Elizabeth Warren has now spent fifty-six days in Iowa, where her campaign has held more than a hundred events and spent around five million dollars on political advertising. Her operation, as the Washington Post recently reported, is widely regarded as the best in the state. With a hundred and fifty staff members in twenty-six field offices, it is considerably larger and better organized than the campaigns of either of her chief rivals, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. On Saturday, the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper, awarded her its endorsement, saying that she “is not the radical some perceive her to be,” and that “she cares about people, and will use her seemingly endless energy and passion to fight for them.”
None of this, however, seems to be translating into broader support: Biden and Sanders, in a handful of recent polls, appear in a two-way race to win the Democratic caucuses in the state, with Warren lagging farther and farther behind. Despite being ideologically closest to Sanders, Warren is no longer competing for the most progressive pool of voters. Instead, she is now trying to pick up the voters—perhaps some three-quarters of expected caucus-goers—who haven’t already enlisted in the Vermont Senator’s revolution. With less than a week to go before caucus night, Warren is making the case to Iowa’s moderates that she’s a better option than Biden.
At Warren’s events in Iowa this past weekend, a number of voters raised the question of “electability.” “If it wasn’t an electability issue, I would definitely be for Elizabeth Warren,” Jessica Paige, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at the University of Iowa, told me. “That consideration, you know, makes me feel bad. But the current situation is so bad.” Some wondered whether Warren’s message would be too progressive for swing-state voters in November; others seemed to believe that Biden, with his experience and name recognition, was best positioned to win the election. “She’s so honest. She’s so committed. She’s got such incredible convictions, and so much energy and enthusiasm that I’m really leaning towards her right now,” Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, a professor of art at Augustana College, said of Warren. “My worry is that they’re going to try to call her a socialist—her and Bernie both—and my worry is that Trump is just so crazy to have to run against. He’s not going to play fair. How is she going to hold up?” Schussheim-Anderson is still deciding, mainly between Warren and Amy Klobuchar. “Biden’s in there a little bit,” she added, “because I think he’s seeming to be the most electable. And I want to have someone win.”
None of the voters I met in Iowa expressed doubt that a woman could win the Presidency, but Warren seemed to sense that this was an underlying concern. In response to a voter who asked why caucus-goers should support Warren “and not Bernie Sanders or any of the other Democratic candidates,” Warren said, “I just want to be clear: Women win.”
Warren is not so much campaigning as counselling at this point, making an emotional appeal to voters to put their faith in her. According to the Washington Post, a half hour or so before her most recent town halls, Warren has been holding private discussions with “carefully selected voters, from those who are wavering to potential endorsers.” These sessions, which the campaign calls “clutches,” provide an opportunity for Warren to personally address any looming concerns, but it also sounds a bit like group therapy. At the event in Davenport, Warren’s golden retriever, Bailey, who has a luxuriant coat and the easy temper of a service dog, had his own selfie line. “It’s not a competition,” Warren told the crowd. “If it were, I might lose.”
She is also adding notes of moderation to her stump speech. The primary focus is now not on her most ambitious proposals but on what she would actually do, as President, in her first days in office. Universal health care has become using executive power to defend the Affordable Care Act and lower the cost of prescription drugs. Paying off the student loans of forty-three million Americans might be the ultimate goal, but the first order of business is appointing “a Secretary of Education who believes in public education.” The country needs to end its dependence on fossil fuels—but, for now, any new projects in housing, transportation, and electricity should be “zero carbon footprint” by 2030. “I start with things we can agree on,” she told the crowd inside a freshly parqueted gymnasium, at Sudlow Intermediate School, in Davenport, “and I start by treating everyone with respect.”
Iowans famously take their decision-making process extremely seriously, and expect the candidates to do the same. Jessalyn Holdcraft, a marketing professional in Cedar Rapids, who caucused for Hillary Clinton in 2016, developed a spreadsheet to help make her decision. It’s a complicated algorithm that factors in the results of an online quiz, an inspirational score, positions on key issues—“reproductive rights, funding Planned Parenthood, repealing the Hyde Amendment, and post-secondary educational paths”—and each candidate’s answer to the question: “In your first hundred days in the Oval Office, what would you do to support women?” She has personally asked this of each remaining candidate, except Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick. Based on the data, Holdcraft is most likely to caucus for Warren. But, with Klobuchar currently in second on the spreadsheet, she’s not ready to commit. “I like to say that there’s a difference between uncommitted and undecided,” she told me.
Many of Warren’s strongest supporters charted a deeply personal path to her campaign. In July, Pamela Portland moved to Davenport from Ansbach, Germany, where she was a director of public affairs for the U.S. Army, beginning in 2016. After Trump took office, she noticed that the work environment within the military started to change. “People who had to behave all of a sudden did not behave,” she told me. She retired this summer to return to her home state and become involved in the caucus. “Best decision I ever made,” she said. “I didn’t know it was going to be for Elizabeth. But I knew I was going to caucus.” Portland, who wore sleek frameless glasses, a black puffy vest, and a bright pink cashmere scarf, had enlisted in her twenties, and gone to nearby Grinnell College in her thirties, receiving a B.A. in European history. In Warren, who left George Washington University to marry her first husband, and stayed at home with her daughter before going to law school, Portland saw a kindred spirit. “I read her book,” Portland said. “I understood the struggle that she went through.”
Warren’s final event this weekend was at the NewBo City Market, in Cedar Rapids, an upscale food court that was designed to resemble a converted corrugated feedlot, with venders selling greeting cards and chocolate, barbecue, Indian food, and wood-fired pizzas. On Sunday evening, the line to see Warren wrapped around the building, in subfreezing temperatures. Nine hundred people, most of them forced to stand, were in attendance, according to the campaign. Jonathan Van Ness, the grooming expert on the Netflix series, “Queer Eye,” introduced Warren over the first ascending chords of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” Warren, whose political gifts are undeniable, was at her most animated, waving her hand above her head and darting out to the edge of the stage. The applause lines—“I believe in science”—went over big; the crowd was intermittently raucous and rapt. During the question-and-answer segment, a middle-aged man named Rich, who had come up from Kansas City with his wife, mentioned a friend who wouldn’t support Warren and Sanders because he thought they were both socialists. “We want to win,” Rich said. “So how do you convince those white men over fifty that Elizabeth Warren’s the candidate?”
Afterward, Gary Lapsey, who retired after working in a hospital in Cedar Rapids, sat at the bar of NewBo Beer and Wine. He was waiting for his daughter, who was visiting from Oregon and was in the Warren selfie line. Lapsey, who is sixty-eight, has stark white hair, and wore wire-framed glasses and a crisp, orange plaid collared shirt. As he gazed into a plastic cup of draft beer, he told me that he would vote for either Biden or Warren. “I just can’t decide,” he said. He likes Biden because “he’s got a lot of the black vote down south. I don’t think you’re going to win without that.” His impression of Warren, though, is slightly more positive. “I think she’s sincere, and intelligent,” he said. “I don’t know—she kind of convinced me tonight.” But the stakes of the general election were weighing on him. “It’s just made me kind of uneasy,” he said. “I want somebody to win more than anything in the world. And I’m afraid I’ll pick the wrong one.”
