Sanders, O'Rourke Face Off in Iowa

BURLINGTON, Iowa (AP) -- They became notable presidential candidates in Iowa after narrow losses that nonetheless put them on the national political stage. They're competing for some of the same young voters. And this weekend, they've been driving around this first-in-the-nation caucus state reintroducing themselves to voters as others in the 2020 Democratic field dispersed to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

It's been Bernie versus Beto all weekend in Iowa, with both hopefuls reintroducing themselves as the man with a plan to deny President Donald Trump a second term. Sanders swept back into the state as the early front runner after raising $18 million in 41 days during the first quarter of the year, the most of any candidate. O'Rourke raised $9.4 million in 18 days.

In dueling rallies, town halls and house parties, they spoke most of improving health care and affording college tuition.

Other hopefuls fanned out to political hot spots elsewhere, with much the same mission: Gauging early strength in a crowded field and raising enough money to secure a coveted spot in the presidential debates that begin in June.

Republican leaders have relished the jockeying among Democrats.

"I'd be happy with any of 'em, to be honest," the president said of the Democratic derby.

Here's a roundup of the crowded Democratic campaign.

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Iowa Democrats know Sanders, the Vermont senator who lost the state — and the Democratic presidential nomination — to Hillary Clinton in 2016. At two town halls in counties he won during that caucus fight, Sanders' questioners asked most about making health care more affordable.

Over and over, people told Sanders grim stories about medical bills putting them deeply in debt. He empathized, at one point putting an arm around a young woman who had begun weeping as she spoke. Sanders told his audience that he supports "Medicare for All" and a single-payer health care system. But he didn't get into specifics.

Shannon Abel, a 28-year-old coordinator at a nonprofit organization in Muscatine, Iowa, said she still liked what she heard from Sanders. Then again, she had only begun seriously paying attention to politics after nearly a year of being ill and seeing the medical bills — with an $80 co-pay — put her family deeply in debt.

Of Sanders, Abel said, "He knows what it's like to not have money."

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O'Rourke is calling for a range of educational changes to alleviate college debt, including providing free community college and allowing students to potentially eliminate or refinance their debt through public service.

"The cost of higher education, and not just tuition . is out of reach for so many of our fellow Americans," O'Rourke told a crowd gathered for a campaign house party in Polk City, Iowa. He said the tens of thousands in debt that students carry when they graduate "is a weight that literally sinks them into the ground."

To solve the problem, he offered a number of proposals to help students "stop digging the hole" and stop taking on debt when they go for a college degree: Making community college free, allowing students to earn an associate degree while they're in high school so they're "ready to earn a living wage on day one," increase access to union apprenticeships. For those already saddled with student loan debt, O'Rourke said he'd like to "re-up the public service student debt forgiveness program" — a federal program that currently accepts only a fraction of applicants and is eliminated altogether in President Donald Trump's latest budget proposal.

If students are willing to work in in-demand jobs at places like the Department of Veterans Affairs, or "willing to teach school or be in a support role in a community that needs your talent and human capital, I want to wipe clean your student loan debt. At a minimum I want to refinance what you have at a much lower rate."

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Sanders says he wants to make college free and pay for it by getting rid of tax havens and lowering taxes for the richest Americans.

That's been received with some skepticism among budget and deficit hawks. But to Trevor Meyers, 19, it sounds right.

Meyers, like Sanders, is a democratic socialist. The Muscatine County resident attends a nearby college and lives at home with his family, which owns a farm. A sibling, he said, is five figures in debt from college.

"How is anybody in our society going to get started in life?" he wondered.

He liked Sanders, but said he's going to check out one of O'Rourke's events too.

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Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is discussing gun control and death penalty issues with survivors of a massacre that claimed nine Bible study participants at a historic black church in South Carolina.

Hickenlooper sat down on Saturday with Anthony Thompson and Polly Sheppard during a visit to Mother Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston.

Thompson's wife was slain in the June 2015 shooting. Sheppard, who survived the ordeal but lost her son and aunt, has said the shooter told her he was sparing her life so she could tell others what happened. He is now on federal death row.

The church has become a place of pilgrimage for some 2020 presidential candidates as they campaign in the state, home of the first primary in the South.

Hickenlooper is known as a staunch advocate for gun control legislation. Following the fatal 2012 shootings in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, the then-governor called for and signed bills requiring universal background checks and limiting magazine capacity to 15 rounds.

Both Thompson and Sheppard told Hickenlooper they want those kinds of reforms in South Carolina and elsewhere.

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Sen. Michael Bennet told reporters in Nashua, New Hampshire, that he hopes to be on the move again a few weeks after surgery for prostate cancer.

"I don't think there's any point in dwelling on it," said the Colorado Democrat. "If it turns out to be worse than I think, I'll deal with it then."

The cancer diagnosis has "slowed us down a little bit," Bennet said when asked about how it would impact him getting on the debate stage for the Democratic presidential debates, with well over a dozen candidates now running.

"It's obviously slowed down our ability to raise money and at some point it could have an effect on whether we get to the debate stage or not, but I think we have a good chance to get there," he said.

And with how he's feeling right now, Bennet said he's likely to run.

"I mean, I didn't pick this particular set of circumstances," he said. "This is not how I would have rolled it out."

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Democrats running for president will have to do more than campaign on an anti-Trump message if they want to take back the White House in 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Saturday.

"If your message is 'not-Trump,' it's not going to work," the Democratic presidential hopeful told about 500 supporters who packed a high school gymnasium in Reno, Nevada. "Our job is to talk about our vision."

Warren, D-Mass., blasted Trump's economic and environmental policies and touted her plan to invest $500 billion over the next 10 years to build, preserve and rehabilitate affordable housing for low-income families. She said she would pay for it by returning the estate tax thresholds to where they were during President George W. Bush's administration and imposing a new "wealth" tax on the nation's 17,000 wealthiest families.

"Washington is working for the ultra-super-duper rich, and until we change that we are going to stay on this path. This is our moment," she told the cheering crowd.

Warren was making her second campaign stop this year in the early caucus state, which on Feb. 22 follows only New Hampshire and Iowa in the nominating process. She spoke for about 30 minutes, took questions from the audience and posed for photographs for another half hour. More than half the crowd lined up to take selfies with her.

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South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg headed to New Hampshire after his campaign announced he'd raised more than $7 million this year.

Hundreds of voters interested in the mayor attended his two events in the state; some were turned away because the venues were at capacity.

The mayor gave short speeches at both his Friday and Saturday events and did not take town hall style questions from the two crowds.

Speaking at Gibson's Bookstore in Concord on Saturday morning, the 37-year-old Buttigieg said he understands people's difficulty in avoiding the spectacle of politics these days.

"As hard as it is to take our eye off what we see on cable, because grotesque things have the quality of drawing your eye, and we can't take our eye off that show, but the show's not what matters," he said. "What matters is our everyday life."

He later told voters, "We've got to change the channel, and that's what we're about."

(KA)