The 2020 Iowa caucuses: A first-hand account Part II: The Candidates

DePauw University political science Professor Bruce Stinebrickner spent five days in Iowa recently, observing the Iowa caucases. In Part 1, published Wednesday, Feb. 11, Stinebrickner focused on the three caucuses he observed in person.

In Part 2, he will turn to his impression of the individual candidates whom he saw in Iowa.

Joe Biden

Very much on my mind when I observed Joe Biden in Iowa were his mental acuity and proneness to misstatements or gaffes. The first Biden appearance (estimated crowd: 400) that I saw occurred in a small public school gym, and the candidate used a teleprompter to deliver a reasonably good speech well. Then he very capably worked the rope line, chatting with people and posing for selfies with the likes of me.

I had a brief exchange with Biden, and I watched and listened to him interact with others as he worked the line. Even so, I wondered about his reliance on a teleprompter for a campaign speech of approximately 20 minutes.

Later that day I saw Biden again, this time in a large meeting room. Perhaps 100 of the estimated 280 people in attendance were sitting arrayed around him in a circle. After he had spoken for perhaps 10 minutes (this time witout a teleprompter), he began to take questions from literally all sides and handled them adeptly. His answers were responsive, sometimes quite crisp and sometimes quite impressive.

He occasionally linked his responses to questions with his replies to earlier questions: “In my earlier response to her question [pointing to the woman who had asked an earlier question], I said that . . . .” Biden’s question-and-answer segment lasted for perhaps a half-an-hour.

He got one somewhat aggressive (even hostile?) question about his views on the recently announced Trump “peace policy” for the Middle East, and he responded quite effectively, I think. The candidate forcefully expressed his strong and unwavering support for Israel (“I’m a gigantic supporter of Israel and I have been my whole life.”), but also declared in no uncertain terms that “there is no answer other than a two-state solution.”

My overall conclusion about this second Biden appearance: In a challenging “in the round” Q-and-A setting, Biden performed well, significantly exceeding what I had expected in terms of intellectual agility and articulateness.

On late Super Bowl Sunday afternoon I attended a third Biden event, this one a “rally” in a rather large public school basketball gym. This was the only stand-alone candidate event that overlapped with the game. Several candidates were scheduled to attend Super Bowl “watch parties,” but the Biden campaign apparently decided that there were enough folks willing to forego the opening quarter or two of the Super Bowl to make a rally worthwhile.

The gym’s bleachers were filled, and I stood just inside an entrance crowded together with some of the estimated crowd of 1,000, all of us trying to see and hear Biden and various preceding speakers who were standing on a make-shift stage close to the middle of the court. Biden offered thank-yous to a number of attending dignitaries who were supporting him (a half-dozen or more leading Iowa politicians; former Senator, Democratic presidential candidate, and Secretary of State John Kerry of Massachusetts; etc.), referring to notes to make sure that he didn’t overlook anyone.

Then he energetically launched into a “let’s go out and win this thing” exhortation that had the crowd cheering and applauding, just as he intended. “I am running to save the soul of the nation,” he declared forcefully.

In sum, 77-year-old candidate Joe Biden’s energy, mental acuity and speaking ability exceeded my (somewhat low, to be sure) expectations by a good margin. I have not, however, altogether forgotten his use of a teleprompter at that first appearance. In my five days in Iowa, I saw no other candidate use a teleprompter or even refer to any extent to notes while speaking.

Pete Buttigieg

I had been impressed by what I seen and heard in Pete Buttigieg during the televised debates, televised town halls and interviews and the like. He seemed smart, exceedingly articulate, knowledgeable and energetic. His youthful energy provided a useful measuring stick for his major opponents, a majority of whom are in their 70s, with two, Biden and Sanders, in their late 70s. I expected Mayor Pete to continue to impress me during my first-hand observations in Iowa.

I saw Buttigieg in two appearances on Jan. 30. Both were standard campaign appearances, with the candidate giving a 15-to-20-minute opening presentation, taking questions from the audience for another 20 minutes or so and then making himself available to the crowd for handshakes, brief exchanges and selfies.

