AMES, Iowa—Bob Summerfelt dutifully sat through Hillary Clinton’s one-hour policy dissertation at a campus auditorium here, dutifully stuck the Hillary sticker (upside down) to his fleece, dutifully declared how phenomenally well-prepared she was, truly, for the presidency.
So would he caucus for her on February 1? The 80-year-old former Iowa State fish and wildlife professor, sheepishly dropped his gaze to his shoe tops. His wife, Deanne, who is all in for Hillary, rolled her eyes. “Actually, uh, I’m for Bernie,” he said.
“It’s a funny story,” he continued. “My 19-year-old grandson has come to live with us while he goes to school here. ... And we began talking about it, about economic inequality and all of that. ... I think Hillary is inevitable, and I’ll vote for her later, but my grandson really convinced me to vote for Sanders. So I’m going to carpool him and all his friends to the caucuses. Several carloads of them, I think.”
Over the past nine months, the Clinton team has recited their collective talking-point mantra that she was always expecting a tough fight here, no matter who her primary opponent was, and that she would earn every vote. But privately, they didn’t expect it to be nearly this close—and Clinton herself has scoffed at the idea that Democratic voters would ever really pick “a socialist” over someone so manifestly prepared to be president, according to people in her orbit.
After her humbling third-place finish behind Barack Obama and John Edwards in 2008, Hillary Clinton hit the caucus state this year with an eye on not just victory, but redemption, committing money, time and an immense ground operation in an effort not only to beat Sanders but vanquish the ghosts of ’08.
Instead, she has watched a sickening slow-motion sequel. Bernie Sanders is no Obama, the original anti-Hillary, but he’s pushing her to the edge. With only two weeks to go before the caucuses, Sanders pulled within 2 percentage points in the latest Des Moines Register poll released last week. The problem, according to interviews with two dozen Clinton insiders and Iowa operatives, isn’t with Clinton’s new and improved operation, but with a candidate hampered by her old, familiar limitations.
All the door-knocking, phone-banking, motivated volunteers (there really are hundreds of them) and pizza-fueled pep sessions at Clinton’s downtown Des Moines headquarters can’t alter an immutable fact about the woman at the center of it all: She isn’t an Iowa kind of candidate, never has been, and isn’t going to shape-shift into one by the end of the month. Part of it is Iowa, a state where roughly four in 10 Democrats self-identify as socialists. But the political MRI of the caucus has revealed that Hillary ’16 is essentially the same mixed-bag candidate she’s always been: amply informed but often uninspiring, more focused on the tactical task of fileting her opponent than the strategic imperative of delivering a succinct, appealing message—an establishment fixture in an era of populist statue-smashing.
“There are certain elements of Hillary Clinton that are just unfixable,” said one Democratic consultant who has worked with her on previous campaigns.
“Since 2008, Clinton’s people have been pretty smart about putting together a really first-rate organization,” says Jeff Link, a Des Moines-based consultant with close ties to former Sen. Tom Harkin, long the state’s dominant Democrat. “In the last eight years she gained all this experience at the State Department, which is great. But experience is not something voters are dying for right now.”
Still, Sanders has his own weaknesses—namely, a late-to-the-game field operation that is struggling mightily to harness his momentum into an effective organization. And it’s Sanders who has the most to lose: He has enough cash to campaign for months, but a Clinton win here could be a coup de grâce, nullifying his probable win in New Hampshire and giving her momentum heading into Nevada and South Carolina where she, not he, has an inherent advantage.
And Clinton remains a formidable front-runner who stands an even-odds chance of winning. Staffers say she is much more personally engaged in the details this time than in 2008, and over the past year has assembled the most formidable field and data-gathering organization on the ground here in all 99 counties—an organizing push overseen by a young operative who ran Obama’s Cedar Rapids operation eight years ago.
Even the selection of her top campaign brass back in Brooklyn reflects her focus on Iowa. Campaign manager Robby Mook has made it clear the bulk of the campaign’s resources, as well as the candidate’s time, would be deployed to the first four states, with a major focus here. In interviews, Mook—a highly skilled field organizer—often begs off questions about a general election strategy and dodges discussion of the big March states with an intense focus instead on the first four states, led by Iowa.
