The NPR Politics Podcast - Buttigieg And Sanders Locked In Tight Race After Partial Iowa Results Released

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., is neck and neck with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, according to a partial release of results from the state Democratic Party. Even without final totals out of Iowa, candidates are looking towards New Hampshire where the first primary will be held in just one week. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Juana Summers, and senior editor and political correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Ashton Trimble from DeWitt, Iowa. This is Naomi and Ryan calling from our first Iowa caucus in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Hi, this is Terry in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, getting ready to go to our caucus date night. I'm headed into caucus for the very first time. This podcast was recorded at 6.01 p.m. on Tuesday, the 4th of February. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, like who has won the Iowa caucuses. Okay, here's the show. Ooh, little did that listener know how much things would change. Wow. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Juana Summers. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And this is the podcast that we thought we would be doing late last night, but it is now six o'clock on Tuesday and we have some results. We have results from the Iowa caucuses with about 62 percent of precincts reporting. Yeah, real votes, if you can believe that. After this long delay. Finally, we have some real numbers. And what we have so far with 62% of the precincts reporting,

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, narrowly ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Buttigieg has 27% of the estimated delegates. Sanders follows him with 25 percent. Then Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, further back with 18 percent in third place. Then Joe Biden, the former vice president, at 16 percent. Really not a great showing for him. And you see Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar right on Biden's heels with 13%. And then behind her comes Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer, who are in the low single digits and fractions of digits. That's right. And they had, you know, look, Yang had a lot of energy at a lot of his events. But if you can't make viability in these places, if you can't get 15%, then those delegates wind up going to others. So this was a failure of semi-catastrophic proportions.

Semi. Okay. Fully, completely. Well, it would have been worse. It would have been far more catastrophic had there not been paper backups. Because this app that the Democratic Party was using for the first time and really wasn't battle tested, you know, failed last night. And luckily for the party, for the first time this year, they used paper ballots to back up everything. And especially considering

the 2016 election and all the potential conspiracy theory stuff that came out of that and how Sanders supporters felt like the Clinton campaign and the establishment Democratic Party was rigging the system against them. It's a good thing that they had those backups. Troy Price is the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. He held a press conference this afternoon and essentially fell on his sword. The bottom line is that we hit a stumbling block on the back end of the reporting of the data. But the one thing I want you to know, we know this data is accurate. And we also have a paper trail and documentation that have been able to use to provide information to help verify the results. So Juana, you are in New Hampshire, which is the

next state up. How is this playing there in New Hampshire? You're waiting to hear from Bernie Sanders, right? Yeah, that's right. He is expected to speak later this hour in Milford, New Hampshire. It is his first event since arriving here in the state from Iowa. He flew in today. A number of other folks flew in last in the wee early hours of the morning. What I'm hearing a lot from New Hampshire voters is a lot of pride in their state's primary. I talked to a couple of voters at an Elizabeth Warren event earlier today, and they told me their state's not going to screw it up. They feel pride in their first in the nation status. It's something that the state, as our friends at New Hampshire Public Radio have reported, has clung to and has by law wants to keep. And they feel like this means that New Hampshire is truly the start of the process.

I also heard some concerns about the fact that because this data is rolling out in kind of part and parcel, They're worried about not really getting a full picture sometime soon. And there's a there's a chance some voters say that we might might not know for a couple days who actually is the winner from Iowa and gets all of the momentum that comes along with it. But if it takes several days, is there still momentum? I mean, it's like a tree falls in the forest kind of a question. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, if you think about transport yourself back to last night and imagine us telling you that Pete Buttigieg is leading in Iowa and that Bernie Sanders is very close with him and the two of them are vying for first place, certainly far separation of seven points separation between Buttigieg and Sanders together and Elizabeth Warren, they are separated from the field. That would be a big story. We'd be talking about Pete Buttigieg's

potential upswing with donors and fundraising and what is happening with Joe Biden's campaign finishing in fourth place. Can he sustain what the stakes then become for South Carolina? All that stuff is still true. But you have to feel for people like Sanders and Buttigieg, who really could have had a moment last night to propel themselves on to these next few states. Can we talk about Vice President Biden, who by the early reported numbers, you know, still 62 percent of precincts reporting, but he's in fourth place and it's not close. And, you know, the cliche is that there are three tickets out of Iowa. Obviously, he made his way out of Iowa and he is campaigning in New Hampshire and then on to South Carolina and Nevada. But is there something about this result that pierces his shield of electability? I think it pierces his shield of inevitability when it comes to this nomination. You know, there's no excuse for the performance that he had. And frankly, following him around on the campaign trail, a lot of us were looking at each other saying, what is he

talking about? You know, on paper, there were a lot of people I talked to who said they liked Biden, they were thinking about him. They wanted to vote for him. And then they saw him in person and they said, you know, maybe I'll go for Amy Klobuchar. Maybe I'll go for Pete Buttigieg. And that's what happened. That opening happened and they went elsewhere. Just to play devil's advocate for a second, something that I've heard from Biden campaign

surrogates and his supporters is that, you know, this is a long race. Iowa and New Hampshire are not the totality of the primary calendar. They are also states that I feel obligated to note are not necessarily representative of the country in terms of their demographics, not necessarily representative of the party in their demographics. And so I think you'll start to hear Biden campaign folks make that argument that, look, this is certainly not the day that they wanted in Iowa, but there is a long primary ahead. And when the primary calendar turns south and we head to some of those more diverse states, Joe Biden has a firewall with African-American voters. Now it remains to be seen

if there's anything with that changes, given the results that we're starting to see in Iowa, that they will make the argument that he has the ability still to go the distance. And in fact, Simone Sanders, who is a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, made that very point on all things considered today. You don't get the full depth and breadth of anyone's strength or the lack thereof with just the Iowa results or just the New Hampshire results, frankly. Since 1992, the Democratic nominee, no Democratic nominee has been the nominee without a substantial amount of votes from the African-American community. We don't get that coming out of Iowa or New Hampshire. And that interview was before the results came out. But I don't think that the Biden campaign's pitch on this is changing particularly.

