As a poll for the first time showed Clinton trailing Sanders in Iowa, she has sought to accentuate the one issue on which she is to the left of her Democratic rival

During Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton released an ad, titled I’m with Him, in which she aligned herself with the president on gun control.

“It’s time to pick a side,” the Democratic candidate said in the ad, which aired on Wednesday in Iowa and New Hampshire, states which will vote next month in the first caucuses and primaries of 2016. “Either we stand with the gun lobby or we join the president and stand up to them. I’m with him.”

Though not explicit, the ad’s obvious implication is that her main rival, Bernie Sanders, a senator from the hunting state of Vermont, is on the other side.

Though Clinton still maintains a lead over Sanders in national polls, the once overwhelming favorite for the nomination is now running in a primary race that is much less settled than it was just a few weeks ago.

As Clinton spoke in Ames, a Quinnipiac University survey released on Tuesday showed Sanders taking the lead over the former secretary of state for the first time in Iowa, with 49% of Democratic caucus-goers in the state supporting him and 44% supporting Clinton.

A separate survey, from Monmouth University, also released on Tuesday, showed Sanders holding a double-digit lead over Clinton in New Hampshire, by a margin of 53% to 39%.

A New York Times/CBS poll released on Tuesday showed Clinton’s lead over Sanders nationally tightening to 48%-41%. A month ago, Clinton was 20 points ahead of him.

“Secretary Clinton, obviously now, feels herself in trouble. We started this campaign at 2% in the polls; some polls now have us winning in Iowa and New Hampshire,” Sanders told CNN on Tuesday. “So it’s fine that she wants to pick on this issue, but, as I’ve said several months ago, we are going to work on changing that legislation.”

He specifically rejected the notion raised in Clinton’s new ad, telling MSNBC after Obama’s speech: “I stand with the president on gun issues. The idea of expanding instant background checks, the idea of making sure that people who have criminal backgrounds or [who aren’t] mentally stable should not have a gun is something I have believed in my whole life.”

As the dynamics of the race for the Democratic nomination shift in the final weeks before voting begins, Sanders finds himself under increased pressure to answer for his record on what Clinton has made a crucial liberal issue: gun control.

For weeks now, Clinton and her allies have hammered Sanders over a 2005 vote for a bill that broadly shields gun manufacturers and dealers from legal liability in cases “resulting from criminal or unlawful misuse” of their products by a third party. Though the law does not grant blanket immunity, it does grant manufacturers and dealers unique protections that most other consumer goods manufacturers do not have.

Though Sanders has said repeatedly that he intends to “revisit” and “take a new look” at it, Clinton has said that is not good enough. If Sanders truly intended to reverse course, she has argued, he would introduce legislation in the Senate to repeal the legal immunity for gun makers.

During the Iowa Black and Brown Forum, an event focusing mainly on minority issues, on Monday, Sanders was asked whether the vote was a “mistake”.

“No,” he replied. “Like many pieces of legislation, like many of the 10,000 votes that I cast, bills are complicated.”

Trying to square that with his promise to revisit the law, Sanders explained that he supports making large gun manufacturing companies liable but has qualms about completely removing those protections for local dealers.

“If you are a gun manufacturer who is selling guns into an area,” Sanders said at the forum, “and you’re selling a whole lot of guns and you have reason to believe that a lot of those guns are not meant for people in that area, but are being distributed to criminal elements, should you be prosecuted? Damn right.”

Winning strategy

Clinton and her campaign decided to place gun control – one of the few issues where she can position herself to the left of Sanders – at the center of her presidential campaign months ago in the hope that taking a strong stand on the topic would pay off in both the primary race and the general election.

Months ago, Clinton added a passage on gun control to her stump speech. She has called for moderate gun owners and gun control advocates to join together in a “national movement” to take on the NRA, and proposed a slate of gun control proposals.

She has also taken pains to align herself with the president, who recently announced a series of executive orders aimed at preventing gun violence. In doing so, she has also sought to distinguish her record from that of Sanders, hoping to paint him as out of step with the president, a still wildly popular figure among key Democratic voters.

Yet this is a sharp reversal from the 2008 presidential campaign, when Clinton attacked Obama – her then rival for the Democratic nomination – for his gun control platform, even sending out mailing cards that accused him of being inconsistent on guns and highlighting his controversial remarks that people in small-town Pennsylvania “cling to guns” in response to economic decline.

Clinton goes on the attack

In Ames on Tuesday, Clinton accused Sanders of failing to stand up to powerful corporate interests – the core message of his campaign – when he cast his vote for a bill backed by the powerful National Rifle Association.

“There probably isn’t any corporate lobby stronger or more influential in picking politicians to be elected and intimidating them once they are than the gun lobby,” Clinton told voters. “Anybody who cares about real reform in our political system, who cares about making a difference that will literally, in this case, save lives, has to stand with us against the gun lobby.”

Then, Clinton pivoted to knock Sanders for using the home-state argument as an excuse for being lax on guns. Vermont has very few gun laws on the books while maintaining one of the nation’s lowest gun crime rates.

“I find it kind of interesting,” Clinton said, mimicking a conversation between her and Sanders, “when I say, ‘You voted against the Brady bill five times; you voted for what the NRA said was the biggest NRA priority, giving them immunity,’ he says, ‘Well, I’m from Vermont.’”

She said Sanders “constantly reminds people” of her Wall Street ties as a senator from New York, but argued that she has the “scars to show” from battling big banks and hedge funds over their financial practices.

Clinton was introduced at the event by Delphine Cherry, an Illinois mother who struggled to recount how she lost two children to gun violence. After she spoke, Clinton embraced her.

Then Clinton was endorsed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, her second major endorsement this week from leaders of the gun control movement. The day before, she was endorsed by the former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head while meeting with constituents outside a supermarket in Tucson in 2011, and her husband, Mark Kelly, who have become advocates for gun safety.

Sanders has defended his record, noting that he lost a 1988 congressional race in part because he supported a ban on assault weapons, which the gun lobby forcefully opposed. And during the last presidential debate in New Hampshire, Sanders suggested that his record might be a starting point to bridge the deep divide across the country over guns.

But responding to the notion that he had bowed to the interests of the NRA, the senator laughed. “I have a D-minus voting record from the [National Rifle Association],” he said emphatically on MSNBC on Tuesday night. “A D-minus!”

On Wednesday, the Sanders campaign faced attacks from his opponent on another front: healthcare.

Sanders released an accounting of how he planned to enact his major domestic agenda, but omitted details of how he would pay for his proposal for a universal, single-payer healthcare system.

“Every proposal Senator Sanders has introduced in this campaign has been paid for,” said Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs. ”We hope the Clinton campaign will stop engaging in false and misleading attacks and instead provide similar clarity on how their proposals will actually be paid for.”



Clinton’s campaign is trying to paint Sanders’ healthcare policy as the end of Obamacare.

“The goal now should be to build on the Affordable Care Act ... We don’t need to start over with a whole new system and a whole new debate,” Clinton’s adviser Jake Sullivan said during a conference call with reporters.

During the same call, the campaign argued that Sanders did not want to release the details of how he will pay for his healthcare plan because it would require raising taxes on the middle class, something Clinton has pledged not to do.