Hillary Clinton’s campaign has wisely avoided attacking Bernie Sanders these past nine months. But the front-runner’s tactics are changing as multiple Iowa polls show Sanders within striking distance or a little ahead in Iowa only a few weeks before the February 1 caucuses. Clinton would do better making the case that she is a stronger and more battle-tested general election candidate. Attacking Sanders on gun control and especially on health care reform could backfire with Democrats who are undecided or not firmly committed.

The Clinton camp’s growing alarm is understandable. The polling average now shows her ahead of Sanders by just a few points in Iowa. Two surveys released this week show Sanders leading here. The latest poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics, out this morning, shows 42 percent of respondents plan to caucus for Clinton and 40 percent for Sanders; she had a 9-point lead in last month’s survey by Selzer, who is generally considered the “gold standard” for Iowa pollsters. Full results and the questionnaire from the new poll are available here. From the Des Moines Register’s top story by Tony Leys:

The tightening race is not because of a surge in support for Sanders, the poll indicates. His support has risen just 1 percentage point in the past month. But Clinton has seen her support slide from 48 percent to 42 percent. The big shift has been in the number of likely Democratic caucusgoers who say they are undecided or who plan to stand up for “uncommitted.” Fourteen percent now say that, up from 8 percent a month ago. […]

The Iowa Poll of 503 likely Democratic caucusgoers was conducted Jan. 7-10 by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines. […]

Selzer, the pollster, noted that Sanders scores well with the types of voters who put Barack Obama over the top in Iowa in 2008. Sanders is supported by 62 percent of political independents who plan to attend the Democratic caucuses, compared with 21 percent for Clinton. He also leads 59 percent to 27 percent among those younger than 45 and by 52 percent to 34 percent among people who plan to attend their first caucuses. […]

Clinton’s strengths: She is supported by 56 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers 65 and older. Just 26 percent of seniors support Sanders, even though at 74, he is six years older than Clinton. Clinton also leads Sanders among women, 49 percent to 32 percent, and among registered Democrats, 49 percent to 34 percent.

Seventy percent of Sanders’ supporters say they have made up their minds, compared with 69 percent of Clinton’s supporters.

Adding to the sense of deja vu from the 2007 campaign trail in Iowa, Sanders continues to draw unusually large crowds, most recently during a swing through Polk County over the weekend. The enthusiasm gap favoring Sanders may counteract his campaign’s biggest challenge: needing to turn out large numbers of supporters who have never attended a precinct caucus.

Annie Karni summarized the Clinton campaign’s new strategy well in her latest piece for Politico:

Clinton is increasing her ad buys to achieve parity with Sanders — who has been outspending her here [in Iowa] for the past three weeks — in the major markets across the state, according to a source familiar with the ad buys.

And she is ramping up her own attacks on healthcare and gun control, and employing her entire campaign — and even family members — to amplify the message.

“Sen. Sanders has some very big ideas, but he hasn’t yet told anybody how he would pay for them,” Clinton said in a CNN interview Tuesday night [January 12]. “He had promised that he would roll out his tax plans before the Iowa caucus on February 1. Well, if you wait too long, nobody will have a chance to see them or analyze them.”

On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said Sanders was “depriving Iowa caucus voters of the full details” of his healthcare plan and how he would pay for it.

“They do their homework,” he said, “they should know how Sen. Sanders would achieve it. This is a major detail for Sen. Sanders to withhold. It’s not becoming and it’s not worthy of the caucus-goers in Iowa.” Senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan added that Sanders is “studiously avoiding” detailing the tax side of his healthcare plan because he does not want to admit it requires raising taxes on working families.

I understand the thinking behind drawing more contrasts with Sanders on the issues. Personal attacks would be a disastrous mistake for either side; the Selzer poll found “89 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers view Sanders favorably, and 86 percent of them view Clinton favorably.” Margaret Talev reported for Bloomberg today on the same poll,

Just weeks before votes will be cast, the race remains fluid: 40 percent of those surveyed say they either have not selected a first choice or may be persuaded to change their minds about whom to back in the nation’s first nominating contest. […]

“Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say this is an election about issues, rather than leadership. That really explains the division in the party,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer. “Half of those who say this election centers on issues support Bernie Sanders, versus 37 percent for Clinton. Among those who say the election is about leadership, it’s just the opposite. Half say Clinton is their first choice, versus 29 percent for Sanders.”

