Summary
- The Senate heard closing arguments in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
- “What we do here, in this moment, will affect its course and its correction,” said House manager Adam Schiff in his final appeal to the chamber to hold the president accountable.
- “This is an effort to overturn the results of one election and to try to interfere in the coming election that begins today in Iowa,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone countered.
- Some moderate Democrats remain undecided on whether they’ll vote to acquit or convict the president. Joe Manchin, a swing-state Democrat, pushed for a third option: Formally censuring the president.
- The four senators who are running for president beelined for Iowa once the trial adjourned, to make their final pitches before the first contest of the Democratic primary season.
- The Guardian’s political reporters will provide live updates, as the caucuses kick off in Iowa. Follow along!
Bloomberg campaigns in California as Iowa caucuses kick off
While the other presidential candidates make their final appeals to Iowa voters, Michael Bloomberg is campaigning in California.
The billionaire former mayor of New York is skipping early voting states altogether and instead focusing on bigger states, where he believes he can win more delegates. California has 415 pledged delegates to award primary contenders, whereas Iowa has only 41.
We are running a NATIONAL campaign. That's why, while other candidates are in IA, I'm in CA today.
— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 3, 2020
We can't afford another 4 years of Donald Trump, and I've been the only one taking the fight directly to Trump in the states that will decide the election. https://t.co/PXRKVSOBua
Bloomberg scheduled stops in several California cities, including the capital, Sacramento. He pitched himself to voters as someone who could beat Donald Trump.
Since entering the presidential race in November, Bloomberg has spent more than $300m on advertising. But because he is using his own fortune to fund his campaign, Bloomberg so far hasn’t qualified for any of the Democratic primary debates, which had a grassroots funding requirement as a barrier to participation. Last week, the DNC announced it was doing away with that requirement, opening the door for Bloomberg to enter the upcoming debate in Nevada.
Updated
What’s happening at the Senate now?
Officially, the trial is in recess until Wednesday, when the senators are scheduled to vote on whether to convict of acquit Donald Trump. Most headed out after the closing arguments today. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet probably beelined for Iowa, where the caucuses are kicking off.
But some senators stayed back, to continue debating impeachment — they’ve got up to 10 minutes to talk on the floor today, tomorrow and Wednesday before the vote. These speeches are an opportunity for the lawmakers, who’ve had to sit quietly through the trial, to voice their opinions.
Democratic Senator calls for lawmakers to formally censure, if not convict, Donald Trump
Reflecting on the impeachment trial, Senator Joe Manchin said “history will judge the Senate harshly” for not holding a fair trial, and refusing to hear witnesses. “Sadly this is the legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren,” he said.
Manchin said he remains undecided on how he will vote in the impeachment trial, though he indicated that he would definitely vote to formally censure the president, if not remove him from office.
“It was not a perfect call; it was just simply not,” he said. “Pressuring a Nato ally...it’s not who we are as a country.”
But Manchin said he sees “no path to the 67 votes required” to convict Trump.
“However, I do believe a bipartisan majority of this body would vote to censure President Trump for his actions in this matter,” he said.
Updated
At 4:30pm ET, Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, is expected to give a speech on the Senate floor, to share his thoughts on the impeachment trial. But Manchin isn’t expected to reveal how he ultimately plans to vote.
The swing state moderate has wavered on whether to acquit Donald Trump. Earlier today, he told reporters, “It’s a tough one guys. It’s a tough one,” in response to questions over which way he’s leaning.
Manchin is one of three Democrats who may vote to acquit the president. Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Doug Jones of Alabama have also indicated that they’re undecided.
Manchin has broken with the party before: He was the only Democrat who voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which may have been a factor that helped him narrowly win reelection in 2018.
Updated
Evening summary
- The Senate heard closing arguments today. While much of it rehashed the points made in the previous days of the trial, the hearing adjourned with impassioned remarks by lead prosecutor, Adam Schiff.
- “What we do here, in this moment, will affect its course and its correction,” Schiff said. “Every single vote, even a single vote, by a single member, can change the course of history.”
- During closing arguments, Donald Trump tweeted his position on the trial, which he called “the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax.”
