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WASHINGTON — An insurgent liberal hero is once again rising in Iowa, drawing huge crowds of young supporters and making Hillary Clinton’s team see ghosts of her 2008 caucus collapse.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has clawed his way into a virtual tie with Clinton in Iowa polls, and the former secretary of state's backers are increasingly nervous that she could lose there once again.
"I still have 2008 PTSD, and I’m feeling a lot of it right now," said one Iowa Clinton loyalist who has been involved in both campaigns. "These polls have closed up. His fervent support is not something she’s matching… Things seem to be a little off the rails."
Recent polling has found a coin-flip race with less than three weeks to go. The gold standard of Iowa polling, the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll conducted by Ann Selzer, found Clinton leading by just two points in results released Thursday morning.
New Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll in Iowa:Clinton 42%Sanders 40%O'Malley 4%Uncommitted 14%https://t.co/tjckLJ60ax
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) January 14, 2016
Eighteen days out from the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Clinton held a four-point lead over Obama. A few days after that, Selzer’s poll found Clinton up by 7.
The Hawkeye State is the first to cast its ballots for president. It can give underdogs a huge boost towards their party’s nomination— like it did for the-candidate Obama in 2008 — or put a front-runner’s campaign on the skids, like it did to Clinton.
While Clinton’s allies think she’s in better shape to bounce back later in later primary states if she can’t get past her Iowa problems, they disagree over what if anything she can do to end her recent struggles. A few want her to lean harder into policy contrasts like her recent attacks on Sanders over gun control, while others said she needed to highlight her biography more and soften her image. Some advised Clinton to ditch the smaller events she’s been holding and do more big rallies to match Sanders’s energy — a tactic she tried last time around. Others said she needed to spend more time one-on-one with Iowa caucus-goers.
"She’s not doing the big rallies because she can’t get the big crowds,” said the Iowa Clinton ally. "Maybe people are too anxious over this, and that anxiety is spilling over into cautiousness and overthinking decisions. Everyone’s on edge given how much we’ve invested in Iowa."
Sanders has a fervent following of millennial voters is closing in on Clinton in the state, much as Obama did eight years ago. Clinton’s team is spending big to try to keep her ahead, touting her experience and arguing she’s the most electable candidate while attacking his healthcare plans. As then-Sen. Barack Obama channelled Democrats’ fury over the war in Iraq and lust for change, Sanders has captured the current liberal zeitgeist with his tirades against income inequality.
So much that’s happening between Clinton and Bernie Sanders today echoes back to her losing battle against Obama in Iowa.
"I have a buddy who was with Obama last time who has been sending around links to recent stories and polling data that read the exact same as at this point in 2007 and 2008," said John Davis, a Clinton backer who was former Rep. Bruce Braley’s (D-Iowa) chief of staff.
Clinton’s reaction to the tightening race has echoes of the 2008 as well — and some Clinton backers fret that she’s repeating some of her past mistakes, leaning too hard on an electability and experience argument.
Clinton released a new ad Wednesday evening saying she’s "always stood strong to get the job done" that was heavy on archival footage from the ‘90s. Just days ago, another spot called her "tested and tough" and argued she’s the "one candidate who can stop" the GOP.
For some Clinton backers, the ads caused flashbacks.
"It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it turns out Mark Penn is back in the game, right down to some of the selection of the footage," one 2008 alum said of Clinton’s polarizing chief strategist and ad-maker from the last campaign. "That doesn’t exactly have 2016 written on it. Those were some really interesting stock footage choices."
Sources close to Clinton’s campaign laughingly dismissed the idea that the controversial Penn could be back in the fold.
On Tuesday, Clinton attacked Sanders for thinking he could “wave a magic wand” and do what he wanted as president. The words mirrored her February 2008 barb at Obama that “You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.”
Chelsea Clinton followed up with an attack on Sanders’s healthcare plan, saying it would “dismantle” ObamaCare — not too far from her attacks on Obama’s 2008 healthcare plan.
Clinton’s campaign doubled down on that attack Wednesday, slamming his campaign for refusing to say how he’d pay for his plan to expand Medicare to everyone and accusing him of planning to pay for it by raising middle-class taxes.
"To Bernie Sanders with thanks for your commitment to real health care access for all Americans..."-@HillaryClintonpic.twitter.com/XMVPEx8fT8
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders)January 13, 2016
Sanders’s campaign fired back by sending around a signed photo of the two politicians Clinton had sent to him in 1993.
"To Bernie Sanders, with thanks for your commitment to real health care access for all Americans and best wishes," the then-first lady wrote to the then-congressman.
Not everything is the same this time around.
Clinton’s team has been able to lob effective attacks on Sanders’s gun record, the one area where she’s clearly to his left, and has locked down nearly the entire Democratic establishment behind her campaign. Obama had much more establishment support, a much shorter record, and no such policy weaknesses in 2008.
Sanders is significantly to the left of Obama on many issues, and his embrace of the “Democratic socialist” title may give Democratic voters more pause about electability than the fresh-faced Illinois senator gave them eight years ago.
