Elise Amendola/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks outside the statehouse, October 30, 2019, in Concord, New Hampshire.
Suddenly, Mayor Pete has overcome his woes back home in South Bend, where he was bogged down dealing with a police killing of a black citizen. What was going to be a three-way race is now shaping up as a four-way, with Buttigieg in the coveted position of underdog with momentum.
The latest New York Times/Siena poll shows something close to a four-way tie among likely Democratic voters in the February 3 Iowa caucuses: Warren leading at 22, Sanders at 19, Buttigieg at 18, and Biden at 17.
Mayor Pete is personable, smart, has a terrific resume, seems commonsensical, and is a compelling retail politician. He is also fuzzy on the issues and is raising a ton of money from Wall Street, as understudy to a fading Joe Biden. Wall Street just loves to go left on identity politics as camouflage for fierce resistance to any effort to rein in its predatory business model.
Warren, meanwhile, has been a media punching bag on Medicare for All, while candidates with incremental (and ultimately more costly) paths to universal health coverage have gotten a free pass. Warren, who takes her policy seriously, made a rare tactical misstep when she addressed Medicare for All with all the complexity that the subject warrants.
Her plan is actually terrific. That will win her entry to policy heaven, but on the campaign trail it is too complex for talking points, and all that remain are a few top-line messages. It costs upward of $20 trillion, and lots of people will lose their current (crappy but never mind) private insurance.
While Warren has kept gaining in national polls, that latest Times poll showed her struggling in key Midwestern battleground states. Biden and Sanders both outperform Warren in matchups against Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Warren’s supporters say she has plenty of time to recoup. Biden is doing well with the African American vote, but Warren is also well regarded. As black voters become more conversant with Biden’s actual positions on everything from school integration to long prison sentences for minor offenders, Warren stands to gain.
There is also the tricky competition for the role of progressive leader between Sanders and Warren. If one were to drop out in favor of the other, a strong majority of the Democratic base favors a progressive. But if both stay in, they divide the progressive vote.
For Warren, who has gradually edged into front-runner status from way back in the pack, the improbable danger is that she may have peaked a little too soon. Iowa is famous for turning underdogs into giant killers, and timing is everything.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter, whose national name recognition was just 4 percent when the election year began, came from behind to win the Iowa caucuses, and suddenly he had the magic of momentum. In 2004, John Kerry, favorite of the pundits who still questioned whether he could deliver as a politician, quieted the doubters by winning Iowa, beating insurgents Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean as well as also-ran John Edwards. In 2008, outsider Barack Obama established himself by beating then front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Iowa, along with New Hampshire, takes on far greater importance than it deserves, because politics is such an expectations game, and nothing succeeds like success. In Iowa, dark-horse candidates can upset front-runners, a story that then feeds on itself.
The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith observed the pattern in several species, from gorillas to cuttlefish, of two alpha males battling to mate with a female. While they are battling, a smaller beta male sneaks in and gets the girl. Smith gave this successful, surreptitious smaller male the vulgar term the “sneaky fu*ker.”
This colorful phrase is now a standard term in evolutionary biology. You could look it up.
The winner in Iowa is often the sneaky fu*ker. We’ll see whether that describes Mayor Pete.
If Buttigieg wins the Democratic nomination, he will be the fifth Democratic president or candidate in a row (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton) to offer sensible moderation on pocketbook issues combined with left stances on cultural issues, when the times call for radical, Rooseveltian economic change.
