Sanders Campaign Press Release - We're Touching a Nerve

The big room at a community center in Iowa City was packed long before the meeting was to begin. Those who couldn't get in — and there were a couple hundred of them — jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the community center lobby. Inside the meeting hall, when Bernie took the stage and scanned the crowd, he was blown away. "We're touching a nerve," he said.

At that event near the campus of the University of Iowa and speaking later to another overflow crowd in Ames, the home of Iowa state, some of the loudest cheers were for Bernie's proposal to make four-year colleges and universities tuition free.

The senator had been introduced at Torrents, near the university, by Cornelia Flora of the group Grassroots for Bernie. She brought the crowd to its feet when she announced, for the first time anyone ever said these words in Iowa about Bernie, "Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States."