Overall, a majority of those surveyed—57 percent—say the election is more about issues than leadership, and among the issues that Democratic caucus-goers identified as top priorities are the economy, civil rights, the gap between the rich and poor, and national security. Clinton and Sanders supporters feel nearly equally strongly about all those issues with two notable exceptions: National security is rated extremely important by 65 percent of those supporting the former secretary of state, compared to 45 percent of Sanders supporters. The gap between rich and poor is ranked extremely important by 79 percent of Sanders supporters, compared to 60 percent of Clinton’s.

If most likely Democratic caucus-goers view the campaign as primarily about the issues, and Sanders leads among those voters, why not go after Sanders on gun control and flaws in his health care proposal?

My unscientific canvass of scores of liberal Iowa Democrats who did not caucus for Clinton in 2008 has convinced me of two things.

1. You cannot predict who will be for Clinton this time around and who will “feel the Bern.”

2. Liberals who have committed to Clinton or are leaning in that direction are overwhelmingly motivated by pragmatic concerns. They love Bernie and everything he stands for, but they do not see him as electable. My impression is that this sentiment is particularly strong among progressives who are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan’s presidency, as I am. For my cohort and Democrats somewhat older, the prospect of more Republican-appointed justices to the U.S. Supreme Court is a compelling argument for nominating the candidate with the best chance to win at least 270 electoral votes.

I realize that many Sanders supporters believe he is more electable than Clinton. I will address that debate another day. For now I want to focus on what’s not compelling to voters like me: attacking Sanders for a few bad votes on gun control and an imperfect health care plan.

Perhaps in October one could have argued that many politically engaged Iowa Democrats were unaware Sanders voted against some gun control measures. By now the candidates have hashed this out in debates and media interviews. Look, I wish Sanders had not supported immunity for gun manufacturers. By the same token, I wish Clinton had not voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, had been against the Keystone XL pipeline from the beginning, had never spoken favorably about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and so on.

If Sanders had an A rating from the National Rifle Association, that would be a different story. But his NRA scorecard is a D-. He’s not an enemy to the gun control cause. To voters who see Sanders as more progressive than Clinton on a wide range of issues, a few bad gun votes will not be deal-breakers.

Criticizing the Sanders health care proposal puts Clinton on very shaky ground. Sarah Kliff analyzed the two Democrats’ policy differences and the “thin line” Clinton is trying to walk in a must-read piece for Vox:

“[Sanders] wants to roll Medicare, Medicaid, the children’s health insurance program, the Affordable Care Act program, and private health insurance into a national system and turn it over to the states to administer,” Hillary Clinton said in Ames, Iowa. “I think that would be a big problem.”

The context here is that Clinton doesn’t support single-payer health care. Sanders does. And so do many liberal Democratic primary voters. So Clinton is attempting something risky: an attack, from the left, against Sanders, whose support for publicly provided health care is much more fulsome than Clinton’s. […]

Sanders’s idea might be a bad one, or an unrealistic one, but it’s genuinely strange for the Clinton campaign to try to paint it as somehow contrary to the cause of government-provided health insurance. […]

Health care is a tricky space for Clinton to navigate in the Democratic primary. So far, her campaign hasn’t attacked the idea of a single-payer system itself, and for good reason: The idea is wildly popular among the kind of liberal voters Clinton needs to win the Democratic primary. One recent poll finds that about 80 percent of Democrats like the idea of a single-payer system.

Her campaign is clearly cognizant of this fact, and attempting to walk the line between criticizing Sanders’s proposal and the idea of government-run health care itself.

“Secretary Clinton absolutely respects Democrats who support the principle of a single-payer system; she counts many of them among her supporters,” Clinton senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Wednesday. “She also believes many of those people would agree with her that now is not the moment to plunge the country back into a divisive debate over health care.”

Count me among the majority of Democrats who believe a single-payer system would serve the country better than Obamacare. I also have no doubt that “Medicare for All” would be a dead letter in Congress, where Republicans have a lock on the U.S. House for the foreseeable future, and that the proposal could be caricatured during a general election campaign as a wild idea pushed by a tax-raising socialist from Vermont.

