Iowa voters play pundit with decision time at hand
AMES, Iowa — Cable news pundits have descended on Iowa in droves, hoping to understand and analyze the minds of voters who will caucus here Monday night in the first contest of the Democratic presidential nominating process.
But those voters are not tuning in to hear what the talking heads on MSNBC, CNN or Fox News think. Instead, they have become their own pundit class, scrutinizing the candidates to determine which one has the best chance of beating President Trump in November.
In conversations with dozens of Iowa Democrats over several months, it is less common to hear voters contemplating a candidate’s health care plan than it is to hear them weigh that candidate’s appeal to key constituencies — often in other states — who will determine the nation’s next president.
“I like the fact that independents or moderates can feel really comfortable with Amy Klobuchar and trust her,” said Mia Power, a junior studying geology at Iowa State University who attended a Friday rally with surrogates backing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “She doesn’t turn off moderate voters.”
Power plans to caucus for Klobuchar, the senior senator from neighboring Minnesota, and to migrate to Warren if Klobuchar is not viable in the first round of voting.
“There are people who I really like their policies, but I’m not sure they can beat Trump,” said Sue Seidenfeld, a retired physician’s assistant from Waukee, Iowa, who attended a rally for former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday. “I’m just trying to figure out who America will vote for. So that’s one of the things that’s hanging me up right now.”
Democratic voters have told pollsters virtually all year that they prioritize choosing a nominee who can beat Trump in November over someone who aligns best with their ideology but would be a weaker general election candidate.
In an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released Friday, 73 percent of Democratic primary voters said voting for a candidate who had the best chance of beating Trump was very important. Just 58 percent said the same of voting for a candidate who proposes large-scale policy changes on issues such as health care, climate change and economic opportunity.
A Suffolk University poll of Iowa Democrats conducted for USA Today found that 39 percent of voters said beating Trump was the most important issue to them, while just 21 percent chose the next most popular issue: health care.
Democrats say they do not recall the same level of tension in any previous year.
“It’s the Trump factor. It’s a combination of Iowans taking this so seriously, their role of giving someone their start towards the nomination and the pressure they’re feeling to get it right,” said John Norris, a former state Democratic Party chairman who backs Warren. “They want to make sure that the person they support and we nominate can beat Donald Trump. I saw a fraction of this amount of intensity about George W. [Bush] in 2004 but nothing like this.”
Choosing which candidate is the most electable has become a source of anxiety and concern for Democratic voters, even those who have years of experience working in professional politics. One Iowa Democratic strategist who is unaligned in the race created a custom point system to plug into a spreadsheet to help her decide which candidate to support.
“The stakes are so high. If it was President Jeb Bush and the only issues people were weighing were ordinary politics, I think people would be less worried,” said Rob Sand, Iowa’s Democratic state auditor. “There’s a weight and a seriousness even in these campaigns that did not exist in 2008.”
But the variables within the equation that make a candidate the most electable are open to interpretation and dispute, and the candidates are using their last rallies and final paid advertisements to appeal to Democratic voters’ newfound obsession. Each candidate has spent the closing weeks making the case that they are the best positioned to beat Trump.
Norris told Warren backers here on Friday that the Massachusetts senator is the most electable contender because she serves as a bridge to every wing of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, candidates such as Klobuchar, Biden and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg present themselves as palatable to independent voters, but that’s a strategy that Norris said has proved to be unsuccessful.
“When we choose someone because we think they’re more electable, do you remember President [Michael] Dukakis? Do you remember President [John] Kerry?” he asked. “Electability was part of their argument. Somehow if we get closer to the other party, we become more electable. It doesn’t work that way. Trump didn’t work that way. He excited his base.”
The surrogates stumping around the state for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) use a variation on Norris’s pitch for Warren — their candidate, polling at or near the top of the Iowa field, is the most electable because he is best able to bring new voters into the fold, they say.
“The one way that we defeat Donald Trump is by expanding the electorate and welcoming new voters into our movement,” said Misty Rebik, Sanders’s Iowa campaign director. “We do that by building the largest, deepest, multiracial, multigenerational movement we’ve ever seen.”
Like Warren’s team, Buttigieg is warning Democrats against making the safe choice. He has pointed to the last three Democratic presidents — Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter — all of whom claimed the outsider mantle at a young age.
“Over the last half-century, every time my party has actually won the White House, it’s been with a candidate who is focused on the future, one who hadn’t been in Washington very long, if at all, and was opening the door to a new generation of leadership,” he said Thursday in Decorah, Iowa. “That has always been true when we’ve won, and it’s worth thinking about with so much depending on whether we win.”
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