Bernie's In

I have never directed personal remarks at you, other than to wonder why you direct such at me.

All I (and Sanders) are asking is a thorough investigation by an unbiased source. Anything less is just rehashing the he said/she said.

I only ask you to lay off getting personal with your replies. Otherwise I will quit trying to dialog with you.

Sure it's stupid, but that's the gist of it. Better vote a second choice, because it's just too hard to do the right thing.

DES MOINES — This fall the words of a Hillary Clinton backer were posted like a locker-room taunt on the wall at Bernie Sanders’s Iowa headquarters: “There is no Sanders organization.”

The quote, from Jerry Crawford, a leader of Iowa’s Democratic establishment, was meant to enrage and goad the Sanders staff, and it did the job.

The campaign has quietly assembled an extensive ground game here, with 100 paid staff members and with trained volunteer leaders for each of the state’s 1,681 caucus precincts.

The field team is meant to be the engine for a Sanders upset in the caucuses on Feb. 1 — the vehicle to turn out the tens of thousands of grass-roots supporters who show up for Mr. Sanders’s rallies, even if they no longer earn him headlines.

Mr. Sanders almost certainly needs a victory in Iowa for his candidacy to remain viable. For Mrs. Clinton, the stakes are also high, though different: A loss here would revive memories of her third-place finish in the 2008 Iowa caucuses won by Barack Obama.

He will need that enthusiasm because younger and economically struggling voters are historically less likely to caucus. Even in 2008, when Mr. Obama won the caucuses with an outsize share of younger voters, only 23 percent of Democratic caucusgoers were under 30.

“It’s definitely closer than some of the polls showing her up by double digits,” said Derek Eadon, who helped organize Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign in the state. But he was skeptical the Sanders campaign would galvanize first-time caucusgoers in the same numbers that turned out eight years ago. He predicted total turnout closer to the 124,000 Democrats who caucused in 2004 than the record 240,000 in 2008.

Mr. Eadon, a political consultant unaffiliated with any candidate, said that even though Mr. Sanders had a large field operation, there were signs it was being outhustled by Mrs. Clinton’s team, which has been in place longer. Until this weekend, neither Mr. Eadon nor his wife, for example, had been contacted by Sanders volunteers by phone or at their West Des Moines home.

“We’ve gotten knocked twice by the Clinton campaign,” Mr. Eadon said. “They’re continuing to stay in touch with my wife, who is undecided.”