event was filled with Sanders campaign signs, Sanders merchandise,
   and nearly 2,000 Sanders supporters, and also featured a lineup of
   speakers, including film director Michael Moore, and Congresswomen
   Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal.

   But noticeably absent from the Bernie Sanders campaign event '¦ was
   Bernie Sanders himself.
   Sanders, along with fellow candidates and Senators Amy Klobuchar,
   Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bennet, lost crucial time campaigning on
   the ground in Iowa while attending the impeachment proceedings of
   President Trump on the Senate floor in Washington, D.C.

   "In Iowa, we like to see the candidates, we like to see them a lot in
   fact. That's the joke both here and in New Hampshire, that they can't
   decide on a candidate until they talk to a person three, four or five
   times," explained University of Iowa political science professor
   Timothy Hagle, reinforcing the importance of personal interaction
   between voters and candidates ahead of the caucus. "Especially as we
   are in these closing weeks we like to see the candidates rather than a
   surrogate."

   While Sanders made a brief phone call to address the supporters at his
   concert campaign event, he and other candidates stuck out of state
   relied heavily on surrogates in the final weeks to spread their message
   and rally voters.

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