Pence to visit Iowa days before caucuses

Vice President Pence will go on a bus tour in Iowa later this month, just days before Democratic White House contenders duke it out in the Hawkeye State’s 2020 caucuses.

President Trump’s reelection campaign announced Saturday that Pence will start his tour in Sioux City on Jan. 30, making stops in Council Bluffs and ending in Des Moines. The caucuses will take place four days later, on Feb. 3.

Pence is slated to deliver remarks at an Evangelicals for Trump event in Sioux City and a Veterans for Trump event in Council Bluffs before joining joining Trump for a rally at the Knapp Center at Drake University in Des Moines.

Trump’s campaign announced plans for the rally earlier this week.

Pence and Trump’s visits to the Hawkeye State, traditionally considered a swing state in presidential elections, could serve to simultaneously gin up support for their reelection campaign and draw voters’ attention away from the looming caucuses.

The state’s six electoral votes are a key piece to the president’s reelection path. Trump decisively won Iowa in 2016, capturing 51 percent of the vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 41 percent. 

On the Democratic side, polls show a contested race heading into the caucuses, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) locked in the field’s top tier and any of the four poised for a first-place finish.