IOWA FALLS, Iowa — In a primary marked by its sharp turn to the political Left, a handful of 2020 Democrats are pedaling their appeal to Republicans and independents in their closing arguments before next week’s Iowa caucuses, with mixed results.
Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and even Elizabeth Warren are pitching their potential to broaden the Democratic tent by adding Republicans and independents unimpressed with President Trump to the fold should one of them become the party’s nominee.
Buttigieg, for one, is spending his time prior to the Feb. 3 kickoff caucuses making up to five stops a day in Iowa counties that voted for both former President Barack Obama and Trump.
But independents, such as Jan Beriskin, 72, remain unconvinced. Beriskin is “quite sure” she won’t back the White House incumbent, but she doesn’t know if she can “switch to another party.”
“The one issue for me is the abortion issue, a woman’s right to choose. What about the child?” the spiritual director from Eldora told the Washington Examiner in Iowa Falls this week. “So that’s a thing that keeps me away from a lot of the Democratic issues,” she added, referring to a topic on which Buttigieg was confronted during last weekend’s Fox News town hall.
While she’s toying with the idea of supporting Buttigieg, 38, or Klobuchar, 59, she’s less sure about Biden, 77.
“We just need some youth in the game,” she said. “He’s part of the Washington elite. He’s been there a long time.”
Jackie Lauer, 73, a Democrat who is caucusing for the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is similarly skeptical about the strategy.
“Most Trump supporters that I know are just so closed to hear anything, and Davis County, where I’m from, is just a snake pit of them,” the retired nurse from Bloomfield said in Ottumwa on Tuesday. “So independents, yes. Republicans are only reachable if they’re not Trump voters.”
Lauer added Biden may “have a better chance of winning them over because I don’t think he’s as honest” as Buttigieg.
Buttigieg has been more successful than some of his 2020 Democratic rivals or former opponents, such as California Sen. Kamala Harris, in straddling the divide between holding liberal and center-left policy positions when ideas, including “Medicare for all” and free college, are ascendant among the party’s activist base thanks to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Warren, his Massachusetts colleague in the Senate.
Touting his Midwestern roots, Buttigieg has long referred to his desire to draw independents and “future former Republicans” into “an American majority” that wants reforms such as expanded background checks for gun owners and buyers, warning that hyperpartisanship will still permeate once Trump is no longer commander in chief.
“That’s what this campaign is about,” he said in Indianola on Tuesday afternoon. “Even more than agreeing on what we’re against, most Americans agree on what we’re for.”
But the general electability argument, which he claims isn’t a “trick,” also helps Buttigieg siphon support from Biden ahead of the Feb. 3 caucuses in a conservative-leaning state, where contenders such as the former vice president have brought former Republicans to campaign events to introduce them to those in attendance. He denies that’s why he’s doing it.
“No, it’s about the fact that we need to bring as many people as possible into this process,” he told reporters in Boone this week.
Biden has been jeered throughout the primary for his outreach to Republicans, praising his work in the Senate with known segregationists and teasing the prospect of a GOP running mate. Meanwhile, Klobuchar, a Minnesota senator, has weaved a riff into various versions of her stump speech about her track record winning Trump counties in her swing state, arguing more recently she could make “our coalition wider” because “my coattails [are] longer.”
Yet it’s Warren’s attempt to emerge as the “unity candidate,” a bridge between Biden and Sanders and their respective wings of the party, which appears to be the biggest stretch at the moment, particularly after her confrontation with populist ideological ally Sanders over whether a woman can clinch the White House.
“We’re not going to get every Republican, but we are going to treat people with respect. We’re going to treat them with dignity, and we’re going to treat their arguments as serious,” said Warren, 70, herself a former Republican, in a tele-town hall late Tuesday.
Warren’s tilt to the center coincides with Sanders’s rise in the polls on the back of voters who once were with her.
With less than a week to go before Iowa Democrats gather to caucus, Sanders averages 24.8% of the vote to Biden’s 20.6%, Buttigieg’s 17%, Warren’s 14.6%, and Klobuchar’s 9%, according to RealClearPolitics data.
