03 February 2020 - The 2020 Democratic race in Iowa
Iowa Democratic caucuses 2020: when do they start, how do they work and why are they important?
Rozina Sabur (The Telegraph, 02/02/2020)
As the first state to vote, Iowa holds a special place in the 2020 US election.
The candidate who wins Iowa, and even a non-winner who performs better than expected, enjoys a burst of momentum as they head to the next states to vote.
Barack Obama's unexpected win in Iowa against Hillary Clinton in 2008 is widely credited with giving him the national attention which propelled him to win the Democratic nomination. Winning Iowa does not guarantee a candidate will become the party's nominee, however. Ted Cruz won the Republican caucus in Iowa in 2016, but ultimately lost the nomination to Donald Trump.
Can Democrats Beat Trump in Iowa in November?
Trip Gabriel and Jeremy W. Peters (The New York Times, 03/02/2020)
For a full year, Democrats owned the Iowa spotlight as presidential candidates logged thousands of visits, spent tens of millions on TV and digital ads, and boasted of rallies that drew, on some of their best days, 1,000 ardent supporters hoping to defeat President Trump.
Then on Thursday, Mr. Trump dropped in for two and a half hours and attracted more than 7,000 fans at a rally where he predicted that Iowa would deliver for him again in November — and warned what would happen if it did not.
“We’re going to win the great state of Iowa, and it’s going to be a historic landslide,” Mr. Trump declared. “And if we don’t win, your farms are going to hell.”
Candidates power to end of Iowa campaign with competing visions of unity and electability
Chelsea Janes, Annie Linskey, Sean Sullivan and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (The Washington Post, 03/02/2020)
Making last-minute pleas to an electorate that has remained widely undecided, the presidential candidates powered toward the end of a year-long Iowa caucuses campaign by focusing Sunday on vows of electability and Democratic Party unity even as they offered sharply different visions of what that meant.
On the final full day of campaigning here before Monday night’s precinct caucuses, crowds overflowed school gymnasiums and campaign offices around the state as the candidates kept a brisk pace to make their final appeals. But it was also a day marked by upheaval and signs of discomfort among top party officials over whether Iowa’s vote will push the presidential race too far to the left.
The People Who Power the Presidential Campaigns in Iowa
Eric Lach (The New Yorker, 29/01/2020)
American political campaigns are embarked upon by politicians and staffed by professionals, but they achieve scale only with the help of volunteers. More than two dozen Democrats came to Iowa in the past year looking to gain supporters for Presidential bids. And, in a year when many voters hesitated to commit their support—many Iowans remain undecided even now, just days away from the state’s caucuses—almost all of these Democrats found people not just willing to support them but willing to give their time and effort to the cause. Volunteers do on their own everything that a campaign does in aggregate: they find people, they listen, they try to persuade. As our politics have become more national and our campaigns more expensive and technology-driven, the tasks of volunteers have remained remarkably consistent. Knock on one door, and then another. Make one call, and then another. Their work is intimate, humble, and hard.