MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
With the Iowa caucuses on Monday, we're noticing the different ways candidates are trying to reach voters - Bernie Sanders delivers fiery speeches. Generally, people don't leave Hillary Clinton events ready to start a political revolution. Big speeches don't seem to be her thing. Rather, she's trying to win people over by being a wonk who delivers page after page of policy white papers. NPR's Tamara Keith reports.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Autism is not the kind of thing that dominates televised debates or tops polls as a leading issue facing the nation. But Hillary Clinton has a white paper on it. She's also got them for Alzheimer's, drug addiction and elder care. For autism, it's the plan to support children, youth and adults living with autism and their families. And for 19-year-old Abby Walker, who volunteers for the Clinton campaign, it's a really big deal.
ABBY WALKER: So when Hillary came out with her plan, I just saw this, and I just knew right away that I needed to keep knocking on doors even more.
KEITH: Even though Walker goes to college in Missouri, she's been driving home to Ottomwu, Iowa, every weekend to convince people to caucus for Clinton. Walker's older brother has autism. She and her mom attended one of Clinton's small listening tour events over the summer, and Walker says her mom talked to Clinton about autism.
WALKER: And my mom just told her a little bit about my brother and how much he needs services and stuff like that.
KEITH: When the plan came out, Walker's mom posted about it on Facebook. And she wasn't the only one. The plan showed up in the Facebook feeds of people and organizations who don't typically talk about presidential politics. That includes the Autistic Self Advocacy Network run by Ari Ne'eman. He's one of many advocates Clinton's policy team consulted. I asked him if his network would even be talking about Clinton without this plan.
ARI NE'EMAN: You know, certainly not to the same degree and certainly not in the same way. It resonates and it reaches, and the fact that it's done by consulting with autistic adults ourselves really matters.
KEITH: He's hoping to get all the presidential candidates to develop similar autism plans. But here's the thing about Clinton - she has more than two dozen of these policy proposals - more than 50,000 words of them - many heavy on footnotes.
BRIAN FALLON: She takes the issues very seriously. For her, platitudes are never enough.
KEITH: Brian Fallon is the campaign's press secretary. He says, when voters tell Clinton about their concerns, she wants to be able to answer with a plan to address them.
FALLON: It is Hillary Clinton's idea of fun to take a thick briefing binder home at night in her hotel if she's on the road, and study it and to give feedback to the staff that is providing her with a menu of options for different policy prescriptions on any given issue.
KEITH: But is being a wonk in the time when voters feel uneasy and even angry really a recipe for victory? It's certainly a way to micro-target voters and meet them where they live. Margie Omero is a democratic pollster at Purple Strategies. And when she looks at the array of Clinton's proposals, she sees many of them falling into the category of caregiving.
MARGIE OMERO: Those are huge issues facing a lot of everyday Americans in their daily life - far more, I should add, than some of the things that we talk about a lot in Washington. The enormous amount of pressure that women feeling for caregiving everybody - and giving care to everybody in their family - it really cannot be overstated.
KEITH: The question is whether Clinton's many plans to address these concerns will drive the people who care passionately about them to caucus on a cold night in February. Tamara, Keith, NPR News.