Eastern Iowa is significant beyond the borders of the leadoff presidential nominating state, according to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

Eastern Iowa can show how to flip Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin back to voting for a Democrat after those states helped deliver the White House to President Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Early next week, Sanders, of Vermont, will swing through six of Iowa’s counties that voted for President Barack Obama twice before backing Trump: Clinton, Des Moines, Dubuque, Muscatine, Winneshiek and Worth. That sampling of the 31 Iowa counties that flipped is designed to sway voters unsure of Sanders' wider electoral viability, campaign spokesperson Bill Neidhardt said in an interview.

The swing, which the campaign has dubbed the “Bernie beats Trump” tour, comes two weeks after Sanders became the first candidate to hit all three of Iowa’s public universities as he made his case to younger voters — another demographic key to winning Iowa’s Democratic caucuses, the national primary and the general election.

"What you need to be able to do is show that you have a campaign of energy and excitement, that you have a campaign that can bring in young people and working-class people in the way we haven't seen before,” Neidhardt said. “Status quo politics, the politics of (former Vice President) Joe Biden, aren't going to do that."

More on the three counties that could be key to winning Iowa:

The tour is explicitly about winning over voters concerned about “electability” and marrying it to health care, Neidhardt said. “Medicare for All,” one of Sanders’ signature policy platforms, would eliminate private insurance, premiums, co-pays and deductibles, in favor of a government-run payment system paid for with taxes that guaranteed health care coverage. While health care tops many voters' priorities, being able to beat Trump in 2020 is also a key metric, he said.

Sanders' campaign highlights polls showing Medicare for All winning over more voters — 45% said they were more likely to support a Medicare for All candidate, versus 32% who were less likely, according to Politico. Nominating a candidate who doesn’t support it would handicap the party's chances in the general election and hamper overall enthusiasm, Neidhardt argued.

The campaign also highlights polls showing Sanders ahead of Trump nationally by an average of 7 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics. RealClearPolitics' polling average also shows Biden leading Trump by an 11.5-percentage-point margin.

Neidhardt pushes back on that Biden statistic with another metric often cheered by the Sanders camp: His number of unique donors. In Obama-to-Trump counties nationwide, he has more than 81,000 unique donors, or more than the next three Democratic candidates combined, according to the campaign.

"What we're doing here is more than just half a dozen stops in eastern Iowa,” Neidhardt said. “What we're doing is laying out how Bernie Sanders is uniquely positioned to take on and defeat Donald Trump and deliver monumental change."

The details of Sanders’ tour haven’t been finalized yet.

Nick Coltrain is a politics and data reporter for the Register. Reach him at ncoltrain@registermedia.com or at 515-284-8361.

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