- Trump’s attorneys cast the trial as an issue of disliking the president, who ultimately has broad power. “The bottom line is the president’s opponents don’t like the president and they really don’t like his policies,” said Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow.
- The second the trial adjourned, the four Senators campaigning for president jetted out of the Capitol building, presumably headed to Iowa, where the caucuses take place tonight.
A new analysis confirms what everyone is expecting: Donald Trump will be acquitted on Wednesday, according to a Politico analysis of public statements by Republican senators.
In addition to the list of Republican senators who have already indicated their intentions, most of the remaining senators in the 53-member GOP caucus have strongly hinted they’ll support acquittal as well.
In many ways, the result was a foregone conclusion from the start. No House Republicans supported impeaching Trump when that chamber voted on Dec. 18, portending the near-impossible task facing Democrats seeking Trump’s removal. Twenty senators would have to break ranks to support conviction, and most have foreclosed that possibility.
The Miami Herald has published a video which appears to show Donald Trump fidgeting and pretending to conduct a band with his fingers during the US national anthem while people stand with their hands on their hearts, as is custom, nearby.
His restless behavior in the :51 second clip, pulled from an Instagram story by a real estate agent for a Russian-American firm, stands in contrast to his repeated attacks on NFL players who kneel in protest during the anthem.
“You have to stand, proudly, for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing,” Trump said in a 2018 interview. “You shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”
The end of the video, filmed at Trump’s Super Bowl party at Mar-a-Lago, suggests the president is about to sit down while the music continues.
Impeachment trial adjourns: 'Is there one among you who will say: enough?'
Schiff is now comparing Trump’s impeachment trial to Nixon’s and Clinton’s, saying the findings which led to the Trump case were more harmful than the other two cases. What has changed since those cases, then, asks Schiff. “We have,” he says.
This is a full-throated criticism of Republicans, though Schiff doesn’t name them specifically, he is passionate in describing how he thinks Trump has been destructive to the country and what will happen if senators don’t impeach him simply because they are in the same party.
Schiff says it must have been a “pleasant shock” to Trump to learn “our norms” have shifted so much.
“I hope and pray we never have a president like Donald Trump in the Democratic party,” Schiff says. And if we do, “I hope we would impeach him,” he says.
“History will not be kind to Donald Trump – I think we all know that,” Schiff says.
Schiff says this isn’t because “never-Trumpers” will be writing the history books, but because history doesn’t reflect well on people who violate norms. The president’s collective violations of norms, not just the Ukraine business, is a running theme of Schiff’s statement.
“What we do here, in this moment, will affect its course and its correction. Every single vote, even a single vote, by a single member, can change the course of history.”
“Is there one among you who will say: enough?”
Schiff has decided the defense’s argument that people are calling for impeachment because they don’t like the president isn’t too important to challenge and repeatedly criticizes the president. “You are decent, he is not who you are,” Schiff says.
In his final sentences, Schiff says: “They gave you a remedy and they meant for you to use it.”
The trial is adjourned.
Updated
Schiff: 'He will not change, and you know it'
“Senators, we are not enemies, but friends,” begins lead impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, quoting Abraham Lincoln.
He spends some time fighting the defense’s claim that if the president does something which he determines is a “public interest” it is legal.
Operating under that logic, Schiff says other scenarios would be legal, such as : Trump giving Alaska to Russia or moving to Mar-a-Lago permanently and letting Jared Kushner run the country.
“He will not change, and you know it,” says Schiff.
Leaving his audience with the image of Kushner declaring war, Schiff moves on to an another key Republican argument: that if voters don’t like Trump’s behavior, they should vote him out, not rely on impeachment. He notes that Trump asked Russia to help with the 2016 election and that he benefited from that in the 2016 election.
“He has not changed,” Schiff says. “He will not change.”
Schiff warns that Trump will continue asking for foreign help in elections and that is a future Senators “invite” if they don’t impeach the president.
The defense rests and it’s back to the House impeachment managers, who are responding to the defense with more emotive arguments than earlier this morning.
Zoe Lofgren, of California, attacked the defense’s claim that impeachment should not be the way people express dissatisfaction with the president.
