AMES, Iowa — The rise and fall of Kamala Harris over nine months this year offers a cautionary tale for Elizabeth Warren.
The California senator, 55, rose after the opening primary debates in Miami in June, but she has since hemorrhaged support and is struggling to regain her footing. She’s now at best a mid-tier candidate, with her most prominent issue, a push for Twitter to ban President Trump from the social media platform, seen as a desperate attempt for attention, even by fellow Democrats.
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After a powerful debate performance in which she confronted then front-runner Joe Biden on 1970s busing to end racial segregation, Harris briefly shot up in the polls. But she fumbled her own position on modern-day busing and couldn’t capitalize on the moment she had created. Since then, her campaign has been what might be termed a calamity — or, perhaps, a Kamality.
Warren has slowly inched her way up in the polls since announcing her exploratory committee in December. The Massachusetts senator, 70, also reported strong fundraising figures last financial quarter. But with about 100 days until the caucuses, Democrats in the first-in-the-nation state have seen momentum like this before — and just as many stumbles.
“Just this week, Biden dropped and Buttigieg rose. There’s all kinds of shifting,” Cynthia Cory, 68, said, referring to former Vice President Biden, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and a Suffolk University/USA Today poll that put Buttigieg in third place behind Biden and Warren. “The democratic process is so messy that to even be a prognosticator and attempt to predict is fallacious. You can’t do it,” Cory added.
Cory, a nursing teacher who joined roughly 1,200 others at Warren’s Iowa State University town hall in Ames on Monday, is leaning toward the former Harvard Law School professor and consumer advocate after Harris failed to maintain her standing in the historically crowded field.
While all the candidates were at risk of plateauing or plummeting in the polls, Cory said Warren may be able to withstand downward pressure because her campaign is better organized than Harris’.
“As far as I can tell, Harris doesn’t really have a very good system in Iowa,” she told the Washington Examiner. “I was a little worried about her strategies there. I think they’re going to bite her.”
Yet Bruce Antion, 69, who will likely caucus for Warren in February, pointed to potential problems for his pick, including criticism he anticipates she’ll receive over how she plans to pay for “Medicare for all.” The retired teacher from Ames, who supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, also said grudges held over from that cycle and the perception the Democratic National Committee favored Hillary Clinton may make it difficult for Warren to clinch the delegates she needs to win the 2020 presidential nomination.
“My major concern is that we keep all of the Bernie people with us,” he explained of followers of Warren’s ideological ally, large swathes of whom sat out the general election three years ago because their favorite didn’t win the primary.
Although Joe Fuld, a Democratic consultant and president of the Campaign Workshop, praised Warren’s organization, clear message, and efforts building an audience around the issues she cares about, he emphasized there was “a lot of time between now and Iowa.”
“It is really helpful when you’re taking time, and you’re talking to people and getting people to sign up and engage in your campaign, and you have a base of people that are organizing for you. That is a recipe for success in these early primaries. And I do think the Elizabeth Warren folks have done that in a way that’s been, frankly, better than most campaigns,” Fuld said. “But that being said, I think other campaigns are doing that too. It’s a question of whether they have time to catch up.”
Regardless, Paul Henderson, a Bay Area political analyst who worked in the San Francisco district attorney’s office under Harris, told the Washington Examiner he was watching to see whether new polls reflect the extra scrutiny Warren is now under as a front-runner and as one of the more liberal candidates in the contest as voters weigh the issue of electability.
“Iowa voters get to take a bite of the apple first to tell us who has done the work to sell their policies and brand to the voters,” he said.