Obama was able to use his Iowa win to show black voters he was electable, and they flocked to him in record numbers, helping him win South Carolina and a number of other states. Clinton’s team thinks she has a much stronger appeal to African Americans than Sanders.
And Clinton has invested more heavily in her field operation — and made more trips to Iowa — after facing attacks that she dismissed the state eight years ago.
"I don’t think it feels anything like '08. The Clinton team was never really confident in Iowa. If anything it’s the opposite. People thought last time that Hillary didn’t take Iowa seriously," said Clinton ally Hilary Rosen.
How the Democratic race in Iowa has tightened over time in@bpolitics/@DMRegister pollhttps://t.co/HZuAlHq1KLpic.twitter.com/OSsCnTIYWm
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 14, 2016
But unlike in 2008, Clinton actually trails in New Hampshire polling with less than a month until the first-in-the-nation primary.
"While we know it’s going to go down to the wire in both places I think we’re confident in the ground game that we’ve built both in Iowa and New Hampshire," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said during a Wednesday conference call.
Clinton’s team is confident that even if she loses both states she can still win the nomination. But her allies admit her grip on Iowa is tenuous. And they're hoping history doesn't repeat itself.
"It is a true fight. Both have deep statewide organizations," said Brad Anderson, a top Obama Iowa veteran who’s now helping Clinton’s campaign. "I think it’s a coin-flip."
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COMMENTS
Hillary Clinton’s new barrage against Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential primary opponent she has all but ignored through most of her campaign, is having an effect — though probably not the one she intended.
Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.
In its email appeals for money, the campaign accused the Clinton campaign of making “vicious and coordinated attacks” on Sanders’s health-care plan, which calls for a government-run system. Sanders’s strategists are also considering rolling out advertising beyond the early-contest states where it is airing spots now.
The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways.
“Thanks, Team Clinton,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said Wednesday afternoon.
Hillary Clinton challenged Bernie Sanders's stance on gun control during a campaign event in Ames, Iowa, on Jan. 12. (Reuters)“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”
Sanders strategist Tad Devine said the campaign may go on the air with TV ads outside the three early-contest states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Sanders’s team now feels pressure to put out its own message across the map before Clinton has a chance to define it on her terms. “That is something we are considering as we speak,” Devine said.
A New York Times-CBS News survey released Tuesday showed Clinton leading Sanders by just seven percentage points, 48 percent to 41 percent, among Democratic primary voters. A month ago, that same poll showed her with a 20-point lead nationally.
Early Thursday, a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll showed the race in Iowa as statistically tied. Clinton had slipped nine percentage points from a month ago, and now led Sanders by 42 percent to 40 percent, with a 4.4 percent margin of error.
“I am not nervous at all,” Clinton said in an interview Wednesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “I’m excited about where we are.”
Her actions and those of her surrogates speak otherwise.
At the last Democratic debate in December, Clinton barely acknowledged that Sanders was on the stage with her, except when responding to his criticisms. Already sounding like a general-election candidate, Clinton trained nearly all her fire on GOP front-runner Donald Trump.
In more recent interviews, speeches and advertising, Clinton has become more vocal and blunt in her denunciations of her Democratic opponent, accusing him of buckling to the gun lobby and of putting forward naive and unrealistic proposals.
Clinton has also suggested that Sanders, a democratic socialist, is unelectable against whoever the Republicans end up nominating.
Even her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, got into the act, bashing Sanders during her first campaign appearance on behalf of her mother this election season.
“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea Clinton said at a stop in New Hampshire. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”
Her argument echoed what her mother has been saying. What neither mentions is that Sanders is proposing a single-payer system in which all health care would be financed through the government, as Medicare is now. Single-payer health care has long been a cherished hope of liberals, who see it as the only way to assure that all Americans receive medical coverage.
On Tuesday afternoon, Sanders’s campaign blasted out an email funding appeal: “We have made tremendous gains in Iowa, but if we lost because Hillary Clinton’s campaign scared voters into thinking Bernie’s plan would cost them their coverage, it could set our vision for universal health care back at least a generation. We simply cannot let that happen.”
Since he announced his candidacy last April, Sanders has been drawing huge crowds, sometimes on the scale of Trump’s. Over the course of the campaign, his fundraising has steadily grown, bringing him almost on par with Clinton in the final quarter of last year, when he reported average daily takes of $362,637.36 to her $406,593.41. Those numbers, by comparison, also show how significant the $1.4 million haul was this week.
The latest polling suggests that liberal support is not the only area where Clinton is struggling to beat back Sanders.
A new Quinnipiac University poll out of Iowa shows Sanders now holding a narrow, five-point edge, upending Clinton’s 11-point lead in the same survey last month. The biggest shifts were among moderates and conservative Democrats, voters with whom Clinton had run most strongly in December. Her 22-point lead with them last month shrank to two percentage points in the latest survey.
