In the run-up to Monday’s Iowa caucus, Mr Sanders has slowly chipped away at Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, which hosts its primary one week later. In Iowa, polls now show Mr Sanders and Mrs Clinton to be neck and neck, while in New Hampshire he has close to a 15 point lead over Mrs Clinton according to a poll of polls by RealClearPolitics.
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After years on the fringes, Mr Sanders finds himself in step with the American zeitgeist, riding the same wave of populist anger that has fuelled the rise of Donald Trump.
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Mr Sanders has raised 2.5m individual campaign donations — the biggest number of small ticket donations in US electoral history — and attracted some of this campaign season’s biggest crowds. A Sanders rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota this past week drew 20,000 people — an audience that rivals most Trump events and surpasses the crowds Barack Obama saw at this point in the 2008 campaign. At a Sanders event in Portland, Oregon last year more than 27,000 showed up. In Los Angeles: 20,000.
Yet on the eve of the Iowa caucus, the biggest question mark hanging over the Sanders campaign is whether his legions of Iowa supporters will actually come out to vote for him on caucus night, particularly students who have never attended a caucus before and whose votes tend to be concentrated in certain areas of the state, leaving other districts to fall to Mrs Clinton.
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In Mason City, Linda Ward and her husband Bill, both Republicans, said they had been impressed by Mr Sanders and his ideas. In Minneapolis, Nicole Reid, a 41 year-old business developer, said she was starting to have success convincing conservative friends to vote for Mr Sanders instead of Mr Trump with the argument that both men represented similar movements with the bonus that Mr Sanders “has experience . . . and is not insane”.