Everything you need to know about the 2020 race in Iowa today

President Donald Trump's rally in Des Moines Thursday night drew a sharp line under the final days of Iowa caucus campaigning by his Democratic rivals, as they each pitch energetic but nervous Democratic voters on why they could beat Trump in November.

Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are furiously criss-crossing the state making that case in person to as many people as possible. The trio of senators running hard in Iowa — Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — are all stuck in the Capitol for Trump's impeachment trial, but they have enlisted armies of surrogates to speak to voters for them, along with blanketing Iowa's airwaves with ads largely touting their ability to take on the president.

While not all of the candidates are able to be there on Friday, our reporters are in Iowa following all of the top campaigns leading up to the caucuses. Here’s everything you need to know about Friday’s strategy, where the campaigns are and what they are doing just days before the first votes of 2020 are counted.

Check back throughout the day as we update this story with key moments and new developments on the campaign trail.

Joe Biden

Biden is moving more aggressively on his Democratic rivals as the campaign enters its final stretch.

Calling his plan for health care “more real” than other candidates’ more expansive proposals, the former vice president said Thursday night, “The one thing I don’t think we can do is go out in a race against Trump and say things that turn out not to be able to be done.”

“He will just eat us alive," Biden continued.

Biden had been doing just about everything he can to fast-forward to the general election, spending much of Thursday talking about Trump’s arrival in Des Moines and redoubling his emphasis on electability in the final stretch of the Iowa campaign

But Biden is also aware that the caucus Monday is “going to be close.” And by late Thursday, he was rebuking the competitors to his left.

Three public events in a day is not a particularly grueling schedule, but that is the one Biden will keep again Friday in eastern Iowa, with events in Burlington, Fort Madison and Mount Pleasant.

-David Siders

6:20
Biden pressed on strength of Iowa organization

FORT MADISON, Iowa — Upon leaving an event here this afternoon, Joe Biden was asked about the news that Michael Bloomberg could end up on the debate stage after all.

“He’s not even on the ballot in Nevada,” Biden said. His staff moved him away before he answered a follow-up.

The question came hours after the Democratic National Committee overhauled its criteria to participate in primary debates in Nevada and beyond, by doubling the polling threshold and eliminating the individual donor requirement. A candidate who earns at least one delegate to the national convention in either the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primary will also qualify for the Nevada debate.

Biden, who is attempting to sew up support just days before the Iowa caucuses, also got a question about lacking precinct captains — something the former vice president’s Iowa organization back in April had promised would be a priority.

Asked if he was lacking organization, he said, “Watch me.”

“Talk about ground games, this is air game, ground game, all games,” he said, pointing to a group of supporters waiting to see him.

In Fort Madison, Rep. Abby Finkenauer and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack also spoke on Biden’s behalf to a crowd of about 100 people. Biden began the event about an hour after it was scheduled to start. He moves on to Mt. Pleasant tonight.

-Natasha Korecki

Pete Buttigieg

Buttigieg is taking his campaign to new heights on Friday — literally. He's chartering a plane to get from Sioux City in the morning, nestled on the western border of Iowa, to Davenport by the evening, bordering the eastern side of the state. It's 350 miles and 5 hour and a half hour drive apart, but a plane means Buttigieg can add in another two town halls -- one in Council Bluffs ad one in Clinton -- in between.

He's hitting up mid-size cities on both sides of the state, drawing on the suburban communities that surround them. It's an aggressive schedule that Buttigieg can keep up, while some of his top competitors are stuck on Capitol Hill in impeachment proceedings.

Buttigieg ratcheted up his hits on Thursday, by calling out Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden by name. Rather than veiled shots, he's opting for explicit contrast. I'll be watching whether he continues doing that, particularly as we wind down to the final days ahead of the caucuses. Clearly, Buttigieg feels the need to step up the pressure, but will he keep it up? And will it make a difference? We won't know that until Monday night.

-Elena Schneider

6:20 p.m.
Buttigieg names names

Buttigieg's aggressive town hall schedule — fitting in as many events as the laws of time and physics allow for — will continue through Saturday. He's scheduled to be in five cities, covering 200 miles across eastern Iowa. The campaign's theory behind the intense schedule is simple: The more Iowans who see the mayor, the more they'll be open to him.

Buttigieg continued to train his fire on Biden and Sanders, and I'll be watching how and in what ways that heats up. As well as when and how his rivals hit back, if at all.

Starting on Thursday and continuing Friday, Buttigieg took his criticisms from implicit to explicit. On Biden, Buttigieg pushed back on a TV ad the vice president's campaign is currently running urging Iowans not to "take a risk" with their vote. Buttigieg said in Council Bluffs on Friday: "I would argue that what history has taught us in a moment like this, we cannot take the risk of trying to fall back on the old playbook."

Buttigieg also took a light jab at Michael Bloomberg for self-financing his bid for president, adding that in 2020, "Someone can literally buy their way into competition." But Buttigieg didn't name the former New York City mayor.

Amy Klobuchar

Klobuchar will be in Washington for at least one more day on Friday, while the two candidates she's competing with the most for supporters — Biden and Buttigieg — get Iowa mostly to themselves. As Klobuchar’s daughter, Abigail Bessler, and other surrogates made their way through Iowa on Thursday, Klobuchar said she wouldn’t give up on trying to get witnesses in the impeachment trial.