No, and Juana's 100% right. I mean, look, I was 91%, 93% white in some of the estimates in the entrance polls. You know, that's not representative of the country. It's not representative of the party. And Joe Biden has certainly had tremendous strength within the African-American community. But I think the stakes now have been raised a lot in South Carolina. He's going to have to win by a substantial margin. He can't win by five or six points in South Carolina and have some other candidate who may have peeled off some of that vote with the black community and still think that he can run the table in the South and get enough delegates to be a strong nominee going into the convention. All right, we have to take a quick break. But when we get back, we're going to dig a little deeper into these Iowa results. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Google. From Connecticut to

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Roy Wood Jr. on his long path to comedic success. Next time on It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we're back. And the results that we've gotten out of Iowa are incomplete at this point. 62% of precincts reporting. So what are we missing? Is it possible that things could change? Yeah, things could change? Cedar Rapids in the east, Lynn County has almost all their votes in, but probably about three quarters. And there's some other scattered places. But, you know, the fact is here, both Sanders and Buttigieg are doing about the same in both of those places. Maybe Sanders a first place finish. You're looking at something that's essentially, you know, for all intents and purposes, a tie with one candidate, you know, edging out the other at the end of the day.

So, Juana, as we said, you are outside of a Bernie Sanders event in New Hampshire. What are you seeing in the Iowa results about sort of where Sanders and Buttigieg, like where their strengths are? Sure. So one of the things we're seeing is that Buttigieg seems to have done quite well broadly across the state, including both suburban areas, rural areas. And Bernie Sanders showed strength in urban areas and college towns. That tracks pretty similar to what we see in polls from him in other states and what we would expect from looking at the results from when he ran for president in 2016. Now, we haven't heard much from Bernie Sanders himself about this. The campaign hasn't been talking a lot about these Iowa results so far. Obviously, they're just starting to come in. We are now hearing from Jeff Weaver, who is one of Bernie Sanders' senior advisors, that he put out a

statement thanking the people of Iowa, saying that they're gratified with the partial data release, and that it's clear in the first and second round, more people voted for Bernie than any other candidate in the field. So hopefully we'll hear more from Bernie Sanders soon, but pretty measured statement from the Sanders campaign so far. Now, Domenico, is that an allusion to, you know, when we were headed into the Iowa caucuses, we talked about how there could be like three different data sets that are released. And that's part of what caused everything to get mucked up and confused. But is this Sanders campaign emphasizing one part of the data release over another?

I think what they're pointing out is that, you know, it's all basically a jumble when it comes to these three data sets that were put forward. So for example, on the first round of alignment, Sanders was narrowly ahead. On the second round of alignment, you saw Sanders still with a little bit of a lead. Sometimes you saw Buttigieg in parts of the data, taking a lead in different parts of the state, very, very, very close. And then suddenly, when you switch over to the delegate estimate, that's where Buttigieg really does well. And suddenly that flipped. And I think that what that tells you is that their delegate game was really good. And when Juana mentions that Buttigieg was strong across the state broadly in some of these

rural areas and smaller precincts, those are places where you kind of get an extra delegate because it's proportional. And if you do better than that other person and there's not that many people and not that many delegates, you're going to get an outsized number of delegates. And that's exactly how Barack Obama won Iowa in 2008 against Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and won the entire primary campaign, by the way, the nomination, because they really knew where the delegates were. And the Buttigieg campaign appears to have replicated that. Yeah, that sort of broad map where you have wins in all parts of the state is rewarded in the delegate count. And that's the game. When we talk about what is the winner, these campaigns, that's what they

spend all this money and organization on as a show of force in Iowa to say that they replicate, look at how great my organization is across the rest of the country and to tell donors, look, we're really good at this. We can beat someone like Donald Trump. And that's what this is supposed to be, a microcosm of just how good your organization can be. One other thing that I was noticing just here on the ground earlier in the day, I was out in Keene, New Hampshire with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and she was asked what she thought about the Iowa Democratic Party's plan to release partial results or what they had at the time. And you heard some frustration from her. She said,

I think they need to get it together. I think they need to release all of the data. She's offering to turn over materials and photos from her campaign to help. So one thing that I think we haven't seen yet is what these other campaigns are going to say about these results and how they're going to spend them, given the method of delivery, the way that they're coming out now, I think is going to be an important part of the story, too. And it is something that you and the rest of the NPR politics team will be watching. We are going to leave it there for now because we are going to be back in your podcast feeds in a matter of hours. President Trump is delivering

his State of the Union address tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern. You can listen to NPR simulcast of the speech on NPR.org, the NPR One app, or your local public radio station. And then check your feeds for us later. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Juana Summers. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.