COUNCIL BLUFFS (Iowa) • Mr Joe Biden has launched an eight-day bus tour of Iowa projecting confidence, ignoring his many Democratic presidential competitors and pledging that he will unseat President Donald Trump next year.
The former vice-president pledged first to win the Feb 3 Iowa caucuses, despite recent polls suggesting his standing there has slipped in recent months.
"I promise you, I promise you," he told a few hundred supporters outside his Council Bluffs campaign office last Saturday, "we're going to win this race, and we're going to beat Donald Trump, and we're going to change America."
Behind the optimism, Mr Biden's aides acknowledged that he must sharpen his message and bolster his voter outreach operation ahead of the caucuses that start the Democrats' 2020 voting. But his advisers also insisted he had wide support and remained well positioned to recover any lost ground.
His chief argument - his perceived strength against Mr Trump - was on clear display last Saturday. Sidestepping his philosophical tussle with progressive Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over the party's direction, Mr Biden struck a general-election posture.
He added an emphasis on small town and rural America, an electoral swathe where Democrats have struggled in recent elections, but that could prove critical.
Iowa polls suggested that Mr Biden, while a front-runner nationally, is in a jumble near the top.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 37, of South Bend, Indiana, appears to hold a narrow edge over Mr Biden, 77, Ms Warren, 70, and Mr Sanders, 78. The senators have animated the party's left flank, while Mr Buttigieg joins Mr Biden in the Democrats' centre-left wing but is calling for generational change.
Thus far, Mr Buttigieg, Ms Warren and Mr Sanders have drawn consistently larger Iowa crowds than Mr Biden, while some party activists criticised his campaign as insufficiently aggressive.
Mr Biden's national staff have fuelled sceptical assessments with pronouncements that he does not have to win Iowa to win the nomination. Iowa is overwhelmingly white; Mr Biden's national advantage leans heavily on non-white voters who will help determine outcomes in Nevada, South Carolina and many March 3 Super Tuesday states.
Yet all the hand-wringing misses key variables in Iowa, Mr Biden's backers contended. They argued that his support is wider demographically and geographically than other leading candidates. They pointed to rural areas and Iowa's growing minority population that, while small, could prove important with many candidates dividing the overall caucus vote.
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