What’s left is a sprint on a flat track pitting Clinton’s army of organizers and data crunchers against Sanders’ free-jazz attempt to convert raw enthusiasm into caucus votes, and in a hurry.
“This isn’t 2008,” said one architect of Barack Obama’s groundbreaking strategy eight years ago. “But if you ask me which I’d take—a great organization or great voter enthusiasm—I’d take voter enthusiasm every single time.”
Momentum, for the moment, seems to be on Sanders’ side. At the Hamburg Inn restaurant in Iowa City (like Ames, another Sanders-friendly college town), a popular pit stop for politicians (Obama and Clinton regularly dropped in eight years ago to nibble on crinkle fries), customers are encouraged to drop a coffee bean in a row of jars labeled for each candidate. One Clinton volunteer who recently stopped by said she was dismayed to see the status of the jars. Hillary Clinton’s sat mostly empty. Sanders had received so many beans they’d had to put out a second jar. It was overflowing, too.
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For both Clintons, Iowa isn’t just a state, it’s a taunt. Bill Clinton never competed in the 1992 caucuses, ceding victory to native son Harkin, and he still wishes he’d given Harkin a challenge. A few years back, the hypercompetitive former president approached Harkin to tell him that not being able to run here “was just about the biggest regret in my political life,” according to a Democrat who witnessed the exchange.
For Hillary Clinton, never the type of retail politician her husband was, Iowa “is simply not a great fit,” in the words of one top adviser, speaking a few months ago. In Game Change, the candidate dramatically turned to her husband in the shabby presidential suite of the Hotel Forth Des Moines on that fateful caucus night to pronounce self-pityingly, “Maybe they just don’t like me.”
That wasn’t true. Iowa liked Hillary Clinton just fine—but not nearly as much as they loved Obama or even the as-yet-untainted John Edwards. Clinton spent $30 million in the state and won 70,000 votes, a blockbuster majority in any other year when the average caucus turnout would have been 120,000 or 130,000. Instead, the Obama ground operation helped jack the turnout up to an astonishing 240,000.
The Obama victory ranks among the biggest political coups in decades. His team, led by campaign manager David Plouffe and field-ops specialist Paul Tewes, threw all the campaign’s local resources into a risky Iowa-or-bust strategy. It centered on an “unusual suspects” approach—galvanizing participation among the tens of thousands of fired-up-ready-to-go young voters who had been thought too flaky and distracted to caucus—driven by a novel, hugely successful reading of how Iowa really works.
“The usual theory is that you just work the previous caucus-goer lists,” Tewes recalled. “This originates from the myth that caucus participation is a regular thing. It isn’t. Competitive caucuses happen once every four, eight, even 12 years, so it’s not like a regular pattern for people. You have to start with the destruction of that myth. The crowds we were getting were just unbelievable, so we had to figure out a way to turn them into caucusgoers.”
This time around, Clinton’s organizers (many of them Obama alums) have updated or adopted many of the data and organizing techniques used by Obama’s team. But for all the talk of lessons learned, she’s actually implementing a much older and more conventional pre-Obama strategy—harkening back to the 2000 and ’04 races—rooted in her appeal to a fixed group of older voters. The idea, people close to the campaign say, is less about generating buzz than securing Krazy Glue commitments from previous caucus-goers. To the extent that Clinton’s team, led by veteran Iowa operative Matt Paul, is seeking to expand the electorate, it’s by targeting the smaller universe of 20,000 or so committed Democrats who don’t usually caucus.
Several insiders told us Mook, who ran Clinton’s successful Nevada operation in 2008, has been closely overseeing day-to-day operations from the day he took the helm, coordinating with his friend and protégé Michael Halle, a highly regarded Obama 2008 veteran. Mook thought about tapping Halle as state director, two people close to the campaign told POLITICO, but the candidate valued Paul’s connections with state political and labor leaders, and Paul got the nod.
