Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* A month ago, Quinnipiac showed Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton in Iowa by one point, 41% to 40%. Today, Quinnipiac has Clinton leading Sanders by 11 points, 51% to 40%.
* Speaking of Iowa, the new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll shows Ben Carson with a nine-point lead over Donald Trump among Hawkeye State Republicans, 28% to 19%. It’s the second poll in as many days that shows Carson leading the field in Iowa.
* Team Jeb appears to have some financial concerns: “Jeb Bush … is implementing an across-the-board pay cut for his struggling campaign, removing some senior staff from the payroll, and canceling some fundraisers.”
* A super PAC supporting Trump is shutting down “after questions arose about whether the strategist who is running it had direct ties to the campaign.”
* Speaking of Trump, the GOP frontrunner retweeted something rude about Iowa on his Twitter feed yesterday. The New York developer quickly blamed an intern.
* Despite the rhetoric about the Republicans’ Benghazi Committee being non-political, Marco Rubio used yesterday’s hearing to try to recruit supporters for his presidential campaign.
* The latest statewide poll in Louisiana’s gubernatorial race shows John Bel Edwards (D) ahead with 41%, while three Republicans split the GOP vote.
* Bernie Sanders has a Washington Post op-ed today, making his case for free higher education.
* And while the Democratic National Committee this week endorsed a presidential town-hall event hosted by Black Lives Matter, one of the groups involved in scheduling the event is saying that’s not good enough — the #BlackLivesMatter organization says it wants a debate, not a forum.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."