"It will not be a fair trial if we don't have witnesses," Klobuchar said on CNN. "I just want to get the witnesses."

Thursday evening, Olympic curling coach and Minnesotan Phill Drobnick touted Klobuchar’s ability to win in Trump districts in her home state during a hotdish party in Prole, just outside of Des Moines — a theme her campaign is hammering home in the final days.

“The electability argument is what we're seeing on the ground as one of the most effective reasons why people are finally making their decision and coming on board,” Norm Sterzenbach, Klobuchar’s Iowa caucus adviser, told reporters at a Bloomberg News breakfast Thursday.

Three Minnesota elected officials, Duluth Mayor Emily Larson and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, and state Rep. Ross Wilburn are scheduled to campaign in Ames, Iowa for Klobuchar on Friday, while Bessler will join them later in the day for a meet and greet with voters in Indianola.

-Laura Barrón-López

Bernie Sanders

One of the feature acts of “Bernchella” debuts Friday.

Bon Iver, the indie band, will perform in Clive, Iowa as part of Sanders’ traveling celebrity surrogate tour. The Vermont senator, meanwhile, will be in Washington for the impeachment trial, itching to get back on the campaign trail soon. (Sanders' wife Jane said Thursday night that Bernie will "hopefully get to Iowa sometime this weekend, but we don't know.")

Whether or not the senator makes it to Iowa, the Sanders campaign will hold nine events in the state Friday: Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, along with Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, will kick off canvass launches in Des Moines, Council Bluffs, Greenfield and elsewhere. Jane Sanders will speak with small business owners and join filmmaker Michael Moore for a pair of town halls.

The goal of the Bon Iver show? Juice turnout, especially among young people.

Meanwhile, Sanders’ campaign is also trying to boost him among seniors, with whom he struggles, with a TV ad launched Thursday in Iowa that highlights his history defending Social Security. Though it doesn’t mention him by name, the ad is also implicitly about Biden, who has entertained cuts in the past. Biden and Sanders have been fighting over their records on the issue.

-Holly Otterbein

Elizabeth Warren

Warren will spend most of Friday in Washington as a juror in the impeachment trial — again. Warren has repeatedly said that the trial is more important than politics, but she has also expressed frustration that she is not in Iowa for the final stretch before Monday’s caucuses. The campaign has planned events only to have to send surrogates in Warren’s place.

That will be the case again Friday. “Due to the schedule for impeachment in the U.S. Senate, Elizabeth Warren’s previously advised events in Sioux City and Ames have been changed to get-out-the-caucus rallies with Congresswoman Katie Porter and John Norris in Sioux City and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and John Norris in Ames,” the campaign told reporters late Thursday.

Warren’s campaign, perhaps optimistically, is also planning for a big nighttime rally in Des Moines featuring the senator herself as well as Porter, Pressley and more of her surrogates. If she makes it, it will be her first time in the state since last weekend as she has been held up in D.C. I’ll be curious to see if she emphasizes electability even more on the stump--as her campaign has been doing in recent weeks. The campaign largely avoided process-oriented arguments last year but have ramped them up in the final weeks before voting as voters have expressed concern about her chances against Donald Trump in November.

Her latest polling in Iowa shows her in striking distance of victory but sliding slightly. Still, the campaign has invested tremendous money and resources into their organizing team and are counting on it to inch ahead a few points and overtake some rivals.

-Alex Thompson

3:20 p.m.
Warren snags power-couple endorsement as Pressley fills in in Iowa

Elizabeth Warren still isn’t in Iowa because of impeachment. Her staff and surrogates don’t even know if she’ll make it to a planned rally in Des Moines tonight with her campaign co-chairs--Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Katie Porter, and Deb Haaland.

Her campaign is trying to make up for her absence with a flurry of surrogate events and with Warren hitting the phones from D.C.. That bore fruit Friday when Warren scored an endorsement from former Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky and her husband, former state Sen. Bob Dvorsky, as the Des Moines Register first reported. The couple are influential among Iowa Democrats and had been quiet about their preference after their first choice, Sen. Kamala Harris, dropped out.

Warren helped seal the deal with a personal phone call Thursday during a break in the impeachment trial. "This woman has integrity. She has grit. And she has a plan," Sue Dvorsky said.

Meanwhile, Pressley made the rounds today at a number of organizer events in Des Moines where she tried to rally door knockers braving the Iowa winter in the days before the caucus.

“Policy is my love language and I’m unapologetic about that because with the power of a stroke of a pen you can create injustice, with the power of a stroke of a pen you can create justice, you can actualize it as well,” she said at a supporter home Friday morning with a caged cockatoo named Derby and caique named Peepers squawking along with applause (Pressley dubbed the bird the "amen" corner of the room).

In the late morning in front of “Hope Over Fear” placards affixed to the wall at Drake University, she led organizers and volunteers in “Dream Big. Fight Hard” chants.

Pressley also noted that it was her first time ever in Iowa, but it’s possible it will not be her last as Democrats have privately speculated about her future national ambitions.

Capping off the day, Warren released four new ads — three in Iowa and one in New Hampshire — that largely focus on electability. My write-up is here.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct Minnesota state Rep. Ross Wilburn's title.