Analysis: What we learned about 2020 Democratic candidates so far
By David Weigel David Weigel National reporter covering politics Email Bio Follow May 3 at 12:52 PM David Weigel, in The Trailer newsletter, has written about what we’ve learned from Democratic candidates campaigning in early states. We’ve gathered them together here; their publication dates range from Jan. 6 to April 30, so we’ve noted any updates in italics.
DES MOINES — By the end of her first full day of campaigning in Iowa, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had spoken to around 2,700 people. She’d taken 30 questions from voters, chosen by a random, ticket-based lottery. She’d stopped for three short media scrums, evaded one heckler and battled one cold , the waking nightmare of any presidential candidate.
Trump has become the silence between the notes of Warren's speeches, which portray an economic system that has been rigged, for decades, to favor the wealthy.
Warren’s stump speech begins with “a little bit about who I am,” with a story that quiets down the crowd: about the night she heard her mother muttering, “We will NOT lose this house” as she contemplated how to deal with her father’s medical bills. She moves on to a vision of “changing the rules” of three sectors of society: the economy, government and politics.
Contrast that with Sanders, who never lets a speech end without talking up Medicare-for-all. Contrast it with what the bill’s other sponsors might do when they get to Iowa and work to distinguish themselves. It was also easy to find Democrats who had wanted Warren to run before and were still shopping for a candidate but had an emotional connection to her.
See another candidate: Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand speaks in Nashua, N.H., on April 26. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND This edition is from Jan. 20. Gillibrand's story is, in political terms, pretty “likely” — the daughter of politically connected Albany lawyers, she received an Ivy League education, became a corporate lawyer and won a tough race before she turned 40.
The Trailer gets delivered each Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up to read it first, in your inbox. Not every question about that district has to do with Gillibrand’s old, more conservative positions. At several stops, she emphasized that she had sold Medicare-for-all, as a concept, to conservative voters.
Gillibrand preempts any attempt to diminish her record by describing how much she passed and how much she's proposed. Her first real national attention came with legislation to get medical care for 9/11 first responders and a simultaneous effort to end the military's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy — both are part of her story now, as was a bipartisan bill that provides one of her readiest laugh lines: “I worked with Ted Cruz on ending sexual harassment in Congress.
At one Sioux City stop, Gillibrand confronted an issue that has dogged her for more than a year: Her vocal role in urging Al Franken to step down from the Senate after eight allegations of sexual harassment or inappropriate touching were levied against him. Gillibrand did not mention the president's name in her answer, but put her decision in an unmissable context: It was impossible for her work against sexual harassment and disrespect toward women if she gave a friend a pass on it.
Booker, who has been seen as a potential presidential candidate for most of his 22-year career, made his campaign trail debut in a state where Democrats are still proud of launching Barack Obama to the presidency. At every stop, Booker leavened his family's civil rights history with a joke, describing how a racist landlord sicced a dog on his father for trying to integrate a white neighborhood. “Every time he told the story, the dog got bigger,” Booker said in Des Moines. “I'd be eating my Cheerios, and my dad would say, 'Boy, I fought a pack of wolves to get you in this house!'"
Booker’s been in the Senate for a bit more than five years; in Iowa, the main accomplishment he discussed from this period was the passage of the First Step Act, a criminal justice restructuring bill endorsed by the Trump administration. He recalls"some guy named Chuck Grassley” trying to smother the bill. “I didn’t stand there and answer his speeches with my angry speeches,” Booker recalled in Marshalltown. “I went to his office, sat down there, and talked to him.
He may be on to something about the Democratic base. A recurring theme in conversations with voters at Booker’s events was nervousness — a real dread about picking the wrong candidate, one who couldn’t defeat the president. Annelie Heinen, a 35-year-old teacher who attended Booker’s Waterloo roundtable, showed up wearing a “She Persisted” T-shirt, a reference to Booker’s Senate colleague and presidential competitor Elizabeth Warren. But she said she was nervous about Warren’s ability to win.
