ANAMOSA, Iowa — The specter of the divisive Democratic battles of 2016 cast a shadow over the final days of the 2020 contest for Iowa, as several leading presidential candidates questioned the ability of Senator Bernie Sanders to unite the party as its nominee while the Sanders camp sparred with allies of Hillary Clinton, his rival in the race four years ago.
The negativity and doubts aimed at Mr. Sanders on Saturday reflected a widespread belief among the other Democratic campaigns that he has perhaps the most political momentum heading into Monday night’s caucuses, which he narrowly lost in 2016 to Mrs. Clinton. While the political jousting was not ferocious, it echoed private anxieties among some moderate party officials that an Iowa win could propel Mr. Sanders, a staunch liberal, to more primary season victories and make him harder to beat in the long run.
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The Sanders campaign was also facing some blowback on Saturday after one of its most high-profile supporters, Representative Rashida Tlaib, urged a crowd to boo Mrs. Clinton on Friday after she was critical of Mr. Sanders in a podcast. Ms. Tlaib apologized on Saturday, only to receive words of support from Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, who was then quickly called out by Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman.
Mr. Sanders made no mention of the rumpus during his campaign stops, largely sticking to his standard message and exuding confidence that he would have a strong caucus night. At times, he even seemed to be enjoying himself, sprinkling his remarks with wry jokes.
The rekindling of fights from 2016 — when many Sanders supporters were reluctant to unify around Mrs. Clinton, the party nominee — provided an opening for a line of attack on Saturday from Pete Buttigieg, one of the leading moderate opponents to Mr. Sanders.
“Reliving the 2016 primary, I did not much care for that experience the first time around, I definitely don’t want 2020 to resemble 2016 in any way,” Mr. Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., said while campaigning at an elementary school in Anamosa, a rural stop in eastern Iowa. “The best way to win is the best way to govern, to leave the politics of the past behind.”
Earlier, in Waterloo, Mr. Buttigieg questioned whether Mr. Sanders’s calls for a “political revolution” would lead to a winning coalition in November.
“Senator Sanders is offering an approach that suggests that it’s either revolution or it’s the status quo and there’s nothing in between,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “I’m here to remind us that we have an American majority, more than we have seen even 10 years ago when President Obama was making change, we have a bigger American majority today around what we are for than what we are against.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, returning to Iowa after a week attending the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, took an implicit jab at Mr. Sanders during an event in Cedar Rapids as she made the case that she could appeal to a broad range of voters.
“I’ve been building a campaign that’s not a campaign that’s narrow — that’s not a campaign that says it’s us and nobody else,” Ms. Warren told voters at an event in Cedar Rapids. “But a campaign that says come on in because we are all in this fight together.” Ms. Warren did not refer to Mr. Sanders by name, but her language echoed an ongoing Democratic line of attack about Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist, being an us vs. everyone else candidate.
In another attempt to project unity, Ms. Warren hailed candidates who had left the race, and said she was proud that some of their staff members had decided to join her campaign. Ms. Warren’s internal numbers, according to a person familiar with the data, show that half of her 2020 support comes from people who caucused for Mr. Sanders in 2016, and the other half comes from people who caucused for Mrs. Clinton.
Similarly, Senator Amy Klobuchar knocked Mr. Sanders’s plan for “Medicare for all” within minutes of returning to the campaign trail after being tethered to Washington for impeachment. Though she too did not mention Mr. Sanders by name, Ms. Klobuchar pointed to the Affordable Care Act as a way to rebuild the “blue wall” of Midwest states that she said would bring Democrats victory in 2020.
“I don’t think we should be blowing it up,” she said of the A.C.A., in front of a crowd of roughly 500 in Bettendorf. “I think we should be making it better.”
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden took swipes at both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Buttigieg as he spoke to an undecided voter, Jaimee Warbasse, at an event in Cedar Rapids.
“Everything I say, I’ve done, and everything I talk about is authentic,” Mr. Biden told Ms. Warbasse. “Now, if you don’t like what I’m talking about, I understand. You can be for somebody else. But ask yourself, who is going to be able to unite the country? How can Pete do that? How can Bernie do that? And so ask yourself that question.”
Mr. Sanders seemed to take the jabs in stride on Saturday, focusing instead on making the case for his own electability against Mr. Trump.
At a stop in Indianola, he presented his most forceful argument yet, saying would beat Mr. Trump because he would excite voters, speak to the working class and expose Mr. Trump’s populist “hypocrisy.”
“I believe very strongly — and no disrespect to my Democratic colleagues who are competing for the nomination, they are friends of mine — but I believe that we are the strongest campaign to defeat Trump, and I’ll tell you why,” he said, vowing to express himself “bluntly.”
Later, at a stop in Iowa City, he suggested that he would run a stronger kind of general election campaign than his rivals.
“I honestly do not believe that a traditional same old, same old type of campaign is going to generate the excitement and the energy that we need to bring new voters into the process,” Mr. Sanders said.
An ongoing back-and-forth over the 2016 presidential race has been one of the side narratives unfolding in recent days, with a particular focus on the lack of Democratic unity that followed the fierce primary battle between Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton has recently belittled Mr. Sanders, saying “nobody likes him,” and on Friday she was sharply critical of how his 2016 campaign and supporters did not unite strongly around her after she won the nomination.
Hours after The Times reported Mrs. Clinton’s latest remarks, a crowd of Sanders supporters booed at the mention of Mrs. Clinton’s name at a campaign event, and Ms. Tlaib at one point encouraged them to keep booing. On Saturday, she wrote on Twitter, “I allowed my disappointment with Secretary Clinton’s latest comments about Senator Sanders and his supporters to get the best of me. You all, my sisters-in-service on stage, and our movement deserve better. I will continue to strive to come from a place of love and not react in the same way of those who are against what we are building in this country.”
But Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, tweeted out support for Ms. Tlaib, writing “you’re all good” and “don’t change,” which drew a retort from the Clinton spokesman, Nick Merrill.
“Unbelievable,” Mr. Merrill wrote. “If Sanders got the nomination, he’d need the same 66 million votes. His campaign may not know that that’s how you beat Trump, but voters do.”
With polls showing a highly competitive Iowa race, no Democrat has shown an effective way to take on Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator who is now in his second presidential run and is leading in some recent Iowa polls. Sanders aides view any clash with Mrs. Clinton as an opportunity to rally supporters, who bristle at any reminder of the 2016 campaign and who view her as the embodiment of the establishment they despise.
Sydney Ember reported from Indianola, Grinnell and Iowa City; Reid J. Epstein from Waterloo and Anamosa; and Katie Glueck from North Liberty and Cedar Rapids. Astead W. Herndon contributed reporting from Cedar Rapids and Nick Corasaniti from Bettendorf.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
