Fight to be the pick of the Democratic Party

A year out from the US election, a strong Democratic contender has yet to emerge.

Democratic presidential candidate and former US vice-president Joe Biden. Picture: Getty Images

Before a Democratic fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa, last weekend, Joe Biden’s campaign workers were handing out free tickets in a bid to fill the hall with supporters for his run for the party’s presidential nomination.

In the end, hundreds of seats — which had been pre-purchased by the Biden campaign — were left empty. Outside the hall, aides ­quietly gathered up Biden 2020 signs that had been earmarked for large crowds that never arrived.

It was a small moment in a long campaign, but it highlighted that the race to win the Democratic presidential nomination is not what it once was.

This week US voters began the one-year countdown to the ­November 3 ballot to decide who will preside in the Oval Office. The Democratic contenders are already locked in a fast-changing race along an unpredictable course. Biden, long-time frontrunner and former US vice-president, is losing steam while others around him are rising and even more are falling behind.

As Biden slumped, Democrat house Speaker Nancy Pelosi sounded a pointed warning to the more left-leaning contenders who are filling the void. Their health and tax plans may appeal to liberal elites but won’t win over the traditionally Democratic voters who shifted to become part of President Donald Trump’s base in his ­stunning 2016 election win over Hillary Clinton.

“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said last week. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing ­prosperity.”

GRAPHIC: The Democrat race

Year of division

The building political clash — dramatically fuelled by the House of Representatives’ impeachment ­inquiry into Trump — appears to virtually guarantee another year of sharp division in a nation long weary of such drama.

Polls suggest the country could not be much more divided.

The latest projection from a University of Virginia political science team points to a dead-even 2020 race, with each party leading in states totalling 248 electoral college votes, 22 short of the 270 needed for victory.

The division is reflected in the house, where the vote last week to formalise the impeachment inquiry passed almost entirely on party lines — more partisan than any of the three previous impeachment votes in US history.

The most stunning illustration of the uncertainty is a New York Times/Siena College poll, which places Biden in fourth place in Iowa — the critical state because it kicks off the Democratic presidential primaries on February 3.

Sitting above Biden (who polled 17 per cent) is left-wing populist Elizabeth Warren on 22 per cent, socialist Bernie Sanders on 19 per cent and the fast-­rising Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, on 18 per cent.

On a national basis, the picture for Biden looks a little better. A Washington Post-ABC poll last week finds Biden leading on 28 per cent support, followed by Warren on 23 per cent, Sanders on 17 per cent and Buttigieg on 9 per cent.

Then the field falls away dramatically, with five candidates locked on only 2 per cent — ­Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. Behind this group are the final eight Democratic candidates — such as Julian Castro and Tom Steyer — who received between zero and 1 per cent, giving them no hope of the nomination.

Buttigieg fills void

The biggest story behind these new polls is the changing momentum. Biden, a clear leader in Iowa and nationally for all of this year, is struggling, especially in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where bad losses could doom his campaign.

At the same time, a rival moderate has emerged in Buttigieg — ­almost four decades younger than Biden — who possess all of the charisma and eloquence on the stump that the former vice-president lacks. At the Democratic Party fundraiser in Iowa last weekend, it was Buttigieg’s speech, not Biden’s, that drew thunderous ­applause.

“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Butti­gieg told the crowd.

“I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”

It was a direct generational ­attack by Buttigieg, 37, against his three septuagenarian rivals, the 76-year-old Biden, 78-year-old Sanders and 70-year-old Warren.

Buttigieg is a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar and a former military officer who served in ­Afghanistan. He is openly gay and has no legislative experience ­beyond being mayor of the 100,000-strong city of South Bend. He has campaigned on the idea of generational change and has presented a policy agenda which, while still progressive, is more moderate than the agenda proposed by Sanders and Warren.

On the key issue of healthcare, for example, Buttigieg supports a major expansion of Medicare but, unlike Warren and Sanders, he does not propose to abolish all private health insurance, insisting that Americans should have choice. Buttigieg says he would ­increase the defence budget rather than cut it; would cancel some, but not all, student debt; and would increase taxes on the wealthy but not to the same extent as Warren and Sanders.

In short, Buttigieg is playing in a similar policy space to his fellow moderate Biden and it is no coincidence that Buttigieg’s rise in the polls in Iowa has come at Biden’s expense.

For a growing number of Democrats, Buttigieg offers the formula they have been looking for. He is young, charismatic, articulate and presents a less extreme policy agenda, which might have a ­greater chance of flipping Trump voters in his native mid-west.

But he is inexperienced, having never run anything larger than South Bend. Buttigieg also polls poorly among African-Americans, a crucial group of voters for any ­aspiring president.

