One is the mayor of the 308th largest city in the country. Another is a well-liked woman who’s spent a decade in the Senate, two decades in public office, and outperformed Hillary Clinton by more than a 20-point margin in the most bipartisan state in the nation. Both have managed to convince Democratic voters to consider them as quasi-moderate alternatives to aging front-runner Joe Biden.
It’s Amy Klobuchar’s time to pounce.
Despite her on-paper appeal, the senator from Minnesota has struggled to make any meaningful progress in the Democratic presidential primary until now. Overnight (nearly literally) she gained three extra polls that qualified her for the November debate, making her the first and only candidate thus far to gain a polling bump from the October stage to secure her place for November.
Klobuchar’s moment is finally here. Her polling has been revived from the dead to the mid-single digits, but it won’t last unless she capitalizes on it. The timing is telling enough that she could have a real shot at gaining a lasting boost.
Biden didn’t encounter a much-anticipated polling drop when he launched his campaign or for any substantial time thereafter. While Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has seen a sustained surge, it’s come far more from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s slight drop and the complete collapse of supposed rising stars California Sen. Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke. With Warren besting Biden in a handful of polls, Warren came under real fire for the first time during the October debate, namely from Klobuchar and Klobuchar’s greatest obstacle, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Buttigieg, an Ivy League-groomed polyglot with military service and a resume to match, has the sort of political talent that reminds his fans of another outsider who catapulted from an unfinished first term in the Senate to the Oval Office. But Buttigieg is even younger and even greener than President Barack Obama was while running against a nonincumbent from the party departing power. He’s an unknown entity who polls abysmally with voters of color in a primary built on diversity coalitions. Contrast that to Klobuchar’s proven crossover appeal, and you have a winner.
The more Democrats hear about the details of Medicare For All, the more they revile it. As Warren continues to fight Biden for the top of the ticket, the more her embellished resume and pledges to tank the stock market will come to haunt her. If Klobuchar wants to make herself the heir apparent to the moderate lane in case of a Biden collapse, she has to do it now.
Polling at 2% nationally and a little more in Iowa doesn’t spell more than a footnote in the history books. But given Buttigieg’s rapid success in Iowa, the field is still plenty open, especially as Warren’s extremism comes under challenge and Biden’s gaffes age him. If Klobuchar can turn her Iowa ground game into a winning one, she can become a real player again.
The odds are in her favor. She’s shrewd but not shrill. To anyone but her staff, she comes across as charming but tough, a progressive of the Obama era but not brimming with socialist dreams. As President Trump becomes increasingly embroiled in an impeachment proceeding with mounting evidence of a damning quid pro quo, those 80,000 Midwesterners who gave him the Oval Office may like a moderate liberal but not far-left alternative.
Klobuchar could be that woman. But she has to go all in before it’s all over.