“Some say no impeachment when there’s an election coming, but without term limits when they wrote the Constitution, there was always an election coming,” Lofgren said. “If impeachment in election years was not to be, our founders would have said so.”
Sylvia Garcia, of Texas, said: “I believe that the decision in this case will affect the strength of democracies around the world.”
Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a House manager who was the first Latina judge in Harris County Commissioner's Court before becoming a congresswoman, said toward the end of her speech:
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) February 3, 2020
"Nadie está por encima de la ley."
("No one is above the law.")
“The bottom line is the president’s opponents don’t like the president and they really don’t like his policies,” says Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow.
He showed a video of members of Congress calling for Trump’s impeachment for reasons other than turning to a foreign government for help investigating a political rival. The reasons those Congress people cited included the president’s racist statements and policies that disproportionately harm marginalized groups and impoverished people.
Sekulow says if people don’t like Trump’s policies, then they should not vote for him in November.
WH defense team lawyer Jay Sekulow says the bottomline is that Democrats wanted to impeach Pres Trump from the moment he was elected.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) February 3, 2020
He showed videos of Dems dating back to 2017 saying Trump should be impeached.
"These articles fail on their face," he argues.
Patrick Philbin, deputy White House counsel, responds to the claims the Trump defense team has made bad faith arguments by doing things such as misconstruing facts of the case and saying the president is allowed to do anything he wants if its in the “public interest” of him being re-elected. “There hasn’t been analysis here, there has just been accusation,” Philbin says.
While Trump’s defense has been speaking this afternoon, reporters have highlighted how some of their claims are misleading:
and now Philbin is blasting Schiff for leading the process while he was, Philbin charges, "a material witness"
— Tom McCarthy (@TeeMcSee) February 3, 2020
Philbin's team is led by Pat Cipollone
whom Bolton reportedly places in the room as Trump issued instructions to carry out the drug dealhttps://t.co/kHdHUmacbI
As Trump’s lawyers claim Mick Mulvaney “misspoke” or offered a “garbled statement” on whether there was a quid pro quo over a Biden investigation & Ukraine aid, here’s what Mulvaney actually said via CNN https://t.co/VmvRc0bete
— John Bresnahan (@BresPolitico) February 3, 2020
Trump team doubling down on "perfect" call even as GOP senators led by Lamar Alexander breach the dam by declaring call "inappropriate" and saying House managers proved their case
— Eleanor Clift (@EleanorClift) February 3, 2020
Updated
White House counsel Pat Cipollone is up, which means its time for the president’s defense to present their closing argument.
He promises a series of short presentations to wrap things up.
Kenneth Starr, the former counsel in the Clinton impeachment, is talking about the song God Bless America by Irving Berlin. This is the beginning of a series of US cultural references: Martin Luther King Jr, the Lincoln Memorial, back to King, former supreme court justice Benjamin Cardozo and deflategate.
It is not immediately clear how they connect to the impeachment argument. Starr says: “We’re the rules here faithfully followed, if not, if that’s your judgement, then the prosecutors should not be rewarded.”
He is calling for accountability of the House for pursuing impeachment, which he thinks was not done “scrupulously.”
Starr is weaving between criticism of the House movements in impeachment and these cultural references.
He ends by making the case that voting for impeachment is akin to taking away Americans right to vote.
With almost every Republican in the audience holding fast behind Donald Trump, House impeachment managers made impassioned closing arguments before the Senate on Monday, writes the Guardian’s national affairs correspondent, Tom McCarthy:
The senators will hold separate votes on each article of impeachment, with an out-of-reach two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and remove him from office.
The third president in US history to be impeached would then become the third president also to survive a Senate impeachment trial and remain in office. Andrew Johnson survived in 1868 and Bill Clinton survived in 1999. Neither then faced re-election, as Trump will in November.
With unusual rules requiring senators to maintain silence in the trial to this point – apart from what they might tell the media off the Senate floor – the members of the upper chamber will finally have a chance to make speeches about the charges against Trump, starting on Tuesday morning, when the trial adjourns temporarily for regular Senate business.
Afternoon summary
- House managers began their closing argument for the impeachment trial. They have an hour left of their allotted time, before handing the podium to Republicans.
- So far, House managers have been recounting the key facts supporting their case for impeachment.
