A Clinton campaign official avoided answering questions Monday about whether his team planned to prop up former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley in the Democratic primary so as to undercut support for Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield tried in an interview to see if John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, would comment on reports his team is moving to keep O’Malley in the game long enough that his supporters don’t switch over Sanders, boosting the Vermont lawmaker’s already surprisingly impressive numbers.
“If it looks like that Martin O’Malley might fall below that critical 15 percent threshold, and he’ll have to disperse his voters to either your candidate Hillary Clinton or to Bernie Sanders, and the worry is that they would go to Bernie Sanders, that you might actually dispatch some of your Hillary Clinton supporters over to Martin O’Malley’s camp to keep him afloat … Is there truth to that?” the host asked.
Podesta dodged the questions, however, and would only speak in vague and ambiguous terms.
“That’s what makes Iowa so interesting is it’s so complicated,” he said. “What we are going to do is try to get every delegate we can for Hillary … We are going to go out and try to get our voters to the caucuses and rack up the numbers that we need to win this outright tonight.”
Banfield persisted, repeating her initial question. “So are you saying to me you will not do that or that will be a strategic move if it’s needed?”
“Each precinct is going to be different,” the Clinton campaign official responded. “We’ve got leaders who have been trained to know what to do, but our goal is to get as many delegates as possible tonight.”
Sanders and Clinton are running almost neck-and-neck in Iowa, the first of the crucial caucus states, according to a Des Moines Register poll released this weekend.
The poll of self-identified Democratic voters shows Clinton leading with 50 percent, and Sanders coming in at second place with 45 percent. O’Malley trails far behind at about 3 percent, according to the same poll.
