COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) — Joe Biden launched an eight-day bus tour of Iowa on Saturday projecting confidence, ignoring his many Democratic presidential competitors and pledging that he will unseat President Donald Trump in 2020. The former vice president pledged first to win the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses, despite recent polls suggesting his standing there has slipped in recent months.

“I promise you, I promise you,” Biden told a few hundred supporters outside his Council Bluff campaign office, “we’re going to win this race, and we’re going to beat Donald Trump, and we’re going to change America.” Behind the optimism, Biden aides acknowledge he must sharpen his message and bolster his voter outreach operation ahead of the caucuses that start Democrats’ 2020 voting. But his advisers also insist he has wide support and remains well-positioned to recover any lost ground.

His chief argument — his perceived strength against Trump — was on clear display Saturday. Sidestepping his philosophical tussle with progressive Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over the party’s direction, Biden struck a general-election posture. He added an emphasis on small town and rural America, an electoral swath where Democrats have struggled in recent elections but that could prove critical in both the nominating fight and November battlegrounds.

“We’re going to touch on what we think is a forgotten part of this campaign,” Biden said, bemoaning the effects of Trump’s tariffs on Iowa farmers and highlighting his own rural policy plans shaped with the help of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. The former Obama agriculture secretary recently gave Biden his most high-profile Iowa endorsement.

Iowa polls suggest that Biden, while a front-runner nationally, is in a jumble near the top. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 37, of South Bend, Indiana, appears to hold a narrow edge over Biden, 77; Warren, 70; and Sanders, 78. The senators have animated the party’s left flank, while Buttigieg joins Biden in Democrats’ center-left wing but is calling for generational change. Thus far, Buttigieg, Warren and Sanders have drawn consistently larger Iowa crowds than Biden, while some party activists criticize his campaign as insufficiently aggressive.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Prosecutors plan to call an 8-year-old boy to testify against his father in an Iowa triple-homicide trial. KCCI-TV reports that the state on Wednesday filed a motion that would allow the boy to testify via a closed-circuit TV feed. The child is the son of Marvin Esquivel-Lopez of Guatemala, who faces three counts of first-degree murder in the July shooting deaths of 29-year-old Rossibeth Flores-Rodriguez, her 11-year-old daughter and her 5-year-old son.

The killings happened in Des Moines. Court documents say the child was an eyewitness. Esquivel-Lopez pleaded not guilty. His trial starts Jan. 27. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said Escobar-Orellana is in the United States illegally and had twice been deported before the shooting. He was convicted in 2010 of illegal entry into the U.S.

NEWTON, Iowa (AP) — Two people are dead and one person is badly injured after an accident in central Iowa. The Des Moines Register reports that the accident happened about 7 a.m. Friday in Jasper County when a Chevrolet Impala went off the roadway and rolled. Authorities are investigating to determine what caused the accident.

The driver, 23-year-old Dallis Harrison of Newton, and a 16-year-old passenger, Isaiah Eliander of Garwin, were both ejected and killed. A 15-year-old passenger, Kylie Eliander, was not ejected and was seriously hurt.