Buoyed by Poll, Hillary Clinton Has Day Full of Optimism in Iowa

Source: nytimes



7:26 pm ET By Amy Chozick




Hillary Rodham Clinton at a town hall-style meeting in Coralville, Iowa, on Tuesday.Credit Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

CORALVILLE, Iowa — With a new poll showing the fickle Iowa electorate warming to her candidacy, even the weather agreed with Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday.


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Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had reasons for optimism on Tuesday, too, as she answered questions on everything from what to do about land mines in Laos to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the escalating tensions in the South China Sea.

After a spate of polls this fall showed Mrs. Clinton losing ground to Mr. Sanders in Iowa, which she lost in 2008, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday showed that 62 percent of Democrats said Mrs. Clinton was their first choice, with 31 percent choosing Mr. Sanders.

Mrs. Clinton made no mention of polls on Tuesday. (After weeks of denouncing more problematic polls as unreliable, campaign aides remained mum.) But she did address the crowd, set up adjacent to a duck pond under a cloudless sky, with a newfound confidence to confront the Republicans in a general election.

“You don’t hear them talking about the issues people talk to me about,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We have to make up our minds that we’re going to roll up our sleeves,” she added, “act like Americans again and start solving problems and getting results.”

Standing behind a red-white-and-blue-festooned fence, Mrs. Clinton used her opening remarks to reinforce her stance on gun control, an issue that has become central to her race against Mr. Sanders, who voted against some gun control measures in the Senate........................

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/03/buoyed-by-poll-hillary-clinton-has-day-full-of-optimism-in-iowa/