- Commentators are hoping there is more explanation of why these things are grounds for impeachment and more attempts to battle the Trump defense team’s known arguments.
- Four Democrats seeking the presidential nomination are in the Senate chamber while their competitors make a final push for support in Iowa, where caucuses will be held tonight.
The president maintains his position on impeachment:
I hope Republicans & the American people realize that the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax is exacty that, a Hoax. Read the Transcripts, listen to what the President & Foreign Minister of Ukraine said (“No Pressure”). Nothing will ever satisfy the Do Nothing, Radical Left Dems!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2020
Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, is now at the dais. “If we let the president’s misconduct stand, what message do we send?”
He also speaks about John McCain, the deceased Republican senator.
Hakeem Jeffries makes a point of citing the courage of John McCain, but hard to see that this is the same Senate GOP that used to claim to revere John McCain. Would he be as isolated now as Mitt Romney has become?
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) February 3, 2020
A strategy is emerging as House managers deliver closing arguments:@RepValDemings appealed to senators' minds with a top-to-bottom recitation of the facts in evidence. @RepJeffries is now appealing to their hearts by invoking McCain and the courage of Yovanovitch & Vindman.
— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) February 3, 2020
Updated
Impeachment manager Jason Crow, of Colorado, begins by citing historical speeches and documents to assert the importance of Congress in providing a check on the president’s behavior.
“What you decide on these articles will have lasting implications on the future of the presidency,” Crow says.
Val Demings, of Florida, then takes the podium.
She is outlining the facts of the case and explaining why they show Trump was using Ukraine to help influence the 2020 election. The president’s counsel have “made several remarkable admissions” that confirm details of the scheme, Demings says.
She also referenced the not-yet-published book by former US national security adviser John Bolton, which reportedly describes how Donald Trump told him about his determination to delay US military aid to Ukraine until its government agreed to investigate Joe Biden.
Shade from Rep. Val Demings, as she cites "reports about Amb. Bolton's account, soon to be available—if not to this body, then to bookstores near you." https://t.co/R3pVNW37sk pic.twitter.com/HCotiPuIlS
— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) February 3, 2020
Closing arguments begin at impeachment trial
The Senate impeachment trial has opened for the day.
Four senators who are seeking the Democratic nomination for president are in the chamber, stuck in DC in the final hours of the Iowa caucuses.
.@BernieSanders walking into Capitol with his wife said “I think (Iowa) is gonna be a close race. we're gonna do fine, thanks.”
— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) February 3, 2020
I'm starting my day heading to the Senate floor for the impeachment trial. I have a job to do—a constitutional duty. And I think Iowans understand that experience matters. Being in the arena matters. Fighting for the truth matters.
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) February 3, 2020
Those are the qualities we want in a President.
A reminder on how today will play out with impeachment.
The trial resumes at 11am, about half an hour from now. That’s when the House managers and Trump’s defense team present closing arguments. Each side has two hours to deliver their statements.
The Senate votes on whether to remove Trump from office at 4pm ET on Wednesday.
Lead House impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, said Sunday that even if Trump is acquitted, as expected, “it’s enormously important that the president was impeached.”
Despite the near certainty of Trump’s acquittal, Schiff said on Sunday he is focused on delivering a convincing closing argument.
“They need to remove him from office because he is threatening to still cheat in the next election by soliciting foreign interference,” Schiff told CBS’s Face the Nation. “And so the normal remedy for a president’s misconduct isn’t available here because the elections, he is already trying to prejudice and compromise with further foreign interference.”
Lyz Lenz, a columnist for Iowa’s the Gazette, wrote about the challenges facing mothers who want to caucus in Iowa, which takes time and requires most people to appear in-person.
While some mothers bring their children along, others don’t have the energy for it. Lenz writes:
So many women, privately told me they want to caucus but they just can’t make it work. They don’t have supportive partners or the money for a babysitter. Some have babysitters, but their sitters want to caucus. So, they are staying home.
There are other issues too. A caucus is not a private vote. Women in politically divided marriages or in abusive situations may not feel safe casting a vote that will make their lives harder at home.
The Iowa Democratic Party does not officially sanction childcare at caucus sites, though a few precincts organized it for voters.
Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator seeking the Democratic nomination, said she will continue to campaign no matter where she finishes in the Iowa caucus today.
“There’s no scenario where I don’t go on,” she said in an interview Monday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Klobuchar described endorsements she has in New Hampshire, which has its primary next week. Political leaders and three of the biggest newspapers in the state have backed her for the nomination.
"Is there any scenario where you do not go onto NH and beyond?" --@JonLemire
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) February 3, 2020
"There's no scenario where I don't go on." --@amyklobuchar pic.twitter.com/s4Qw853EKH
Andrew Yang also appeared on Morning Joe this morning, making the case for why he is the candidate to beat Trump.
“I am the only candidate he has not tweeted a word about,” Yang said. “He knows I am better at the Internet than he is.”
Joe Biden has been interviewed by NBC News about the presidential race, and was asked whether Bernie Sanders had majority support from the under 50s.
“Not under 50. I don’t believe that,” the former vice-president said. “I think he has a significant number of voters between the ages of 18 and 30. I think that’s true and a significant number of millennials. But I think I am the only one that has broad support with brown, black, young, old, women, men, working-class folks. So I don’t buy into that.”
And he defended his son Hunter’s former job on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Donald Trump’s request to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to look into Hunter’s role led to the current impeachment proceedings against the US president, and shone a spotlight on whether Hunter only got the well-paid job because he was the son of then-vice-president.
Biden told NBC: “No one has found anything wrong with his dealings in Ukraine, except they say it sets a bad image…he said he regretted having done it. Speaks for himself. He’s a grown man.”
Hunter was asked last year by ABC News if he would have been offered that job if his last name was not Biden. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not. I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
Democratic centrists fret over Bernie Sanders
The controversy this weekend which saw former secretary of state John Kerry overheard seemingly suggesting he might jump into the presidential race illustrates the nervousness within the Democratic establishment about how well Bernie Sanders is doing.
According to NBC, Kerry was heard telling whoever he was talking to that he feared “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole”.
Kerry’s remarks come after both Hillary Clinton and – reportedly – Barack Obama both expressed serious misgivings about the prospect of Sanders winning the nomination. Former 2016 candidate Martin O’Malley told the Guardian this weekend: “I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our party.” Sanders sits in the Senate as an independent.
Democratic chairman Tom Perez spoke to the BBC ahead of the race today, and was asked about what lessons he had drawn from the recent British election – a devastating loss for the leftwing Labour party – and was careful to make the point that the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn had problems Sanders does not – such as the antisemitism crisis in the British party.
But the Democatic National Committee has been accused of being biased against Sanders and towards Clinton in 2016, and recently changed the rules of its debates, seemingly to allow Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, to take part.
Donald Trump has ben quick to stir the pot, tweeting this weekend that Bloomberg is “getting the DNC to rig the election against Crazy Bernie”.
But as well as indicating anxiety about Sanders, these interlinked controversies seem to suggest a lack of faith among Democratic centrists in Joe Biden, following unsteady debate performances and a perceived lack of enthusiasm from his supporters. Bloomberg’s whole strategy seems predicated on the idea that Biden will at some point collapse, leaving the field clear for another centrist.
For what it’s worth, Trump’s focus on the man he calls “Mini Mike” suggests that he takes that prospect seriously. Axios reported this morning that the president considers Bloomberg a more formidable threat than his advisers do, and has told them: “You’re underestimating him.”
“He [Trump] thinks that money goes a long way,” one official said, referring to the millions of his own cash the billionaire Bloomberg has ploughed into his campaign.
A strong showing from Sanders tonight will probably bring a lot of these concerns further out into the open.
Updated
Iowans choose a Democratic candidate ... in Scotland
This year, for the first time, Iowans out of state will be able to take part in the influential Iowa caucuses thanks to a series of satellite events taking place across the globe, writes Eve Livingston.
Glasgow, Scotland, might not be an obvious location for such an event but Strathclyde University postgraduate student Colyn Burbank, 31, from Des Moines, says his “little caucus” has “taken on a life of its own”.
