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ACKER/BLOOMBERG
anything like the runaway strength his backers
hoped for and his opponents feared. After spend-
ing $50 million in the last three months of the year,
it looks as though the Vermont senator will end up
drawing about half the level of support in Iowa that
he did four years ago. That means a lot of his 2016
followers switched their allegiance—hardly the stuff
of “revolution.”
Moderate and centrist voters may have it even
worse. While Biden’s strength in national polls has
been the one constant throughout the past year,
his poor caucus showing, scattershot organiz-
ing, and lackluster fundraising bring new doubts
about whether voters will ultimately decide that the
77-year-old former vice president has the stamina
to face off against Donald Trump. The map will
soon improve for Biden when Southern states start
voting, but he’ll have to stave off an exodus of sup-
port before then.
Sanders rose to the top of Iowa and New
Hampshire polls because he faced nothing like the
attacks on his policies that Biden—and Warren andButtigieg—have endured and suffered from. Now,
amid the cloud of confusion and recriminations
from the Iowa results, some Democrats say he may
escape that fate until it’s too late for centrists to stop
him. “Warren spent two months undergoing rigor-
ous scrutiny for [supporting] Bernie’s Medicare for
All policy, scrutiny that was never applied to him,”
says Brian Fallon, a former top Hillary Clinton aide
who’s neutral in the race. “It’s a symptom of the fail-
ure of D.C. Democrats to take his chances of win-
ning the nomination seriously enough.”
Sanders’s fundraising strength and passionate
base of supporters make him a serious contender,
even if it takes a little longer to secure the nomina-
tion. That’s left establishment Democrats struggling
to embrace the possibility of a socialist standard-
bearer. “Bernie would have a hard time winning
the election,” says former Pennsylvania Governor
Ed Rendell, a Biden supporter. “But if he wins the
nomination, I’d do the best I could for him. I’d be
all in for Bernie. It’s a wild thought.”
Could Buttigieg parlay his Iowa showing toIowa Made
▲ Boxes of voter
registration forms in a
Democratic Party office
in Des Moines◼ POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek February 10, 2020