Joe Biden’s campaign on Tuesday said Iowa is not a must-win state on the former vice president’s path to the Democratic presidential nomination and signaled that the campaign is already “ramping up” its Super Tuesday efforts.
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Still, the campaign downplayed expectations in first-in-the-nation Iowa as well as in the first primary state, New Hampshire, which borders the home states of Warren and Sanders.

In his 40 years in the Senate, as is now well known, Biden was a key architect of harsh criminal penalties for nonviolent drug users. Undoing much of his own work was one way to make sense of a large part of the criminal justice plan his presidential campaign recently released. Finding a centrist's safe-and-happy medium on weed in particular, Biden has not embraced legalization—a.k.a. commercialized, recreational pot use—but has claimed to back decriminalization, or removing at least most pot offenses from the criminal justice system.

But Biden is actually pushing a policy that could wreck the growing American weed industry and massively disrupt users' access to the drug, attorneys, consultants, academics, and entrepreneurs well-versed in US cannabis policy say.

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The proposal would do for cannabis "the same thing it’s done for meth: Ensure reduced research initiatives, selective prosecution, and a thriving black market," said Michael Backes, a Southern California-based cannabis industry consultant and author of Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana.

Selling cannabis like other Schedule II drugs, in "a closed system, only by prescription, only sold by licensed pharmacies, would be massively disruptive," Herzberg concluded. "It would produce massive changes—and if it were actually enforced, there could be no recreational marijuana at all."

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the Democratic Party's most liked 2020 presidential candidate, according to a new Gallup survey released Friday.

Out of 10 candidates ranked in the poll, Gallup found that Democrats had the most favorable opinion of Sanders, with 72 percent of respondents indicating a favorable view of the senator. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been leading every national poll of the 2020 roster, earned the second-highest favorable rating from Democrats, at 69 percent.

Joe Biden, former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, said Friday he would bring back the individual mandate, the penalty for not having health insurance, which was a pillar of the Affordable Care Act.
"Yes, I'd bring back the individual mandate," Biden said in an interview on CNN. The individual mandate would be popular now, "compared to what's being offered," he added.