Originally planning for around 10 attendees, mostly made up of his own Iowa friends across Scotland and in parts of England, Burbank, a Bernie Sanders supporter, is hosting the caucus in his modestly sized tenement flat. But since last week, the list of pre-registered attendees has more than doubled in size, and some observers and journalists have had to be turned away.
Tonight, Burbank says, is shaping up to be “lively and packed”, with a number of children and pets also expected to attend. Burbank and his fellow Iowa Democrats in Scotland say they’re excited for the opportunity to exercise their unique influence from afar.
Those taking part can expect a spirited discussion at the Glasgow caucus from 7pm local time - and an equally spirited one at a pub round the corner following its conclusion.
On our podcast Today in Focus, Chris McGreal reports back from his recent reporting trips to Iowa and discusses today’s caucuses.
Democratic race begins in Iowa
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics on the day the Democratic primary race finally gets real.
Tonight the midwestern state of Iowa will be the first to vote in the primary race, as Democratic voters begin the process of choosing a candidate to take on Donald Trump in November’s general election.
Polling at the moment shows leftwing senator Bernie Sanders in the lead – although the caucuses are hard to poll because they’re so complex, and one of the most keenly-awaited surveys was cancelled at the last minute this weekend after it was found that centrist former mayor Pete Buttigieg’s name had been left off at least one list of candidates.
The former vice-president Joe Biden – also a centrist – is close behind Sanders in the polls, with liberal senator Elizabeth Warren the last of the big four in the state.
A Monmouth University survey last week found that roughly half of likely Democratic caucus-goers were still open to changing their minds tonight.
Moderate senator Amy Klobuchar – who represents neighbouring Minnesota – is seen as a potential wild card. By the way, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg – who has been creeping up the polls nationally after spending more than $100m of his own fortune on advertising – is not competing in the early states and hopes to leap into the race on “Super Tuesday” on 3 March.
So what is a caucus anyway?
Well, rather than holding conventional elections to choose their candidate, Iowans hold complicated, hours-long meetings with multiple rounds of balloting until one candidate emerges as victor. My colleague Adam Gabbatt explains further:
Voters have to go and stand in the area where their candidate is represented. So Joe Biden supporters would be in one corner, Elizabeth Warren’s in another, and Bernie Sanders supporters in another. Everyone is tallied.
For the Democratic caucuses, in particular, second choices are important. If a particular candidate does not attract 15% of total voters present, they are not seen as “viable” and are taken off the ballot, leaving their voters free to throw their weight behind another candidate. For example, a Pete Buttigieg supporter could sidle over to the Warren area.
Once the bartering for supporters is over, the votes are totted up, and state delegates are awarded to each candidate proportionately. That, in turn, determines how many national convention delegates each candidate receives.
The candidate with the most state delegate equivalents “wins” Iowa. Except… For the first time, the Democratic party plans to release three sets of numbers from different stages in the process. It will release the raw tally of votes each candidate received taken before the 15% cut off, and also release the tally of votes candidates received once supporters have realigned. Finally, the party will publish the STEs, which represents the number of delegates assigned to each candidate.
However, the “winner” of the Iowa caucuses is still based on the number of state delegate equivalents each candidate receives.
What could be simpler?
Iowa has gone first in the nominating contest since 1972 and since 2000 every Democrat who has won there has gone on to win the nomination. But the system has been criticised as giving disproportionate influence to this small, 90% white, largely rural state, and the long-standing claim that Iowans take their responsibility uniquely seriously is increasingly seen as being a bit paternalistic and patronising.
The candidates spent the weekend crisscrossing Iowa, making their final pitches against stiff competition from the Super Bowl. Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar were all attempting to make up for lost time after spending much of last week in Washington attending Trump’s impeachment trial.
They’ll be zipping back to the Senate again today, as the impeachment continues with closing arguments from the Democrats. The final vote on whether to convict Trump is expected on Wednesday. His acquittal is in no doubt, since 20 Republicans would have to break ranks and turn against him.
Here’s a brief schedule for today:
- 11am ET: Closing arguments from House Democrats begin in the Senate, followed by those of Trump’s legal team.
- 8pm ET (7pm CT): Voting begins in the Iowa caucuses.
Read more of our Iowa coverage below:
Updated
