Watch Iowa Democratic Town Hall Live Online: Streaming Link, Clinton, Sanders, O’Malley Confront Voters
With the Iowa caucuses just one week away, all three Democratic candidates will take part in a Town Hall forum Monday night in Des Moines, Iowa. Politics-watchers can check out the crucial two-hour event streaming live online to see how Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley make their final pitches directly to voters. Each candidate is allowed 30 minutes to make his or her case, answering questions posed directly by the Iowans in attendance.
The Town Hall forum does not count as one of the six debates agreed upon by the three Democrats seeking their party’s 2016 presidential nomination. The event was put together more or less at the last minute by CNN and will lack the usual debate drama of candidates going face to face to try to gain an upper hand with the electorate.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of opportunity for unscripted moments and even conflict during the two hours of give-and-take, as Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley will be forced to deal directly and head to head with voters themselves in the flesh.
While O’Malley, the 53-year-old former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, remains an apparent also-ran in the three-way contest, the battle between national frontrunner Hillary Clinton — the 68-year-old former United States secretary of state, New York senator and, of course, First Lady to President Bill Clinton — and 75-year-old self-described socialist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appears to be growing extremely close.
Voters hungry for another actual face-to-face debate can watch highlights of the fourth and most recent Democratic candidates debate, which took place on January 17, in the video below, or replay the full debate in the video at the bottom of this page.
To find out how to watch the Iowa Democratic Town Hall forum event live online, see the streaming links in the final paragraph of this article. The Town Hall is scheduled to get underway at 8 p.m. Central Time from Sheslow Auditorium on the campus of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. That’s 9 p.m. Eastern Time, 6 p.m. Pacific.
A new CNN “Poll of Polls” Monday showed Clinton and Sanders running neck-and-neck in Iowa, with Sanders actually having edged slightly ahead, 46 percent to 44 percent, over the past week.
The latest CNN/Orc poll shows Sanders well ahead by an eight-point margin among likely Iowa caucus attendees. The apparent Sanders surge has taken place mostly in the New Year. As recently as December, most polls in Iowa showed Clinton with a comfortable margin in the state.
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The new polling shows how crucial the Iowa Democratic Town Hall forum could be to both candidates as they jostle for position ahead of the February 1 caucuses. For O’Malley, the Town Hall could be his last chance to make an impact on voters, allowing him to prove that he still belongs in the three-way race with a respectable showing in Iowa.
But the prediction model used by statistical expert Nate Silver at his site FiveThirtyEight.com — a model explained in full at this link — still sees Clinton as the likely winner in Iowa.
According to Silver’s projection based on a weighted average of 61 polls, Hillary Clinton has a 69 percent probability of winning the Iowa caucuses, to just 31 percent for Sanders and a less than 1 percent chance for O’Malley.
In Silver’s “polls plus” projections, which also assign statistical “weights” to endorsements as well as polls, Clinton’s prospects look even brighter. After she recently picked up an important endorsement from the Des Moines Register newspaper, the polls plus projection sees Clinton with an overwhelming 82 percent chance of winning Iowa, to just 18 percent for Bernie Sanders and, again, virtually zero for O’Malley.
The numbers make the Iowa Democratic Town Hall perhaps more crucial for Bernie Sanders than for Hillary Clinton, who still leads national polls comfortably by a 53 to 38 percent margin in the latest CNN poll of polls.
To watch the Iowa Democratic Town Hall forum live online, use the streaming link provided by CNN.go by clicking here. Another link to Town Hall forum coverage can also be found by clicking here.
[Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images]