Among voters who said they are most concerned with the economy, Sanders held a 29-point lead, up from only three points last month.
For all of her formidable political assets — and the name recognition that comes with having been a first lady, a senator and the nation’s chief diplomat — Clinton is running in an environment when voters of both parties appear thirsty for change.
Sanders’s signature issues, reducing income inequality and reining in Wall Street, are in tune with the Democratic base.
“I think that Bernie is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real. And he has credibility on it. And that is the absolute, enormous concentration of wealth in a small group of people, with the middle class now being able to be shown being left out,” Vice President Biden said in an interview Tuesday on CNN. Biden added that “it’s relatively new for Hillary to talk about that. Hillary’s focus has been other things up to now. No one questions Bernie’s authenticity on those issues.”
Scott Clement and Matea Gold contributed to this report.
Comments.
Illustration on the Clinton’s imperiled political fortunes by Linas Garsys/The Washington Times more >Live by Bubba, die by Bubba.
Something has shifted when it comes to the treatment and perception of the Clintons, and it threatens their joint political ambitions like nothing before it.
For nearly a quarter of a century, the Clintons have been politically bulletproof. No charge, regardless of how salacious, illegal and true, seemed to stick. When they detected incoming fire, they activated their tried-and-true protocol: deny, stonewall, deflect and claim that the nation’s business was too important — they were too important — to respond: “I need to get back to work for the American people.” Exit left. Get protection from the leftist mainstream media.
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They were untouchable, having created a cult of personality rivaled (and surpassed) only by President Obama.
Until now.
And surprisingly, the issue that is currently unraveling their Wizard of Oz illusion isn’t the allegations of massive fraud at the Clinton Foundation or her mishandling of classified material on her private email server. (More on both fronts to come, courtesy of the FBI).
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No, the issue posing the greatest risk right now to a Clinton Restoration is the public’s voiding of the deal it made with the Clinton Devil in 1992.
The conventional wisdom has long been that Mr. Clinton’s lewd, abusive past is itself a thing of the past. His serial extramarital affairs, including the one with the barely legal intern, Monica Lewinsky, his textbook sexual harassment of subordinates like Paula Jones, his alleged assault of Kathleen Willey and the rape alleged by Juanita Broaddrick, were considered old news, episodes litigated in the court of public opinion and dismissed for three reasons: 1) His piggery was already widely known; 2) a strong economy absolved many of his sins; and 3) the public took cues from his wife. “Hey, if she’s OK with his piggery, who are we to judge?”
This cleverly constructed protective shield is now crumbling because Mrs. Clinton, after enlisting her husband on the campaign trail in a retread of 1992’s “two for the price of one” deal, is oblivious to the political ground shifting beneath her.
Republican candidate Donald Trump does not play by anybody else’s rules, least of all Clinton-enforced ones, but apparently no one has informed Mrs. Clinton. So she gleefully and blindly launched an attack on his “penchant for sexism.”
You could almost see Mr. Trump’s rhetorical gun turret turn slowly toward her before he opened fire. “Be careful,” he warned on Twitter. And then, on MSNBC, he blasted her husband as “one of the great women abusers of all time,” adding, “I think Hillary is an enabler.” He then released an Internet ad tying her to the sex scandals of her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (husband of her closest aide, Huma Abedin) and Bill Cosby.
He dared to go where no traditional politician would — hitting the Clintons’ grotesque hypocrisy — and made it acceptable to question both Clintons’ character and judgment on women’s issues. Suddenly, Mrs. Clinton — self-styled champion of women and girls — came under criticism, particularly from news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC and others that have long protected both Clintons.
Liberals are now far less inclined to defend them, perhaps because she is the candidate this time and he, the charming rogue, is not, or perhaps because the Democratic Party and the broader culture have changed. But the cosseting they once enjoyed and exploited is disappearing, and they are floundering without it.
Bill Clinton, a man never at a loss for words, was rendered speechless when asked by an ABC News reporter if his past were fair game. Later that same week, he dodged another reporter who asked him specifically about Mrs. Broaddrick’s charge of rape. Having never before had to account for his behavior, Mr. Clinton’s usual veneer of calculated unflappability dissolved.
Earlier, Mrs. Clinton tweeted a message about rape victims: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” Except, apparently, for those attacked by her husband. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire, an audience member reminded her of her tweet and asked, “Would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and/or Paula Jones?”
Stunned, she gave a mangled reply: “I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence.”
The Clintons are not used to this. Something has shifted. They don’t like it, and they sense they can no longer control it.
The Clintons thought the party would last forever. It took over 20 years, but it’s finally last call.
Mrs. Clinton’s wish for sexual assault victims to be heard and believed starts with her husband’s victims. And this time, they are getting far more support — and from unexpected quarters that once served as the Clintons’ political bodyguards.
As both Clintons may be slowly realizing, when the ground shifts beneath you, you are usually the last one to feel it. And by then, it’s too late to escape.
• Monica Crowley is editor of online opinion at The Washington Times.
