OSCEOLA, Iowa — Democrats are struggling to hide their jitters regarding the prospect of Bernie Sanders becoming the party’s 2020 presidential nominee.
On the campaign trail in Iowa on Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg was asked by supporters on two separate occasions about the rise of Sanders’s second White House bid before the first nominating contest next week.
In Osceola, an Iowan who has committed to caucus for Buttigieg, 38, on Feb. 3, sought advice on how to counter “hardcore” Sanders fans as the night progresses and Democrats realign from candidates unable to secure 15% support in individual precincts during the first round of voting.
Meanwhile, in Ottumwa, a 15-year-old visiting Iowa from Buttigieg’s home state asked the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for the best way to convince others who like Sanders’s “Medicare for all” platform but feel the Vermont senator’s camp is “too mean-spirited” to back the mayor instead.
Although Buttigieg said Tuesday, “It’s okay to talk about why we think we’ve got the best campaign relative to our competitors,” the White House hopeful has avoided directly attacking the socialist amid his late surge in Iowa. Instead, Buttigieg has relied on campaign aides, who keep sending email blasts warning how “Trump’s team wants Bernie to be the nominee,” and other supporters to do his dirty work as he lays out his own electability argument.
With Sanders, 78, stuck in Washington, D.C., for President Trump’s impeachment trial, his camp has sent out a platoon of high-profile backers to fan the early-nominating states and get out the vote ahead of Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s Feb. 11 primary.
In Iowa, Sanders leads Biden, his closest rival, by an average of 3 percentage points, while in New Hampshire, he has a wider berth of 8 percentage points on the former vice president, according to RealClearPolitics data. His advantage in the polls comes as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 70, cedes some of her share of the liberal vote to the socialist and Buttigieg vies with Biden, 77, for center-left support.
Although one of the race’s consistently polling front-runners and its top fundraiser, Sanders’s White House aspirations weren’t the focus of strategists or reporters, particularly after his heart attack last October. But his staying power has turned heads as 2020 Democrats make their closing pitches before voting begins.
Like the attention he has received from Trump, Sanders has welcomed the incoming salvos, soliciting donations off of news articles headlines, such as “Worried Democratic operatives Scramble to Fund a Network to Take Down Bernie Sanders.”
For Corey Larson, 46, Sanders’s resurgence was confusing because “personally, I don’t meet a lot of Bernie supporters.”
“I can just recognize he’s not the one for me. And I have this sense that he won’t be the nominee, but I don’t know. I’m hoping,” the pastor from Eldora told the Washington Examiner in Iowa Falls this week.
Although Iowans are proud of their first-in-the-nation responsibility to vet presidential contenders, Bob Getschman, 65, bracing for a Sanders victory, admitted the state had made mistakes in the past.
“He can always win, but whether he’ll be the last candidate standing is another question. We’ve seen that happen a number of times here where the guy that wins the Iowa caucus or woman who wins the Iowa caucus isn’t the nominee, so we’ll see,” the retired agricultural researcher from Boone said after a Buttigieg event in his town.