Buttigieg displayed the strong, clear and articulate speaking style that was familiar from seeing him on television. He seemed knowledgeable and judicious in presenting and defending his policy stances and what he would do as “President Buttigieg.” He worked in brief mentions of his being a married gay man without belaboring the matter and noted that his military and mayoral experience in Afghanistan and in South Bend, respectively, would hold him in good stead when he occupied the Oval Office.

He emphasized how important it was to beat President Trump and included an appropriate number of critical comments about Trump that brought cheers, applause and sometimes laughter from the audience.

I came away somewhat disappointed by what I saw of Mayor Pete. For one thing, his two performances were remarkably similar, almost to the point of being carbon copies of one another. On a couple of occasions, it seemed that he was determined to work in a favorite anecdote (along the lines of “That reminds me of when I met a young woman on the campaign trail in _ here in Iowa and she told me that . . . .” ) even if it didn’t seem relevant to the question being asked. He came across as too programmed for my tastes.

One dimension of candidates that is mostly supposition on my part is what I have come to call the “next-door neighbor” criterion: How would the candidate likely be as a next-door neighbor? How likable is the candidate on a personal level, as best you can tell from what you observe on the campaign trail? Sometimes my instinct is to say “yes, s/he would be a good and likable next-door neighbor.” Sometimes my instinct is the opposite. Sometimes I conclude that I just don’t know.

Everyone, of course, is entitled to an opinion of what makes for a good next-door neighbor. In my view, Biden would be a good next-door neighbor — friendly, accommodating, good with your kids or grandkids, etc.

Buttigieg struck me as probably less than that. Yes, Mayor Pete would probably be interesting to talk with about all sorts of issues. And, yes, he is smart and articulate and has some interesting background (son of Notre Dame English professor who immigrated to the U.S. from Malta, military experience, former Rhodes Scholar, former mayor of South Bend, surprisingly successful presidential candidate at a young age, etc.) But, for all that, he didn’t easily pass my admittedly less than rigorous next-door neighbor test.

Another observer whom I had met in Iowa this year and with whom I sometimes discussed the candidates may have put his finger on something relevant. “Maybe,” my acquaintance said, “Buttigieg’s the kind of guy whom you invite to your house along with other high school (or college) classmates for a casual get-together during the summer. But instead of joining in with you and your other classmates, he spends most of the time talking earnestly with your parents or other parents in attendance in what seems like an effort to impress them.”

Bernie Sanders

Like the other candidates who were U.S. senators, Sanders’s Iowa schedule was hamstrung by the Senate impeachment trial. In 2016 I had seen two Sanders appearances in Iowa and talked with him briefly. In 2020 I saw him deliver one speech on Feb. 1 at Simpson College, which is about 20 miles south of Des Moines.

Sanders was preceded by two members of the U.S. House of Representatives (one was Rep. Ilhan Omar of Michigan) and Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife. The three warm-up speeches were good and effectively delivered, and I briefly wondered how effective Sanders himself would seem after them. (I clearly remember a Ted Cruz campaign event in 2016 in which no fewer than four very good speakers preceded Cruz. I thought that my assessment of candidate Cruz’s effectiveness as a speaker at the time — make no mistake about it: Ted Cruz is a very good public speaker—was perhaps affected by the very high quality of the warm-up speakers.)

Candidate Sanders came vigorously onto the stage to a rousing welcome from the enthusiastic and near-capacity crowd of about 350 people, introduced his son and two grandkids (who then left the stage), and delivered an absolutely first-rate speech. No notes, no teleprompter, no podium; only a hand-held microphone. Sanders moved effectively around the stage; gestured appropriately with his free hand; spoke clearly, articulately and forcefully; and delivered a coherent, thematic, integrated speech in which his well-known “democratic socialist” policy positions were convincingly embedded.

I have seen good, very good and absolutely superb speeches by presidential candidates in Iowa over the years, and this speech by Sanders came very close to meeting the extremely high bar set by what I consider to be the two all-time stand-out performances by Barack Obama and Marco Rubio that I heard in 2008 (Des Moines) and 2016 (Ames), respectively.