A loss here, Mook has told his staff, would force Clinton to pour resources into Super Tuesday states she hoped to win on the cheap. “Robby has a lot on the line here,” said a Clinton ally. “That kind of organizing is his bailiwick.”
This close involvement by her Brooklyn campaign brass may be the biggest difference between 2008 and 2016. During Clinton’s first tilt here, many in her camp urged her to skip the caucuses altogether (Several former staffers implicated chief strategist Mark Penn – even though he wasn’t on the internal distribution list for the memo) and the candidate’s head was never really in the game. In May 2007, someone leaked a memo from a deputy campaign manager urging Clinton to pull out of Iowa to downplay expectations and better focus on the voter-rich Super Tuesday states. What happened over the next few months was a blur of bad—Obama rocketing into rock-star status; a bitter Clinton battling the press and her own staff—culminating in the infamous decision to buy thousands of snow shovels to clear out voter driveways for a snowless caucus day and defeat.
Under Mook, the staff is better organized and less fractious. “I have a much better organization than I did back in 2008,” Clinton told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow earlier this month. “I have an organization that is a great mixture of people who worked for President Obama in 2008 and 2012, people who worked for me, people new to the process. I’ve got a lot of confidence in them, what they’re doing.”
That confidence isn’t without justification. Her team has been in place since March 2015—and they have executed their plan, even if the candidate hasn’t always executed hers. For reasons that aren’t clear, Clinton is doing fewer events here than in 2008—but they seem better geared to hammering home the point that she’s a humble Midwesterner asking ever-so-nicely for votes. Gone are the large, impersonal rallies that Iowa caucus-goers found distant and insulting eight years ago; gone is the “Hill-o-Copter” chopper she traveled in eight years back, and the 30,000-foot view it implied.
This time, Clinton is going for up close and personal. At her first campaign stop last year, she started out sitting around three folding tables with six community college students in a garage where they learned to fix cars. She nodded. She took notes on a yellow legal pad. She showed an uncanny ability to remember people’s names. She was really connecting. It was going to be different this time.
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Between April and November, Clinton’s ground organization dwarfed Sanders’, even as he began attracting the big crowds. At his early rallies in cities like Davenport, 2,000 people would leave feeling inspired, but the campaign had only two staffers on the ground in the spring and relied instead on volunteers trained just an hour before the event to help it capture the voters. And Clinton’s people noticed that at big events where both candidates appeared—like the Democratic Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids and the North Iowa Wing Ding in Clear Lake—they were collecting more commitment cards from their supporters than the Sanders people were hoovering up.
“When you have people come to an event in Iowa, you really need to contact them within 72 hours to get them engaged in the campaign,” said the former Obama Iowa organizer.
The tortoise hoped to outwork the hare: Clinton’s staff concedes their events are smaller, but everyone who enters her rallies is asked to sign in at the door—and the campaign almost always follows up. Sanders estimates he’s spoken to 40,000 Iowans since launching his campaign here—but and it’s not clear whether he’s establishing caucus-night commitments from them. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, is efficient, metrics-obsessed: Over the past two weekends, for instance, it has sent hundreds of volunteers on sub-zero door-knocking runs—and 80 percent have showed up, an unusually high percentage, according to a campaign official.
David Axelrod, who helped create Obama’s blockbuster hope-and-change message eight years ago, says Clinton, for all of her obsession with “tactics,” still has an advantage over Sanders: “Message and enthusiasm alone isn’t enough, especially in Iowa,” he added. “We built the best organization that state has ever seen. Without it, we wouldn't have won.”
But it’s not just about showing up. Passion is the fuel that runs the turnout machine. In Waterloo last week, Hillary Clinton stood before an audience of about 350 people—average age 60-plus—at a dance hall just up the road from a big John Deere plant. The polite, mostly female crowd was excited to see her, but Clinton’s performance didn’t quite match the venue’s name—the Electric Park Ballroom.