Unfortunately, Clinton’s team is now inching toward dismissing the single-payer idea itself–and worse, validating Republican frames in doing so. Here’s Brian Fallon, the campaign’s national press secretary, on Twitter yesterday: “If Sanders wants to argue his huge tax hikes on middle class are worth it, fine. But be honest about what is required and let voters decide.”

Reacting to the Sanders campaign releasing “an accounting of how he will pay for his major proposals (except for Medicare for all),” Fallon commented, “He left out the $15 trillion proposal that requires across-the-board tax increases on working families? Go figure.”

Sure, a single-payer system would require some tax increases. But many families would come out way ahead financially, because they no longer would need to pay private health insurance premiums.

If Clinton’s strategists stake her Iowa campaign on convincing likely caucus-goers that single-payer is a bad idea, they will lose support in the final weeks. Framing the case against Sanders in terms of “huge tax hikes on [the] middle class” sounds like what a Republican would say. And one of the key talking points for Sanders, which I’ve heard from countless Iowans who’ve “got Bernie’s back,” is that Clinton’s little better than a Republican.

Karni reported yesterday,

In response to the attacks, a Sanders spokesman noted that Clinton had once said it “undermined core Democratic values” for Democrats to attack each other’s healthcare plans, and accused her of “using the same Karl Rove tactics she once decried.”

But [Clinton] allies said they worried the strategy of a concerted stream of attacks looked desperate and that some of messengers were wrong — particularly Chelsea Clinton, who on her first day on the campaign trail warned that Sanders would “dismantle Obamacare.”

Alex Seitz-Wald sees Clinton’s new approach as

subtly evoking an electability argument against Sanders. By raising the issue of Sanders’ alleged tax hikes, team Clinton is reminding Democratic primary voters that Republicans will do the same, times infinity, if Sanders is the nominee. And while Clinton will probably never invoke the “S” word Republicans will have no qualms going after Sanders’ democratic socialism.

Still, for a candidate who has spent the entire campaign trying to convince voters she’s not a squishy moderate, attacking Sanders from the right on taxes may be a risky play.

If invoking tax hikes is an electability argument, it’s too subtle for my tastes. Just point out that current polling shows Clinton beating all or most of the Republicans in enough swing states to win the election, despite years of relentless bashing by the right-wing noise machine and a national press corps that spent much of last year obsessing about her e-mails. Sanders may do better in some head-to-head matchups today, but he has received comparatively little media coverage, hardly any of it negative. He has never had to deal with anything like the kind of scrutiny a presidential nominee would face, nor has he been forced to defend specific proposals being picked apart by journalists or political opponents.

So far, Clinton’s new tactic is producing a windfall for Sanders, Karen Tumulty reported:

Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.

In its email appeals for money, the campaign accused the Clinton campaign of making “vicious and coordinated attacks” on Sanders’s health-care plan, which calls for a government-run system. Sanders’s strategists are also considering rolling out advertising beyond the early-contest states where it is airing spots now.

The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways. […]

“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”

Any comments about the Democratic race for president are welcome in this thread.

P.S.- The new Selzer poll turned up data supporting my hunch that Sanders may have more supporters packed into fewer precincts. That’s a problem, because the Iowa Democratic Party will not release raw numbers of voters who prefer each candidate. The party will only release delegate counts, and there is an upper limit to the number of delegates a candidate can win in each precinct. From a separate article by Leys for today’s Des Moines Register:

Bernie Sanders might slip in the Iowa caucuses’ delegate tally because his support is relatively concentrated in college towns, the new Iowa Poll suggests.

The U.S. senator from Vermont, who is favored by many young liberals, holds a commanding lead over Hillary Clinton in Black Hawk County, home to the University of Northern Iowa; Johnson County, home to the University of Iowa; and Story County, home to Iowa State University. His support tops hers by 52 percent to 30 percent in those counties, the poll shows.

Those three counties account for 27 percent of his supporters, though they hold just 21 percent of all likely Democratic caucus participants, poll director Ann Selzer said.

I would guess that within those particularly strong counties for Sanders, his support is likewise concentrated in certain precincts, rather than evenly distributed. If that’s the case, the delegate count for Sanders on February 1 may not reflect the number of caucus-goers who “feel the Bern.”