UNDERWOOD, Iowa — Bernie Sanders’ Iowa rise is powered in part by the college towns where he’s killing it in the progressive communities clustered around some of state’s biggest universities.

But that won’t be enough for him to carry Iowa in the Feb. 1 caucuses, which explains why the senator who describes himself as a Democratic socialist spent Tuesday in some of the most conservative territory in the state.


His goal was simple: to shore up support in rural western Iowa amid concerns that statewide polls are masking a potential geographical vulnerability.

Sanders, who’s in a neck-and-neck race with Hillary Clinton after months of trailing, has visited far-flung corners of the state before. But his pastoral bus tour took him to a largely unfamiliar part of Iowa Tuesday, far from his strongholds in Des Moines and Democratic eastern Iowa.

The reason is related to worries that, despite strong top-line polling numbers, the Vermont senator’s support is disproportionately concentrated in a few college-oriented counties. Thanks to the mechanics of the complicated Democratic delegate selection process – which limits the number of delegates awarded in each precinct, regardless of turnout – that’s not an insignificant problem.

According to an analysis provided to the Des Moines Register by Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, 27 percent of Sanders’ backers are located in just three central and eastern Iowa counties (Black Hawk, Johnson, and Story) though those places make up just 21 percent of likely Democratic caucus participants.

“There are only so many delegates that are going to come out of Johnson County, so if he wins by a little or by a lot, he could end up with the same number of delegates,” explained Selzer on Tuesday, referring to the home of the University of Iowa. “My speculation, upon hearing he’s in Fort Dodge heading to Underwood, is that there are a lot of delegates out in Western Iowa, so he needs to convince some Democrats who aren’t used to caucusing to get out."

The rapid-fire, four-stop tour of western Iowa on Tuesday included dropping in on small “town meetings” of between 200 and 400 residents at the same time his staff has been increasing its output of direct mail, according to Iowans who noticed the uptick. Western Iowa is the part of the state where Sanders boasts his widest lead over Hillary Clinton in recent polling, but it’s also the region with the smallest portion of likely Democratic caucus-goers.

In front of his brand-new campaign bus at a municipal hall in Underwood, where the wind chill made it feel like seven degrees outside, Sanders himself made the case, telling reporters, “we believe we stand a really good chance to win in Iowa and New Hampshire if there is a big voter turnout."

Sanders’ chief strategist Tad Devine acknowledged that “the schedule reflects that we understand we need to win votes across the state."

“I know Iowa has more significance than how many delegates you win beyond the precinct and county levels, but we’re focusing on targeting,” Devine said as the candidate rode from Fort Dodge to Carroll, to Underwood, to Sioux City. “In a primary, you go where the voters are. In a caucus, you spend a lot of time where the delegates are. We’re aware of that."

The western Iowa swing, which took Sanders near the Nebraska and South Dakota borders, comes before he focuses back on population centers in the east in the final pre-caucus days. He’s scheduled to headline nine events in the eastern half of the state — where Clinton generally runs stronger — between Saturday and Monday.

But on this grey Tuesday that was slowed down by icy and windy roads, a v-neck sweater-wearing Sanders stuck to intimate small-town events, from a 220-person stop in a Fort Dodge opera house where Bill Clinton drew a similar crowd on Saturday, to a similarly-sized visit at a Carroll winery. His visit to Underwood, his final stop before ending in Sioux City, was the first event that had more young voters than elderly Iowans.

Each speech was identical, with Sanders opening in his earnest professorial manner. He joked that the weather reminded him of Vermont and criticizing the media before warning the crowd he would speak about his campaign’s success and strategy — outlining his poll numbers — and only then delve into the issues.

At one point the senator even appeared to allude to the repetitiveness of his own stump speech: “That’s my speech and I’m sticking to it,” he told the Underwood crowd.

Sanders sought to engage the audiences, asking the crowds in Fort Dodge and Underwood about their health insurance deductibles, bringing up one student with $60,000 of debt to join him at the Underwood lectern that was positioned beneath a disco ball in a room that was otherwise only adorned by campaign banners.

And when asked a question about gun control, a point of contention between him and Clinton — “You had a pretty Republican stance on gun control and after the debate you seem to have flopped on it,” said the Underwood questioner — Sanders was quick to shoot back his standard recitation of his background on the topic, without introducing new material. "No. I have not flopped," he said.

But more than any other topic on Tuesday, he sought to wind up his backers with talk of Wall Street, specifically zeroing in on Goldman Sachs, which he in Fort Dodge called a “zillion-dollar institution.” That emphasis was rivaled only by his familiar criticism of super PACs.

When he started his go-to riff on the topic in Underwood, he was interrupted by a voter who yelled, “Crooks!”

Sanders smiled and said, “I have no comment on that,” before demurring.

Here in the state’s western reaches, his campaign has also been increasing its presence on the ground when the candidate barnstorms elsewhere, explained Pottawattamie County Democrats chairwoman Linda Nelson, a Clinton backer who said she’s recently started receiving Sanders-branded mail pieces.

“I’ve seen them now being very purposeful in trying to project what their candidate stands for,” she explained. “They’re working it hard."

In some respects, the Sanders forces have been playing a game of catch-up for months. Clinton’s team had 28 organizing staffers in Iowa on the day she launched her campaign in April, and it had identified backers in each of the state’s 1,600-plus districts by June.

Clinton’s team has kept up a stream of campaign surrogates coming through, ensuring that voters frequently have Clinton campaign events to attend and figures to hear from, explained Nelson — who also added that the Clinton staffers on the ground are more often veterans of previous Iowa campaigns in the area than their Sanders counterparts.

But even if the area is not the fiercest Clinton-Sanders theater, the one-time underdog clearly had the former secretary of state on his mind Tuesday, bringing her up repeatedly in each event. “Today, the inevitable candidate does not look so inevitable as she did eight months ago," he declared.

“Without naming any names, Goldman Sachs also provides some very, very generous speaking fees to some candidates, very generous,” he later said, apparently abandoning his pledge not to go negative just hours before apparently slipping when telling the late afternoon crowd that two of the firm’s alums had become “Secretary of State — I mean Treasury."

As he left his third event, Sanders was informed that a new CNN poll showed him with an even wider-than-expected lead in New Hampshire. The senator looked surprised, and before ducking into his bus looked at the gathered cameras.

“Oh,” he said. “I like that, actually."