I knew that Sanders was no slouch as a public speaker, but this speech was unequivocally a gem. I continue to marvel that the 78-year-old Bernie Sanders, notwithstanding his heart attack last fall, is so articulate, so mentally agile and so energetic, displaying no signs of the age-associated decline that some observers have associated with Joe Biden.

Elizabeth Warren

I arrived a bit too late to get into a scheduled appearance by candidate Elizabeth Warren in late morning on the day before the caucuses, but the overflow of people (perhaps 150 or 200?) was directed to a nearby lobby on the Simpson College campus.

Sitting in the lobby, I was irritated that the Warren campaign folks had not gotten a bigger room, not least because I knew that bigger venues were empty and presumably available in the very same Simpson College building. As I was busily trying to revise my own schedule for the day to accommodate a later scheduled Warren appearance in Ames, the candidate suddenly appeared in the lobby to speak to us overflow folks. She began by saying this: “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that so many people came to hear me speak today that the room was filled to capacity. The bad news is that you folks were not able to get in.”

The crowd laughed at this opening line, and I felt my own irritation melting. Her short address in the lobby was energetic, focused and engaging. She took a few questions and then literally bounded off the make-shift platform to highly enthusiastic applause and cheering.

At Iowa State University in Ames a few hours later, I saw Warren’s performance in full. As had been reported in the press a few months ago, her new-look Iowa campaign appearance consisted of a pared-down opening speech and more time for questions from the audience. She gave a forceful, energetic speech that was noteworthy for its coherent theme to which she connected her positions in a number of policy areas.

Her theme in the speech was money and its corrupting influence in American government. She explicitly related her positions on health care, mortgage foreclosures, homelessness, Wall Street, government regulations, climate change and foreign policy to money, lobbyists and their corrupting influence.

I regularly take handwritten notes when listening to candidates speak, and taking notes at Warren’s event was easy because of her speech’s unifying theme and focus. Maybe this particular attribute of her talk is associated with her being a professor who, I have been told, delivers very good lectures to her law students. I think that some students routinely judge a classroom lecture as “good” if they can easily and effectively summarize it in their notes. Perhaps I should hope that my own lectures as a DePauw professor lend themselves to easy note-taking to the extent that Warren’s campaign speech did for me.

Candidate Warren took a lot of questions and handled them well, regularly linking her answers to her overarching theme of the corrupting influence of money in politics. She now and then interjected brief family stories during her speech and subsequent Q-and-A, generally to good effect.

Warren is a candidate who has been reported as saying that she likes doing selfies and always tries to accommodate every single person who wants to take a selfie with her. Yet on the day I heard Warren speak, she announced — reluctantly, she said — that she would not be available for selfies because the impeachment trial had wrought havoc with her Iowa campaign schedule and she had to rush on to another engagement. However, she said, the family dog Bailey (mentioned a number of times in her 2014 autobiography, which I have read) would be available for selfies outside the building after her appearance. This seemed a nice and disarming touch. Warren also tried to show her human side, I think, by telling the audience where Bailey liked to be scratched and rubbed and urged those getting selfies with him to use that information to good advantage. As already mentioned above, I availed myself of the opportunity for a selfie with Bailey, but I did not implement Warren’s rubbing/scratching tips.

Overall, Warren met, but probably did not exceed, my high pre-Iowa expectations for her as a campaigner — energetic, articulate, smart, knowledgeable, passionate and focused. Her attention to economic pressures on middle-class Americans (in particular bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures) corresponds with what I gather is her major focus as a law academic — bankruptcy law, regulation of mortgages and other lending, and so forth. She played a major role in establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama administration in 2010.

Amy Klobuchar

I went to Iowa with quite well-formed views about candidate Klobuchar: earnest, experienced, proud of her long years of government service in her home state of Minnesota and in the U.S. Senate, and believing that her Midwestern roots, moderate policy positions and electoral history (polling well in her 2018 Senate re-election even in areas in her state where presidential candidate Donald Trump had done well in 2016) would hold her in good stead versus the incumbent president.

All that being said, I did not expect Klobuchar to be a standout orator on the campaign trail. And one more thing: I sensed that Klobuchar would easily pass my “next-door neighbor” test.

