BURLINGTON, Iowa — With most of his top rivals stuck in Washington due to the Senate impeachment trial, one would expect Joe Biden’s campaign to be gathering steam just three days before the caucuses, but, instead, it’s listless.
The contrast between the energy level at Biden’s event and President Trump’s rally in Des Moines last night was quite startling.
At a Friday event in this western Iowa town, Biden drew a crowd that couldn’t have been more than 150-200 people. He spoke for just half an hour and didn’t take any questions from the audience before moving on to other campaign stops.
In contrast, the night before, Trump spoke for an hour and a half, energizing a crowd of more than 7,000 people, with other MAGA hat-wearing supporters spilling outside to watch the event on a big-screen television in below-freezing temperature.
It’s true that the Biden event was held during a weekday in a less populous part of the state and thus likely to draw an older crowd. But this is the fourth cycle that I’ve been covering the caucuses, both Republican and Democratic ones, and it struck me as a pretty tepid showing for somebody who has been the national front-runner (or at least co-front-runner) for the entire nomination race.
This is especially true given that three of his four biggest rivals in Iowa — Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar — have been taken off the campaign trail due to the Senate impeachment trial, having to bail on events and send surrogates in his place.
While Sanders stirs up supporters with talk of a revolution and Warren touts a long list of plans, Biden’s stump speech is mainly focused on the idea of turning the Trump presidency into a “historical aberration.” The promise of his candidacy is more or less that politics can return to the pre-Trump status quo where Republicans and Democrats fight over incremental policy gains and the national character is restored.
At various points in his speech, Biden referenced policy ideas, but he didn’t have much patience to get into them.
At one point, he referenced a proposal to tax capital gains as ordinary income. “That alone would raise $800 billion to allow us to do so much more to help the middle class and people around this country,” Biden said. “There’s much more to talk about in that area, but I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty.”
Given the fractured field and the fond memories most Iowa Democrats have of the Obama administration, Biden still has the opportunity to perform well on Monday. But this is not exactly the type of enthusiasm you typically see of a winning campaign so close to a crucial vote.
