In two weeks, the preliminaries of this unique political season will end and the 2020 election season will begin — with actual voters actually voting, in the Iowa caucuses.
At the same time, three of the top five Democratic candidates will find themselves unable to hit the campaign trail in any meaningful way:
Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will be in Washington, serving as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump, which is expected to last at least until February.
Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg will, in effect, have Iowa to themselves.
Which doesn’t mean the darts will cease flying among all the Democrats, wherever they may be.
Biden and Sanders, in particular, have been sniping at one another lately. Sanders says Biden’s long record in politics — his “baggage” — could provide Trump with ammunition to use against him.
“Biden, meanwhile, has said that the positions held by Sanders, a democratic socialist, would be used by Trump to defeat him as presidential nominee and could also hurt Democrats in down-ballot races,” says the Washington Post.
And a new poll suggests the timing couldn’t be better for Biden.
The survey of likely caucus-goers by Focus on Rural America shows the former vice president with 24%, reports Politico, with Warren at 18%, Buttigieg at 16% and Sanders at 14%. Klobuchar trails with 11%, even though Iowans think she — a senator from neighborhing Minnesota — would best represent “the interests of rural Iowa.”
Politico says Warren and Sanders apparently “suffered fallout from their recent spat … over whether a woman could beat President Donald Trump.” During last week’s Democratic debate, Warren said Sanders told her in a private 2018 conversation that he did not believe a woman could win, which Sanders denied — in essence, a classic case of “she said/he said.”
The survey of 500 Iowans also asked if there was a candidate they would not support based on that debate: 12% said Warren, 11% said Sanders, far higher numbers than the other candidates.
Meanwhile, all the Democratic candidates still in the race turned out for a march to the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia SC on the national holiday celebrating what would have been the 91st birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Returning to this week’s main event, the impeachment trial, Senate Republicans and Trump’s lawyers appear confident that the president will be acquitted.
Their plan, according to Axios, is to present an “aggressively dismissive case” reflecting Trump’s oft-repeated position:
“Concede nothing, admit nothing, apologize for nothing. Talk for TV. And don’t get into the weeds.”
The Democrats will counter with arguments, evidence and possibly witnesses to support their claim that “President Trump’s conduct is the … worst nightmare” of the Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution.
One big question — again, unique to this situation — is whether the televised impeachment trial will so captivate American viewers that “Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar may well get as much, if not more, attention nationally than Biden and Buttigieg slugging it out every day in the freezing climes of Iowa.”