I attended a standing-room-only appearance by Klobuchar on a public school basketball court in Des Moines on the evening of Feb. 1. Iowa seems to have lots of indoor basketball courts and many candidates seemed to make use of them in 2020. Fortunately, I got a seat. (Yes, I get tired when standing and waiting for an hour or more before a candidate finally appears. Moreover, I find it difficult to take good notes while standing in a tightly packed crowd.)

I found myself sitting next to a couple (in their 60s?) from Minnesota who said that they had known Klobuchar personally for more than 30 years and liked her a great deal. These Klobuchar friends’ testimony about what a nice person Klobuchar is and the way the candidate introduced family members on the stage worked to reinforce my inclinations about Klobuchar and my good neighbor criterion. At a caucus night Klobuchar “party” at a downtown Des Moines hotel, besides having a brief exchange with the candidate about the Senate impeachment trial, I met and talked with Klobuchar’s daughter, who is in her mid-20s, for about 10 minutes. That conversation also served to reinforce my views about her mother and my good neighbor test.

The Klobuchar crowd at her basketball court event seemed very loud and enthusiastic — to be sure, crowds at most candidate appearances seem enthusiastic or even wildly enthusiastic about the candidate who is appearing — and her post-speech selfie/brief chat interactions with members of the crowd seemed fine.

But what struck me most about Klobuchar’s event was how her speech contrasted with Warren’s (and Sanders’s and even Biden’s) speeches that I had heard: It was difficult to take coherent notes from it. There was no consistent substantive theme or focus that I could detect; there was little, if any, obvious progression from policy topic to topic. (She did repeat several times that she could win in November because of her Midwestern roots, her doing well in 2018 with Minnesota voters who had supported Trump in 2016 and her record of “getting things done” in the Senate.) Maybe the absence of a substantive theme or focus in a candidate’s stock campaign speech in the larger context of a candidate trying to win votes and support from the audience does not matter. Maybe it does not reflect on how Klobuchar might perform as president. But maybe it does.

As I have suggested, I went to Iowa with modest expectations and a modest assessment of Klobuchar on several dimensions. I left Iowa with those expectations and assessment essentially undisturbed.

Andrew Yang

I had often been impressed by Yang’s comments in televised debates — relevant, often persuasive or at least thought-provoking and sometimes presenting interesting quantitative data, which seemed appropriate for the self-proclaimed “math guy.” (A good number of the 65 or so audience members at the Yang event that I attended were wearing baseball caps with “Math” in big letters on the front and Yang’s name in smaller letters elsewhere on the caps. Such caps were for sale at the event, along with the usual T-shirts, etc.) Since Yang did not participate in the January televised debate, and, even when on the stage in earlier debates, seldom got much time from debate moderators, I looked forward to getting a more extended look at him in Iowa.

With the clear exception of Republican candidate Joe Walsh (see below) and maybe Tom Steyer, no candidate departed further from my pre-Iowa expectations than Andrew Yang. At the campaign appearance that I attended, he gave an introductory speech that was “OK,” but it did not seem to measure up to the often relevant pithiness and thought-provoking nature of his debate performances. He threw out a lot of figures, both in his talk and in his responses to questions, sometimes, but not always, making interesting and thought-provoking connections with them. He emphasized his view that Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of the dire state of the American political system and the United States more generally.

The “math and numbers” guy said that he wanted to “distribute the swamp” by moving national government jobs to Michigan, Iowa and other states. In that context, he twice emphatically asserted that Washington, D.C. was the most expensive metropolitan area in which to live in the U.S. In turn, he said, we should rely less on the decision-making prowess of those who govern the country from the nation’s capital because their judgment is warped by the wealth necessary to reside in the D.C. area.

I am hardly an expert on the cost of living in metropolitan areas across the United States, but I immediately thought that his assertion about D.C. was wrong. Yes, I thought, the cost of living in D.C. far exceeds the cost of living in Greencastle, Ind., but it doesn’t exceed or match the cost of living in San Francisco or New York. I have since looked up a number of rankings of cost of living in major metropolitan areas in the United States and they have confirmed my on-the-spot doubts about Yang’s assertion. Washington, D.C., may well be in the top 10 most expensive major metropolitan areas, but I have found no ranking that put it first. And yes, I was right: San Francisco and New York are regularly ranked as more expensive cities in which to live than Washington, D.C.

