Democratic and Republican voters will choose their preferred nominees for the White House race at Monday’s Iowa caucuses.
While victory in Iowa doesn’t guarantee anyone the nomination, it can help give them crucial momentum.
The path appears clear for President Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, but 11 candidates are running for the Democratic nomination.
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Many have spent the past few weeks vigorously campaigning in Iowa, which is always the first to vote. The primaries contest goes on until early June, and moves on to New Hampshire next Tuesday.
Polls suggest that Bernie Sanders has risen to be the favorite in Iowa.
He is one of four senators running for president who have had to stay behind in Washington to attend President Trump’s impeachment trial, but his supporters, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a well-known congresswoman, have been energetically campaigning on his behalf in Iowa.
Four years after losing out to Hillary Clinton, the 78-year-old is now backed by a huge pot of donations and a team of hundreds.
Some of the other big names including Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg will be hoping Bernie Sanders doesn’t have it all his own way in Iowa.
There are also Republican caucuses on February 3, and two people are running against Donald Trump, but the president’s popularity within his own party is such that his nomination is all but a formality.
Iowa, to some extent, provides a glimpse of what went wrong for Democrats in 2016.
In the last election, more than 200 counties flipped from supporting President Barack Obama in 2012 to backing Donald Trump – and 31 of those counties were in Iowa.
Democrats will be hoping to lure back those swing voters in 2020.
Howard County in northern Iowa flipped by 41 percentage points in 2016, the largest change in the US.
