Biden: We Must Ensure No Russian Interference in 2020 Election

Joe Biden launched an eight-day bus tour of Iowa on Saturday projecting confidence, ignoring his many Democratic presidential competitors and pledging that he will unseat President Donald 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. But his advisers also insist he has wide support and remains well-positioned to recover any lost ground.

His chief argument — his perceived strength against Trump — was on clear display Saturday. Sidestepping his philosophical tussle with progressive Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over the party’s direction, Biden struck a general-election posture. He added an emphasis on small town and rural America, an electoral swath where Democrats have struggled in recent elections but that could prove critical in both the nominating fight and November battlegrounds.

“We’re going to touch on what we think is a forgotten part of this campaign,” Biden said, 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.

Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife, followed suit in Council Bluffs, introducing her husband as the “only candidate who can take on Trump in places like Florida and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan.”

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.

Biden aides reject any framing of the bus tour as a reset; they see it as a way to drive home his potential strengths with Democratic voters who collective cite Trump’s defeat as their top priority, even beyond the particulars of intraparty debates on issues like universal health care.

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.”

Before Biden’s visit, Vilsack predicted in an interview that Biden would see his Iowa support rise because voters “become more and more practical about this” as caucus night approaches.

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

“In terms of people out there knocking on doors, who attend other campaign events, district events, I can’t name a member of the southeast Iowa Democrats who’s supporting Joe Biden,” said Glenn Hurst, a leader of Iowa Democrats’ Rural Caucus.

Bobbie Moore, a party volunteer and Biden supporters 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.

Fairly or not, Biden’s national staff has fueled skeptical assessments with pronouncements that he doesn’t have to win Iowa to win the nomination. Iowa is overwhelmingly white; Biden’s national advantage leans heavily on nonwhite voters who will help determine outcomes in Nevada, South Carolina and many March 3 Super Tuesday states.

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