Perhaps I am making too much of Yang’s twice-repeated Washington, D.C. mistake and maybe I shouldn’t expect an obviously bright numbers guy to give an altogether coherent, thematic, substantive speech relating to his candidacy for the presidency. But . . . .

Tom Steyer

Here is a thumbnail sketch of what I knew about Tom Steyer before I went to Iowa: He had made billions as a businessman and had in recent years begun to work on and fund progressive causes; he was a mostly ignored participant in the televised debates and when he did speak he talked in fairly understated ways about climate change, corporate greed and beating Donald Trump; his number one policy issue is climate change; he has had no government experience; he was running for president and somehow had managed to continue to participate in debates as the criteria for inclusion got tougher, yet polls showed that he trailed far, far behind the major contenders and calling him even a long-shot for the Democratic nomination seemed an exaggeration.

I saw, heard and talked with Steyer at two campaign appearances, although both were relatively short ones.

In person, Steyer seemed bright, articulate, focused, decisive, forceful and personable. One of the events at which I saw him speak was a union caucus in the Des Moines area. (While his meeting with unionists was not open to the public, the candidate did a meet-and-greet in the restaurant in which the meeting room was located and I fortunately managed to gain entry into the union caucus meeting room.) In response to questions from the union members concerning the minimum wage, recent tax legislation that privileged the wealthy, etc., Steyer sounded like we might have expected Bernie Sanders to sound — forceful, passionate, unyielding, fiercely critical of corporate greed, strongly for the downtrodden working people of America. It’s understandable that the union setting might lead a progressive candidate to be even more outspoken on such issues. After all, are not most of us human beings, perhaps especially those running for office, inclined to tell people what they want to hear?

Later I saw and heard Steyer at a canvas launch at his Des Moines campaign headquarters on Caucus Day, with most of the canvassers seeming to be high school- or college-age individuals. His interactions with these young folks seemed warm and effective. He joked with them by asking why they were not in class on a Monday morning, and got laughs in response. After the canvassers left to do their Caucus Day work, he took questions from assembled media people and handled them well, especially given that the pointed premise of several questions seemed to be that candidate Steyer didn’t have any chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

I myself had a few minutes of exchanges with Steyer, and, more than any other candidate with whom I spoke (as I reported earlier, I did not speak with Sanders and Warren), he engaged with me directly in what seemed a candid and serious way.

One remarkable thing about Steyer was the speed with which he seemed to be able to change gears. He could quickly go from engagingly chatting with a 10-year-old, to listening intently and responding to an aide whispering in his ear on some apparently serious and time-sensitive manner, to conversing with and taking selfies with college students who had come to Iowa from Massachusetts with a couple of their Emerson College professors in connection with their studies, to responding to my saying to him how surprising it is that he is the only remaining Democratic candidate who clearly identifies climate change as his number one priority. His brief response to my point went something like this: “Yes, me too. I am especially surprised by Elizabeth and Bernie. For Elizabeth, it’s not even her number 2 issue. For Bernie . . . .” Right then a Steyer aide interrupted us and I never got to hear what the candidate was going to say to me about Sanders and climate change.

I liked Steyer, but I didn’t get a clear enough sense of how he would do on my next-door neighbor test. A senior staffer volunteered to me that one of the reasons that she had taken a leave of absence from her regular job back in New England to work for Steyer, inconvenient as that was for her, was that he was such an absolutely extraordinarily nice human being.

Steyer was probably the Democratic candidate for whom my Iowa experiences led to the biggest upgrade in my assessment of him. He seemed genuine, forceful, smart and articulate, as well as clearly being a focused and energetic, perhaps even “driven,” individual.

See Friday’s Banner Graphic for Stinebrickner’s concluding comments about his visits with republican candidates Joe Welsh and Bill Weld and the process.