Who will challenge
IT’S well known US President Donald Trump wears his heart on his twitter feed.
A study of his social media posts offers insight into what he’s watching on TV, where he stands on the issue of the day and what’s playing most on his mind.
A few weeks before Democrats cast their first votes for the contender they put up against him in November’s presidential election, Mr Trump was making his mind known about what he thinks of some of the candidates.
A series of polls in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire was putting Bernie Sanders ahead of former vice-president Joe Biden, who had been considered the Democratic frontrunner for the past several months.
“Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party,” he tweeted on January 12.
“So what does mean? Stay tuned!”
It followed a sharp escalation in verbal attacks on the Vermont senator, whose passionate supporters and whose record-setting individual fundraising and endorsement from the liberal rock star quartet of young progressive members of Congress — led by New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — had seen him steadily rise in Democrat ranks.
Mr Trump has tweeted about Mr Sanders more times since the beginning of 2020 than the entire preceding six months, and recently targeted him at campaign rallies at a rate of eight times that of Mr Biden, according to an analysis of his public comments by The Intercept.
It’s not just this all
Republicans sensing a genuine threat from Mr Sanders, 78, who identifies as a democratic socialist and is pushing a revolutionary platform that would erase collegestudent debt, immediately scrap private health cover, ban fracking, increase some taxes and reverse heightened immigration restrictions introduced by the Trump administration.
A wave of moderate Democrats have started describing Sanders as a “nightmare” candidate, with one Iowa group on Wednesday releasing an attack-ad reminding voters he had a heart attack in October.
Influential Centre-Left think tank Third Way last week also distributed a memo to prominent Iowa Democrats warning that a vote for Sanders was what “Trump wants you to do”.
“Before you vote, we urge you to consider at least a few of the many things in Bernie Sanders’ long record in public life that make him the Trump team’s ‘ideal Democratic opponent’,” the memo reads.
It then listed a number of vulnerabilities the Trump 2020 campaign would exploit.
“They will call him a socialist,” it reads.
“They will say that he thinks the middle class wants to pay more in taxes … They will say he’s backed antiAmerican radicals.
“Committed Democrats, like us, would vote for Sanders against Trump. But no Democrat remotely as far Left as Sanders has ever won the presidency, and swing voters in crucial states would reject the radicalism of Sanders’ background and ideas.”
All of these tensions will play out in coming days in Iowa, the small midwestern state bang in the middle of America that has for the past 40 years wielded an out-size influence on setting up presidential candidates.
On Monday, it will be the centre of a media maelstrom, as its citizens come together to caucus and choose the candidates they want to lead their parties.
The most attention is going to the Democratic race, because Mr Trump holding the Republican leadership is currently considered a foregone conclusion despite a couple of minor challengers.
The caucus is one of the more unusual processes of the primary calendar, undertaken with arcane rules. Essentially “like minded” people come together in public and make their views known, before taking two rounds of votes by physically moving to sectioned areas of the room.
The level of commitment it requires to talk politics so openly and convincingly in front of your neighbours has created an unusually engaged populace.
The Iowa vote is followed a week later by primaries in New Hampshire, and later Nevada and South Carolina, before Super Tuesday in March kicks off a fortnight