Clinton’s demeanor varies widely from event to event, and here she seemed less interested in reading the room than delivering a rambling, State-of-the-Unionesque list of achingly specific policy proposals on everything from taxes to autism to green energy research. She was there to deliver a new proposal meant to outflank Sanders on income inequality—a 4 percent tax on taxpayers who earn more than $5 million per year—but it was buried in a pile of other ideas, and too complicated to capture the imagination of an audience that came to life when she finally began talking about her little granddaughter Charlotte.
As part of her lessons-learned campaign, Clinton now pulls out a handwritten piece of paper at every rally to read out the names of local volunteers and organizers by name—a practice Obama (who often had their names memorized) enshrined in 2008. Later, we asked one of the people Clinton mentioned onstage, a veteran Democratic field operative tasked with securing the coin-of-the-realm commitment cards from supporters, what message was connecting. It contradicted Clinton’s laundry-list approach.
“You stand there and tell them all about the details of her college plan and you just see their eyes go,” he said, rolling his for emphasis. “They are worried about the economy, it’s getting better, but they are still not doing that well. What they want to talk about is pretty straightforward—the minimum wage and income inequality, that sort of thing.”
Clinton has always suffered from a kind of political multiple personality disorder—and her message remains every bit as muddled as it was in 2008. “[Obama] had a clear message of generational change and we, well, we were talking about experience and competence and whatever the hell else we were talking about,” one Clinton 2008 veteran told us. “It seems like the same thing is happening again this time.”
To halt Sanders’ momentum, she is forced to attack. (The Clintons, one person who is close to both told us, have been the most enthusiastic proponents of slamming Sanders hard all last week.) But that creates a self-perpetuating cycle, defining Clinton as a cynical politician while buttressing Sanders’ brand as a joyous populist warrior.
Even Clinton loyalists aren’t quite buying the bad-Bernie routine. “There’s something very cute about Bernie,” said Clinton stalwart Bonnie Campbell, a former state attorney general. “He can get this mischievous look on his face ... you just want to smooth his hair out and calm down his hands.”
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But it’s the clarity of his message, not appearance, that’s brought him from 50 points down in national polls to par in Iowa. He’d never spent much time in the state before this campaign, but he’s turned out to be heartland natural—Brooklyn Socialist plus rural Vermont somehow adds up to Iowa Democrat in 2016.
Last week, at Pleasantville High School, about 45 minutes outside Des Moines, Sanders turned his stump speech into an interactive, Dead Poets’ Society-style, government class.
Another advantage for Sanders—one people who haven’t visited his events don’t see—is his freedom: He doesn’t inhabit the same security bubble that traps Clinton behind a wall of security and staff.
Unlike Clinton events, there was no security check-in, and no long, fidgety wait with Katy Perry and Jennifer Lopez hits blasting over the sound system, no organizers killing time for her arrival on the mic waiting for the candidate to arrive. He is obsessed with punctuality and arrived on time to deliver his message on a bare stage. Standing in front of an auditorium filled with about 500 people, he roamed freely across the stage in his ill-fitting suit, like he was delivering a Bernie TED talk—a shtick he perfected back in Vermont.
“Income and wealth inequality,” he launched in, “you all know what I mean by that? If I am a high school graduate, and I’m going out looking for work, tell me about that experience. Anyone want to talk to me about that?”
Next, he pressed the students to explain how politicians fund their campaigns. “They get the money by succumbing to corporate interests,” volunteered a student named Max.
“I agree with Max!” Sanders thundered—and the crowd roared.
Sanders, whose unkempt appearance belies iron discipline as a politician, has gained strength because of his strict adherence to his core message that—like his baggy suits—don’t need to be tailored to fit a new crowd. But in his events on Monday, he focused on issues students care about—tuition-free college, raising the minimum wage, equal pay, immigration, guns and weed.
“What should we do with marijuana? Give me some ideas.” The crowd giggled. “Make it legal!” someone yelled out, as he smiled. The exchange wasn’t especially memorable—but it underscored the easy, unspoken bond a politician who’s really connecting has with his supporters.
Afterward, there was no rope line, no crush for selfies. He simply left with his wife Jane, escorted by a few staffers, and forgot to even tell the crowd to get out and caucus on February 1.
