Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders outside his field office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sunday. Photo / Hilary Swift, The New York Times
On the brink of actual voting, the party that preached of unity to defeat President Trump finds itself very divided.
Democrats had a certain vision for this.
There would be boundless throngs braving the Iowa slush, aghast at the incumbent and roused by his prospective successors. There would be a presidential field that looked like the country. There would be unity, or something like it, burying intraparty squabbles beneath a heap of agreed-upon progressive policies — or maybe even articles of impeachment to complete the job early.
And now, well.
From an event space in Newton, where a hand-countable crowd whispered anxieties about Joe Biden, to a union hall in Ottumwa, where filmmaker Michael Moore filled in for a Washington-bound Bernie Sanders with talk of democratic socialism and Icelandic gender parity, the restless final Iowa days of this endless pre-primary campaign have less resembled a resistance fantasy than a kind of rolling low-grade anxiety attack for Democrats.
It is an angst both long in coming and amplified by recent events, coaxed by the ghosts of caucuses past and the spectre of another unbearable failure, three years and three months after the one they swore they would be prepared to redeem this time.
Impeachment? President Donald Trump's Senate trial has served only to sideline several would-be opponents tethered to the Capitol and overshadow the rest, while the president, buoyed by a likely acquittal, stormed into Iowa on Thursday to savage them all as the "totally sick left" before an audience that outnumbered any Democrat's.
Unity? Supporters of Hillary Clinton and Sanders have found themselves relitigating the quarrels of 2016, a feud revived by Clinton's recent assertion that "nobody likes" Sanders and exacerbated when a top Sanders surrogate, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, joined some Iowans in booing the party's last nominee on Friday night.
And that diverse and talented field? The top remaining Democratic contenders are all white, mostly male and mostly old, encapsulated by Biden, the former vice president and long-assumed front-runner, who is wrapping up an Iowa campaign premised often on delivering somber addresses to small rooms about the soul of the nation and the relative strength of his swing-state polling. Some allies would consider Monday night a success if, even in defeat, he finishes ahead of Pete Buttigieg, the millennial former mayor of a small city in Indiana.
"There's two ways people get inspired, in my experience," Biden told voters in Newton during a wandering answer about climate change. "One, by really inspirational people like the John Kennedys of the world or the Abraham Lincolns of the world. And others by really lousy leaders."
The lousy leader in this formulation seemed intuitive enough. Less clear was whether Biden had just conceded that the Democrats on offer were no Kennedys or Lincolns.
Seated in back, David Moseley, 72, said he had traveled to Iowa from Seattle to assess his options in person. He took his place in a gathering heavy on gentle applause and precarious digression as Biden moved through his remarks with a signature medley of "not a joke" interjection and "Barack and I" reminiscences.
"We don't have a candidate that fits the entire coalition that we need," Moseley ruled.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, the play is going great.
Of course, much of the campaign strain has been born of healthy political combat, an ongoing debate over the party's direction and purpose. Biden and Buttigieg have argued that a big-tent enterprise requires consensus and restraint. "Let's not choose between boldness and unity," Buttigieg told voters in Ottumwa on Tuesday, suggesting that he was offering both. "Let's not choose between the right way to govern and the best way to win."
Sanders, the leader in recent Iowa polls, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have spoken with more urgency, insisting that the scale of the country's ills demands significant intervention, a zeal that has informed the electricity of their rallies.
"Kickass women win," Warren said to cheers late Friday evening, thanking her female surrogates after arriving in Des Moines during a break from impeachment duties.
"Our campaign," Sanders thundered in Indianola on Saturday, "is the campaign of energy."
In a state with a quadrennial tradition of nebulous energy metrics — crowd size, lawn signs, the willingness of volunteers to slog through snow to reach one last door — this year's contest has been especially difficult to gauge.
There is still conspicuous passion, measured by the odometers of canvassers in "I'm a Warren Democrat" apparel; the "BOOT-A-TRUMP" shirt at a Buttigieg rally; the blotted tears of a grateful, cane-shuffling Biden supporter after a hug from the candidate. "That's real," the man, Brian Peters, 59, said, nodding firmly.
But where the final Iowa stretch typically monopolises national media attention and all but guarantees a major boost for successful candidates, recent days have passed under the cloud cover of impeachment and a global health crisis. The state's eventual winner, who could generally expect days of momentum-sustaining news coverage, will instead run up against the State of the Union on Tuesday.
It is a fate somewhat difficult to fathom after over a year of Democratic obsession with getting this moment just right, with an all-consuming search for possible party saviors — Oprah! Beto! Kamala! — and debates so overstuffed that even two nights of 10-candidate forums could not accommodate the full slate.
"I have Steve Bullock shirts!" said Martha Viner, 71, from Albia, recalling the ill-fated campaign of the Montana governor. "I'm the only person."
The prospect of a muddled outcome on Monday has only encouraged a yearlong tendency toward punditry among both voters and candidates.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, addressing a group at a bike shop on Saturday in Bettendorf, appeared to set off on a cycling-based electability argument, recalling a trip on wheels once from Minnesota to Wyoming. "That just shows you the grit I bring to this stage," she said.
Andrew Yang, the former technology executive, focused his case on a digital data point. "I'm the only candidate in the field that Donald Trump has not tweeted about," he told reporters at a session hosted by Bloomberg News, "because he knows I'm better at the internet than he is."
The top contenders have been no more subtle. Warren's team recently debuted signs reading, "UNITE THE PARTY," implying that she is the only candidate who can connect its disparate factions.
And the campaigns of Biden and Sanders have continued a running dialogue over voter risk tolerance.
"This is no time to take a risk," one Biden ad narrated.
"This isn't the time to play it safe," Moore, the filmmaker, advised in Ottumwa, speaking to Sanders supporters alongside two other Vermont celebrities: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, of ice cream fame.
Perhaps most striking, at events across the state last week, was the sense that any Democratic nominee might be left to manage an unwieldy coalition — moderates, socialists, Trump-repelled independents.
Asked what it means to be a Democrat in 2020, caucusgoers drifted toward differing, if not always contradictory, definitions.
"Looking out for people instead of corporations," said Lauren Strathman, 37, a Sanders supporter from Bloomfield.
"Sanity," Peters, the Biden supporter, said.
"It means we need to get out and vote," said Maureen O'Connor, 61, from Waterloo, "and get Trump the hell out of there."
And as Moore prepared to leave the union hall he had commanded with Sanders away in Washington, swaddled in a hoodie and a Hawkeyes baseball cap as Ben and Jerry scooped ice cream for guests, he wondered what a party "tent" should even look like in these volatile political times.
Democrats might well nominate someone who has long resisted calling himself a member of their tribe. In fact, Moore hopes they do.
"We're going to elect somebody who's not officially a Democrat," he said, smiling a little. "The flaps are off the tent."
Written by: Matt Flegenheimer
Photographs by: Hilary Swift, Todd Heisler, Jordan Gale and Ruth Fremson
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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