Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Time precious as some Dems eye Senate trial
Campaigns hustle as Iowa’s caucuses near
NEWTON, Iowa — As a winter storm barreled down on Iowa, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign team struggled with whether to scrap a town hall scheduled at the old Maytag headquarters.
There was more than weather at play as the Massachusetts senator’s campaign monitored the forecast and called expected attendees to gauge their willingness to brave the snow and wind. For the Democratic presidential candidate, the event was probably one of her last chances to make a face-to-face appeal to voters in Iowa before the Feb. 3 caucus. So it went on as planned.
Warren, with Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, is soon to be stationed in the Senate as a juror in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. With the trial schedule up in the air, this weekend is likely the final full weekend of campaigning for those candidates before the kickoff caucus.
That has left their campaigns scrambling to make the most of their time in Iowa and the other early-voting states and thinking of ways to stay on voters’ radars during the trial in Washington. And the trial has given their 2020 rivals outside the Senate an opportunity to take advantage.
Klobuchar trails the top tier of contenders in polling and fundraising and needs a strong showing in Iowa to catapult her campaign into the next round of primaries. She said that the demands of the Senate trial wouldn’t hurt her candidacy.
“I’m a mom, and I can balance things really well,” Klobuchar said during an event Saturday in Coralville.
But privately, the collision of the trial and the caucus has created anxiety among campaign advisers who face the prospect of their bosses being trapped in the Senate as silent jurors just as voters in Iowa are taking a final look at the candidates.
The full schedule for the Senate trial is uncertain, and it might wrap up before the caucuses. But campaigns are planning for the prospect of the candidates being in Senate session Tuesday through Saturday next week and five or six days the following week. The fourth Democratic senator still in the race is Michael Bennet of Colorado.
Well-funded candidates such as Warren and Sanders are considering putting private planes on hold in Washington so they can quickly fly to Iowa for late-night events after the trial wraps up.
In other campaign news:
■ Former Vice President Joe Biden called for Sanders’ campaign to
“disown” what he called “doctored video” that some Sanders supporters say shows Biden endorsing Republican calls to cut Social Security and Medicare.
“There’s a little doctored video going around … put out by one of Bernie’s people,” Biden told supporters in Indianola, Iowa.
Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir said, “Joe Biden should be honest with voters and stop trying to doctor his own public record of consistently and repeatedly trying to cut Social Security.”
■ Sanders stepped up his pitch to women in early-voting New Hampshire on the heels of a squabble over sexism in politics with Warren.
“We are in this together,” the Vermont senator said in a speech at the Seacoast Women’s March in Portsmouth. “Men, if you think abortion rights, if you think equal pay for equal work is just a women’s issue, you are dead wrong,”
■ Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said the Oval Office benefits from the perspective of a wartime veteran.
“I do believe there is value in someone in the Oval Office understanding what’s at stake, understanding at a personal level what’s at stake, when decisions are made that could send people into a conflict,” Buttigieg, a naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2014, said in an interview on Iowa PBS in suburban Des Moines.
Buttigieg’s campaign said Saturday night that he will visit Columbia, South Carolina, for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.