That’s not so good—because Sanders needs big caucus turnout to win. Nobody knows how many people will show up (the weather plays a major role, hence the bulk snow shovel buy) but in a dozen interviews with Democratic leaders in the state the estimate were a good-but-not-crazy 140,000 to 160,000. Those aren’t Obama numbers, but like Obama, Sanders is expanding the electorate here, particularly among the 18- to 35-year-olds.
Speaking to reporters last week in Pleasantville, Sanders conceded that pulling off an Obama-style victory is a long shot. “I don't know that we can do as well as Barack Obama did in 2008,” he said.
When it comes to organization, Sanders’ campaign has been late to the party and flying by the seat of the candidate’s wrinkled pants. State coordinator Pete D’Alessandro—former Iowa Gov. Chet Culver’s political director—was Sanders’ first hire here, and joined the campaign on May 29, but things got off to a slow start. That late May weekend, Sanders was planning to barnstorm the state with three large rallies—he had no one to help him hand out caucus cards or gather people’s information for follow up, the exercise was essentially useless from an organizing standpoint.
“He was coming in with nothing but volunteers,” D’Alessandro recalled.
Now, with plenty of money (Sanders raised an eye-popping $33 million in the fourth quarter of 2015) to hire a real team, D’Alessandro has quickly built up the organization to 101 paid staffers in Iowa. And, despite Clinton’s strength with blacks and Hispanics nationally, Sanders—from snow-white Vermont—is hoping to attract the small but significant pool of young minority voters. In 2007, the League of United Latin American Citizens—a local advocacy group—identified 23,000 Latino voters in Iowa. In the intervening nine years, according to the group’s national vice president, Joe Henry, that number has swelled to 49,000. “A lot of young people seem to be going with Bernie,” Henry said. “If you’re looking at a campaign that works on regular caucus goers, clearly it’s Hillary Clinton, who is doing the traditional approach. Who is best organized, in terms of an Obama-style grass-roots campaign? It’s Bernie Sanders.”
Moreover, Sanders is intent on out-hustling Clinton, who has abandoned the five-event-a-day approach she fruitlessly adopted eight years ago. Last Monday, he held three events across the state ahead of a Democratic forum here, while Clinton held just one. In December, Sanders held 22 events in the state, compared to Clinton’s 10. And this month, so far, Clinton has held 16 events compared to 19 for Sanders, according to the Des Moines Register’s candidate tracker.
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It’s a long-forgotten fact, but Clinton finally did find her voice late in the 2008 Iowa campaign and carried her working-class-warrior message to New Hampshire where she scored a major upset. There are hints of a reprise. Clinton events tend to draw a higher percentage of undecided voters than Sanders rallies, her staff says, but in Waterloo, roughly half the attendees cheerfully filled out commitment cards after the event and many offered to volunteer. “I want to see a woman president in my lifetime,” said 85-year-old Marlee Ryan, a retired board of education employee. “If we had a woman president, trust me, we wouldn’t have a lot of this bullcrap.”
And day after that muddled performance, Clinton—speaking at Iowa State University in Ames—was in sharper mid-’08 form, lashing Sanders for voting against a bill that would have allowed victims of gun violence to sue manufacturers for damages. (He reversed his position a couple of days later.)
The audience of around 400—which had braved cloudless 1-degree temperatures and a biting westerly wind—seemed genuinely energized and rushed out to the lobby to sign their pledge cards. But this was a Clinton rally, and this was Iowa, so the sunny day wasn’t entirely without shadow.
To ensure that college students were represented among Clinton’s AARP faithful, the organizers offered last-minute tickets to three classes in the school—including a batch to Sarah Vance’s ballroom dancing class. When the instructor announced the opportunity, one kid booed and shouted “I don’t like Hillary!” and all but 10 of 30 students wandered off.
“It was rude and stupid,” the 22-year-old senior from Davenport said. “I mean why would anyone skip the chance to see someone who might be the first woman president of the United States?”
But would she caucus for Clinton? “I’m definitely thinking about it!” she said.