Senate Television via AP
Bernie Sanders signs the oath book after being sworn in for the impeachment trial of President Trump in the Senate, January 16, 2020.
The impeachment trial kicks off in the Senate today, and one thing you won’t be hearing is a single word from the 100 Senators who make up the jury. Each day, a Senate staffer will announce, “All persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.”
The silence extends to the campaign trail, too, at least for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet. Those four presidential candidates will be stuck in Washington six days a week throughout the trial, only available to jet out to Iowa or New Hampshire at night. In addition to losing out on retail politicking in two states where that’s presumed to matter, the candidates will miss the residual free media effect from holding rallies or events.
“I would rather be in Iowa today,” Sanders said bluntly last Thursday, after signing in as a juror in the impeachment trial. “But I swore a constitutional oath as a United States senator to do my job, and I’m here to do my job.” Sanders will try to campaign at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls on Wednesday night, but the rally won’t start until 8pm CT, and flying back and forth daily for one event, in addition to the toll that could take, pales in comparison to the blitzkrieg Pete Buttigieg is undertaking, with nine events in a 36-hour stretch. (UPDATE: Given Mitch McConnell's rules for the trial, which will likely extend deep into Wednesday night, Sanders's presence at that rally is unlikely.)
But for Sanders in particular, this relative blackout in the early states could become an important lesson. It’s an opportunity for him to test out his people-powered campaign, whose slogan is “Not Me. Us.” The paucity of events mirrors a general election setup, where campaigns in contested states must by default rely on organization rather than having the candidate shake every voter’s hand. And that fits with Sanders’s theory of the race, and the promise of his political revolution. It’s worth seeing whether that can translate into raw votes.
For his entire run, Sanders has made an argument that he alone is equipped to bring in new types of voters who have been frustrated by the political system, alienated from participating. Converting non-voters to voters would transform the electorate, opening up new possibilities for Democrats in places where they’ve had significant difficulty.
If Sanders is right about his campaign’s ability to turn out non-voters, that may well decide the race in Iowa, the key momentum-building state. The entire difference between the reputable Des Moines Register poll, which had Sanders ahead, and the later Monmouth College poll, which had Biden in front, is due to how many first-time caucus-goers the pollsters expect on February 3. The Register predicts nearly 30 percent of the attendees will be first-timers, while Monmouth puts that number at 17 percent. That discrepancy explains the different projections.
For reference, Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa in 2008, incredibly, featured 57 percent first-time caucus-goers. So upending the electorate, at least in the Hawkeye State, is certainly possible.
But a final sprint in Iowa in which the candidate can only do a small amount of campaigning actually simulates the general election environment. In the handful of swing states next fall, candidates cannot camp out and do five or six events a day, lest they neglect the other battlegrounds. The ground game, with volunteers knocking on doors and making phone calls, simply matters a bit more.
Every assessment of the race suggests that Sanders has the largest and most dedicated crew of volunteers. His campaign has the explicit goal of trying to build a new electorate, through techniques like relational organizing, where volunteers map and target lists of votes based on whether they personally know them. Sanders’s team reputedly has massive peer-to-peer lists of voters matched to friends and neighbors in Iowa. This could be a more accurate and, to the campaign. more persuadable list to encourage into the caucus. And the Sanders campaign claims to have enough volunteer support to extend that across the entire state.
Throughout the past year, Warren’s campaign has been admired for having the most sophisticated organization in Iowa. This generally refers to the operatives on her team who have had the most success at turning out voters to caucus. But organization and organizing only rhyme. Warren is making a bet on Iowa as it normally is; Sanders is trying to build something in Iowa as it could be.
Klobuchar, on the other hand, has been running the classic Iowa underdog campaign of personally meeting as many voters as possible. She’s done the full 99-county tour, and has modestly risen in the polls as a result. She appears to have the most to lose from being bolted to her Senate desk. Bennet isn’t really competing in Iowa (he’s competing somewhat in New Hampshire), and his poll numbers suggest his lack of relevance.
Of course, Sanders and Warren will have high-profile surrogates. Warren has dispatched Julián and Joaquin Castro for a two-day tour of western Iowa this week, and has other somewhat prominent figures like Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) and Iowa state senate Democratic leader Janet Petersen, a recent endorser. Sanders could deploy progressive stalwarts like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, recent endorsers Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, and of course, AOC.
Surrogates aside, however, it would be valuable to the party and to the Sanders movement to see if his big bet on mass organizing works out. If people power can demonstrably find non-voters and get them involved in the political process, then any standard of electability would have to place Sanders in front, especially given the handicap of not being able to do much late-stage retail politicking in a retail politics state. If it doesn’t work, or if it comes in under expectations, that’s also good information to have this early in the process.
While the idea of converting non-voters to voters is compelling, there’s not much historical evidence of it succeeding on a mass scale. Political realignments have a seductive power, as they open up limitless possibilities. If you’re going to change the electorate, you don’t have to worry about the normal political constraints. You can use your jumbo-sized ambitions as a draw to get voters off the sidelines. You can stare down obstacles in your path to democratic socialism. Reality may or may not intrude on these comforting thoughts.
But voter enthusiasm, by one measure, is trending as high as any election since 1900. The most respected poll in Iowa suggests that Sanders will bring in a new electorate. And in terms of small-dollar donations and volunteers, Sanders has no peer. Will it work? The whims of the impeachment calendar will allow us to find out.
