DES MOINES — Four candidates were stuck in Washington, embroiled in the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. Another, Joe Biden, delivered a speech that mentioned Trump an average of once every 17 seconds. Pete Buttigieg traveled to counties Trump won in 2016, trying to showcase his ability to win over the president's supporters.
That’s making this a highly unusual lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. With four candidates detained by the trial, several are relying heavily on allies or surrogates — and in the case of Sen. Elizabeth Warren , also her dog — to fill in on the campaign trail. Downtown Des Moines, normally a hive of activity in the days before the caucuses, was notably quiet Thursday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders , after weeks of attacking Biden as insufficiently supportive of Social Security, “I hear Vice President Biden saying that this is no time to take a risk on someone new,” Buttigieg said during a morning stop in Decorah, Iowa. “But history has shown us that the biggest risk we could take with a very important election coming up is to look to the same Washington playbook and recycle the same arguments and expect that to work against a president like Donald Trump, who is new in kind.
When asked about Sanders’s record of opposing some gun-control legislation earlier in his career, Biden said Sanders has “made his verbal amends for his record on guns . . . I think he means it.”The day also presented a jarring visual representation of the Democrats’ challenge. Trump drew a passionate, raucous crowd of supporters that none of the candidates running against him has been able to match.
Biden said in his speech Thursday that he successfully campaigned on behalf of other Democrats across the nation in the last midterm elections.