Booker’s team is not naive about his vulnerabilities. The senator frequently describes constituents he helped, or lessons he learned from civil rights heroes. In the past, he’s been accused of making these stories up. But every anecdote is backed up by some preemptive research. That’s ready to be deployed, but in Iowa, voters didn’t give Booker a reason to do so.
Harris, who is narrowly polling ahead of every other declared Democratic presidential candidate , is running a campaign as the ambassador of another, kinder America. Early polls may not tell us much, but she has, out of necessity, skipped past the house-parties-and-roundtables part of the campaign and moved to large rallies that channel the spirit of the first Women’s March.
Like most Democrats in the field, Harris does not mention the president by name unless she’s asked to. She does not wade into the controversy of the day; in neither of her big South Carolina town halls did she talk about the president’s emergency declaration, which she told reporters, separately, needed to be undone by courts.
The best example of that is criminal justice and policing, the focus of Harris's career up to 2016 and the focus of her first really rough coverage. At her first events, the pushback on her record — one that included leading a truancy initiative that punished parents and defeating an incumbent district attorney she criticized over San Francisco's lack of convictions — was limited to one protest, in North Charleston, by a trio of activists.
“I intend to win.” The “electability” question, which has surfaced earlier than usual in this primary, would seem from the outside to be tougher for Harris. It’s implicit in Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign so far, and it was explicit in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s talk about her own record of winning rural voters. Several Democrats have won races in tough states and districts; Harris has won every election in either Democrat-friendly San Francisco or greater California.
“I think we were too centrist last time,” Charles Nicholson, 62, who was still shopping for a candidate. “I think Hillary at least would have been better off with a progressive running mate. We need to get people excited.” “This country will truly hit its stride when it reflects and represents and involves the contributions, the genius, and the creativity of everyone,” O’Rourke said. “And right now — economically, politically, where power is concentrated, you don’t have that representation. You don’t have a true reflection of who we are, a people from every corner of the globe, who came together here to make this the indispensable nation on the planet.
In Conway, this reporter asked O’Rourke about his 2012 run for Congress, when he talked about the “extravagant” size of government and the need to means-test entitlements — i.e., to shrink Social Security payments to many recipients. What changed his mind? Why should voters think it won’t change back?
“And so, in addition to celebrating civil rights victories, we also have to acknowledge the extraordinary suffering and death endured by African Americans and people of color in this country, long after the end of the Civil War. People who were pressed into convict work gangs simply because of the color of their skin. People denied opportunity. People living in constant fear for their lives.
On social media and at a few town halls, voters have asked whether O’Rourke has real policies or he’s going to offer platitudes — something that has grown out of his aforementioned, philosophical answers. Unlike Sanders, who states his policies one by one, O’Rourke tends to get to them after a soliloquy on what the country needs.
“I believe in free community college and I believe in debt-free four-year public college, so the cost is not a barrier for admission,” O’Rourke said. “We should ensure that incarceration is also not a barrier to advancement.” “I know that we have not done an event where folks cannot ask questions or make comments or level criticisms at me,” O’Rourke said in Manchester. “I’m getting better along the way. I have a long way to go, and that’s very clear to me, but I am grateful for the opportunity.”
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks in Somerville, Mass., on April 30. PETE BUTTIGIEG From March 24 Keep up with the mayors, senators and others in the race: Get the newsletter in your inbox each Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. “If people like me are correct about the way it can be designed, it will become more popular,” Buttigieg said about the Medicare option. “Eventually it can be a very natural path to a single-payer environment. But the bottom line is, we cannot tolerate the fact this country is the only developed country that lacks universal health care.”
Polling, which may largely reflect name recognition right now, does not show a youth advantage for Buttigieg at this point. Sanders does best among voters younger than 35, as he did in 2016; he often notes to audiences that he got more votes from young people than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump did during their primary bids.
Hasn’t taken a punch yet. More than anyone else in the race, Buttigieg has benefited from the idea that the 2016 election demolished notions of what sort of résumé voters needed in a president and what sort of character traits were dealbreakers.
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