Danielle Kurtzleben

Saturday's GOP debate was the final one before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary. Here were five key moments:

1. That awkward start

One key thing has to happen before the debate starts: the candidates have to take the stage.

That proved more complicated than usual on Saturday night, as the ABC ...

At the start of the Democratic caucus in Earlham, Iowa, there were 40 Hillary Clinton supporters, 40 Bernie Sanders supporters and 11 Martin O'Malley supporters, all massed around their respective tables in the concrete-floored town community center.

O'Malley was — in the language of caucus rules — not viable: He ...

Stephanie Hundley is an enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporter. The 28-year-old from Waterloo is also enthusiastic about the fact that she's not going to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman.

"I don't think she's the woman to be representative of women," Hundley said. She ticked off a list ...

Ted Cruz has one of the most overtly religious stump speeches on the Iowa campaign trail.

In Emmetsburg, Iowa, Friday the Texas senator quoted the Bible and exhorted his supporters to pray "each and every day" until Election Day.

"He's real," said Bobbie Clark, a Cruz supporter from Algona. "There's ...

Once again this week, an investigation into Planned Parenthood's alleged sale of fetal tissue came up empty.

A grand jury in Harris County, Texas, voted to indict in a state investigation of Planned Parenthood. But it didn't indict the reproductive rights organization. In an unexpected turn, the grand jury ...

Every four years, Iowans are deluged with the talking points, the stump speeches, the polls and, of course, the ads.

They also hear that they shouldn't be first. Iowans are too white, too old and too few to merit first-in-the-nation status, say the critics.

But if Iowa shouldn't be first, ...

With a little more than a week to go until the Iowa caucuses, the Des Moines Register endorsed Democratic former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential race. The Hawkeye state's largest paper tweeted its choices Saturday night.

The paper's ...

The Anne Arundel (Md.) County State's Attorney is investigating former Gov. Martin O'Malley, the AP reported Thursday, for furniture purchases he made as he left office in January 2015. (The Baltimore Sun was the first to report the investigation.)

O'Malley and his wife paid a steep discount on 54 ...

Hillary Clinton wants you to know she has a new tax proposal. She also wants you to know that Bernie Sanders does not.

Late Tuesday, Clinton released a plan aimed squarely at a specific subset of Americans: that is, the very rich. She also went on the attack against ...

Here are a few safe bets for Tuesday's State of the Union: There will be dozens of applause breaks, endless GIF-worthy moments and a laundry list of proposals (not to mention lots of reporters using the phrase "laundry list" for the first — and maybe only — time this year).

Here's one topic Americans can bank on hearing about in next week's State of the Union address: gun control. The reaction to President Obama's announced gun-control measures this week was swift and entirely as expected. Gun-control advocates and many Democrats applauded his efforts; gun-rights groups and many Republicans loudly denounced ...

"Pretty aggressive." That's how one might describe some of Donald Trump's political rhetoric. (Consider that the word of the day on the campaign trail Tuesday was "schlonged.") It's also how former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin described Trump's tax plan in September, when the reality TV star ...

Donald Trump continued his pattern of provocative rhetoric on the campaign trail this week. At an event in Grand Rapids, Mich., Trump told supporters that Hillary Clinton got "schlonged" in the 2008 race.

"She was going to beat Obama," Trump told the crowd. "I don't know who would be worse. ...

With a Paris climate agreement just over a week old, President Obama is singling out the GOP on climate change. In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, the president lambasted Republicans, whom he views as excessively contrarian on the issue.

"The Republican Party in the United States is ...

Here's what we've heard about evangelical voters lately: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and now Ted Cruz are fighting for them. Cruz says that a bunch of them are "missing" (and that he's the man to find them). And anyone will tell you that they play a decisive role ...

Ted Cruz has coined a new term in the fight over immigration: "undocumented Democrats." Speaking in Las Vegas on Thursday, the Texas senator and GOP presidential candidate portrayed the idea of a path to citizenship as a ploy to beef up Democratic voter rolls.

"Proponents of the Gang of Eight ...