Amid all that, Biden and Sanders found good news in various new surveys of Iowa, New Hampshire and the country at large.

The Times/Siena College poll of Iowa showed Sanders had consolidated his strength in recent months among young people and the most liberal voters. An online poll of Democrats in Iowa taken by CBS News and YouGov found Sanders and Biden in a virtual tie. Both candidates have increasingly attacked each other over the past two weeks, sparring on Biden’s past positions on Social Security and Sanders’s record on guns.

[The Upshot’s Nate Cohn on why different polls might be showing different results]

Hurling attacks isn’t your usual front-runner behavior, so the weekend’s events seem to reaffirm that the race is too close for any one candidate to claim that title.

Here’s our colleague Sydney Ember, who was covering Sanders this weekend, with her analysis of where he stands:

Bernie Sanders has been saying for months that he will win Iowa, and his demeanor this weekend was largely the same as it has been for months. At stop after stop, he lamented that he was stuck in Washington for Trump’s impeachment trial but largely delivered versions of his familiar stump speech.



He did, however, emphasize more than usual that the Iowa caucuses would all come down to turnout: If the turnout was high, he said, he would win; if it was low, he wouldn’t.

The Times’s Thomas Kaplan, who was with Biden, said the feeling was a bit different at his events — but that’s to be expected.

Biden’s campaign events this weekend did not give the impression that you were watching someone who was surging to victory in Iowa. He doesn’t draw big crowds, and this weekend was no different. But Biden has never been a big-crowd candidate; he thrives in one-on-one interactions with voters along the rope line. So it’s hard to know how much to extrapolate from his less-than-electric events.



“I’m a tactile politician,” he told reporters on Sunday. “The poll I feel is what I’m doing when I’m out, and it feels good.” His prediction for next week’s caucuses: “I think it’s going to be a close race in Iowa.”

A big endorsement gets Warren dancing

While the polls have not been as kind to her recently, Warren got a jolt of good news on Saturday night, when The Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper, endorsed her candidacy. When she heard the news, the Massachusetts senator channeled her inner Ellen DeGeneres, busting out a few little dance moves.