Above all, there is the question of whether Americans are willing to vote a gay man into the White House.

The contrast between But­tigieg’s momentum and Biden’s struggles is stark.

Biden has not committed any major gaffes of late, although his campaign is littered almost daily with minor slips of the tongue. But his campaign has no fizz or excitement. Biden’s core campaign promise is that he would not be Trump and that he would ­return the country and its politics to ­normality.

Warren took aim at Biden’s pitch last weekend, saying only big ideas would deliver the White House to the Democrats.

“Complacency does not win elections,” she said. “Hope and courage do not win elections.

“I’m not running some consultant-driven campaign with some vague ideas that are designed not to ­offend anyone.

“We need big ideas, and here’s the critical part: we need to be willing to fight for them.”

Iowa looming

Ann Selzer, who runs the well-known Iowa Poll, says the fall in support for Biden in the state is ominous. “You might expect that a frontrunner is going to lose some ground as other candidates ­become more visible,” she told ­Politico. “It’s not just that there’s not enough numbers to go around, it’s that he is not wearing well. It’s the trend. It’s the decline.”

Biden, who enjoys strong support among African-Americans, has never polled well in Iowa, a state where 90 per cent of voters are white. During his 2008 presidential bid, Biden won less than 1 per cent of the vote at the Iowa caucus and pulled out of the race that night.

Although Warren is still behind Biden at a national level, her ­momentum suggests she is the one to beat for the nomination.

Nationally, Warren’s support has almost doubled from 12 per cent in July to 23 per cent.

Reince Priebus, former White House chief of staff and former chairman of the Republican ­National Committee, says the Democratic base does not want a “return to normal” candidate to take on Trump.

“If you ask Elizabeth Warren ‘What do you think people want to hear in the Democrat Party?’ she’ll tell you ‘They want to fight, fight, fight’,” he said on Steve Bannon’s radio show War Room: Impeachment. “So it’s the opposite of what the mainstream media will tell you. People want more blood on the floor, not less.”

Warren, who Priebus says would easily be defeated by Trump because of her radical policies, is increasingly being attacked by her Democrat rivals.

Warren targeted

Biden and Buttigieg, in particular, have stepped up their attacks on Warren’s most ambitious and controversial proposal — a sweeping “Medicare for all” government-run health program that ends all private insurance, covers all Americans and would cost an eye-popping $US20.5 trillion ($28.9 trillion).

Warren finally released her costings for the program last weekend, saying it would be paid for by huge tax increases on business and wealthy Americans.

She argues that she could pay for her proposal without increasing taxes on the middle class — a claim Biden, Buttigieg and even Sanders, who proposes a similar scheme, say is impossible.

“The mathematical gymnastics in this plan are all geared towards hiding a simple truth from voters: it’s impossible to pay for Medicare for all without middle-class tax ­increases,” the Biden campaign said in a statement.

The changing poll numbers show the Democrat race is becoming more fluid, with only three months until the Iowa caucus, but the top four of Warren, Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg have broken from the pack and it will take a huge effort for others to catch up.

Culling to come

A major culling of the 17 Democrat candidates still in the race is likely next month when most of them fail to qualify for the nationally tele­vised December debate.

Nine have qualified for this month’s debate, but for the next month the Democratic National Committee has lifted the threshold, requiring candidates to have 4 per cent approval rating in select­ed polls (up from 3 per cent) and more than 200,000 unique ­donors. So far, only five of the candidates — Biden, Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg and Harris — have met the criteria.

Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke withdrew from the race last weekend, in part because he knew he would not qualify for the December debate.

O’Rourke began his campaign in a blaze of publicity by jumping on tables in Iowa and giving ­Kennedy-like orations while telling Vanity Fair magazine: “Man, I’m just born to be in it.”

But he fizzled out as he jumped from issue to issue, unable to ­articulate what he stood for.

Up to a dozen more may be joining him before voters cast their first ballots in Iowa.

The impeachment saga will starve any struggling Democrat of oxygen. It also means less attention on the party’s top issues, ­including healthcare, gun control and immigration reform.

“I do think that, in the short run, impeachment will dominate Washington and political news ­reporting” and “will hurt candidates trying to crash into the top tier”, says Chris Arterton, an emeritus professor of political science at George Washington University.

Arterton says Pelosi and other house Democrats are determined to deal with the impeachment quickly so progressive candidates can focus on the election.

“By February, when the presidential campaign really starts … I believe that the 2020 campaign will come to dominate the news,” he says.

In the meantime, less well-known candidates “won’t get the news coverage they might otherwise be able to garner”.

Additional reporting: Agencies

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.