Sanders: It's all about turnout

Bernie Sanders said Sunday that voter turnout in Iowa will be one of the biggest factors that determines whether he defeats Hillary Clinton.

“As you well know, when we began this campaign, we were at 3 percent in the polls. We were 50 points behind Hillary Clinton,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Today, as you’ve indicated, we’re neck and neck. I think we have a real shot to win this, if there is a large voter turnout. And it’s not just young people. It is working-class people, it is middle-class people who are sick and tired of status-quo politics.”


Sanders has steadily inched closer to Clinton in the polls. The latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll showed the two in a statistical tie, with the former secretary of state receiving 45 percent and the Vermont senator receiving 42 percent.

Sanders also addressed Democratic concerns about how his health care proposals would impact Americans.

“First of all,” he said, “what Secretary Clinton has implied throughout this campaign over the last month or two, that somehow I, who has spent my life fighting for universal health care, to guarantee health care to every man, woman and child, to have the United States join the rest of the industrialized world in making health care a right, somehow I’m going to dismantle the health care system and leave millions of children without health care, or elderly people without health care.”

Speaking earlier on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sanders said again he has no interest in attacking Clinton over her email controversy, saying that it was something that would play out in the legal system.