Iowa: progressives to the fore as Sanders and Warren attend 'people's forum'

A collective of grassroots organizers in Iowa will hold their first “people’s forum” on Saturday, hosting prominent Democratic presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, in a bid to push progressive issues further into the 2020 race.

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The event, organized by with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement [CCI] in partnership with the Guardian, will see candidates share the stage with a number of community leaders from the first voting state of Iowa and other nearby states to discuss policy areas including racially biased policing, immigration, the Green New Deal and local farming.

Candidates, also including the former Obama cabinet member Julián Castro and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, will be allowed only a few minutes to speak before taking questions from community members as organizers hope to steer the event away from established stump speeches.

“The purpose of this event is an attempt to put everyday people at the centre of our political life,” said Adam Kruggel, director of Strategic Initiatives at the People’s Action Institute.

“We believe that if we are to transform our country and really defeat the rising tide of authoritarianism and massive racial and economic inequalities, if we’re ever going to be able to do anything about the threats facing our planet, we need to build a multiracial, populist movement that has the capacity to challenge the power of the wealthy few that have dominated our economic and political lives.”

Iowa has, since 1972, held the first presidential nominating contests in America, forging the pathway to victory for a number of previous Democratic nominees including Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, who had been seen as outsiders before voting began.

But the state’s demographics and economy are far from representative of the country. Ninety-one percent of the population in Iowa is white, with the economy dominated by agriculture and food production.

Barack Obama won the state during presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 but it swung heavily to Donald Trump in 2016, who flipped 31 counties – the most of any state in America – from blue to red.

Democrats will face an uphill battle to reclaim the state in 2020, although polls from earlier in the year indicate Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, are ahead of Trump in the state.

Biden, whose centrist campaign has seen him consistently poll ahead of other rivals in Iowa, has begun to slip in recent weeks.

He will not attend Saturday’s “people’s forum” and failed to complete a questionnaire earlier in the year that Iowa CCI presented to all the candidates, which probed their positions on an array of topics.

The responses saw Castro, Sanders, Warren, Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson say they backed a ban on new factory farms for the first time.

“Biden is hiding from the voters of Iowa and the voters of the country,” said Shawn Sebastian, Movement Politics Organizer of Iowa CCI. “He’s hiding his record and he’s hiding what his plans are for the future.”

Biden, along with all the other 2020 candidates, will be appearing at a traditional canvassing event on the same day in Iowa, the Polk County steak fry. In contrast to the “people’s forum” candidates are expected to deliver routine speeches throughout the day.

The Guardian will be hosting a livestream of the forum throughout the day on Saturday, starting from 12pm CT