Biden, Buttigieg diverge on strategy to win in Iowa, derail Sanders’ surge
Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have the same goal: emerge from the Iowa caucuses as the moderate alternative to progressive rival Bernie Sanders. But they’re deploying increasingly divergent strategies to get there.
Buttigieg escalated his attacks on his Democratic rivals on Thursday, calling them out by name for the first time in a notable shift from the largely above-thefray approach he’s taken for much of the past year. Biden, meanwhile, almost entirely avoided the other Democratic White House hopefuls, keeping his focus instead on President Donald Trump.
The contrasting styles come as moderates are under growing pressure to unite behind a clear standard-bearer to blunt Sanders’ rise and position the ultimate nominee to defeat Trump in November. While Biden, a former vice president, remains atop the field in many national polls, his support has slipped some in the early voting states. Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who have framed themselves as Midwestern consensus builders, have had bigger crowds than Biden across Iowa over the past week and believe they have an opportunity to peel off some of his support.
The sense of urgency only grows as Sanders shows signs of gaining strength in Iowa.
Regarding Sanders, Buttigieg bemoaned “a kind of politics that says you’ve got to go all the way here and nothing else counts.” And Buttigieg dismissed what he characterized as Biden’s assertion that it’s not time to “take a risk on someone new,” an implicit argument that the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, doesn’t have the experience needed to be president.
“History has shown us that the biggest risk we could take with a very important election coming up is to look to the same Washington playbook and recycle the same arguments and expect that to work against a president like Donald Trump, who is new in kind,” Buttigieg said.
Biden, meanwhile, presented himself against darker depictions of Trump’s leadership and character.
“In November, America will have the chance to answer the question: Does the character of a president matter?” Biden said. “I don’t believe we are the dark, angry nation that Donald Trump sees in his tweets in the middle of the night.”
He couldn’t ignore his Democratic rivals entirely. Later in the day, Biden issued a warning to voters.
“We can’t let this Democratic race slide into a negative treatment of one another. … The temptation is too much for some,” he noted, a reference perhaps as well to Sanders, who has attacked Biden over his Iraq War vote and support for reforming Social Security in recent weeks.
“We have differences,” Biden added. “We can argue about these differences. We have to be able, when we come out of this, to unite the party.”
He only spoke about Buttigieg when prodded by reporters during a brief stop for ice cream in Pella.
“I don’t know what Pete’s talking about. He’s a good guy, and I’m not gonna get into – he must be deciding things are getting a little tight,” he said with a smile.
Asked what he saw as his biggest contrast with Buttigeg, however, Biden noted, “I’ve gotten more than 8,600 votes in my life” – a reference to the fact that Buttigieg won his 2015 mayoral race with over 8,500 votes.
Buttigieg has hesitated until now to criticize his opponents by name, though he did repeatedly question Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren last fall on how she planned to finance a policy to provide health insurance to all Americans.
And while his pivot to associating Biden and Sanders specifically with the “arguments from before” was noticeable, Buttigieg’s aides signaled that a shift to a more direct contrast between the candidates was long-planned. The final thrust, the aides said, is to turn questions of doubt about his experience on its head by making the betterknown candidates seem risky.
For Biden’s part, the reluctance to engage with his opponents reflects a longstanding strategy to focus largely on drawing a general election contrast with
Trump on his temperament and character. The campaign believes that approach highlights some of Biden’s main advantages with voters: that he’s seen by many as the strongest Trump challenger and that voters can connect with Biden on a personal, emotional level.
Iowa Democrat strategist Matt Paul, who ran Hillary Clinton’s Iowa campaign in 2016, said he was “surprised” it’s taken the candidates this long to go after one another by name – and he warned that Buttigieg’s comments could backfire.
“I’ve actually been surprised, with this many people in the field, with a race as undefined and as fluid as it’s been, that others didn’t try and find that contrast earlier. It’s dangerous to roll out contrasts this late because you do have to be careful, and in Iowa — especially if it gets personal — there tends to be blowback,” he said.
Indeed, some voters at Biden’s events said they didn’t like the negativity among Democratic candidates. Patricia Cooke, a 75-year-old retiree who had been deciding between Biden and Buttigieg but leaning toward Biden, compared Buttigieg’s comments to when Warren sparred with Sanders on stage at the last debate, which she said made Warren look “small.”
“I don’t like that,’’ Cooke said. “It just doesn’t make them look good. They should focus on Trump.”