FAIRFIELD, Iowa — Diane Chojnowski and Denyce Rusch were among the Iowans who braved light snowfall and temperatures in the teens to see Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday afternoon, a few hours before Sen. Elizabeth Warren was also due in this liberal pillar of eastern Iowa.
In Iowa and nationwide, they are the leading second-choice pick of the other’s supporters, a vivid illustration of the promise and the peril that progressives face going into 2020: After decades of losing intraparty battles, this race may represent their best chance to seize control from establishment-aligned Democrats, yet that is unlikely to happen so long as Warren and Sanders are blocking each other from consolidating the left.
“It can’t be, One candidate is the true god or goddess and the others are just shills,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who backed Sanders in 2016 but has not yet endorsed anyone in this race. “It really has to be, We’re trying to strengthen them both.” That progressives find themselves in this situation at all is extraordinary. Perhaps not since anti-establishment Democrats were choosing between two other left-leaning senators, Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, in 1968, have there been two such liberal titans in the same primary contest.
Yet this shared strength has only further confounded members of the party’s left wing who are hung up on the same question: How does it end? Centrist Democrats, of course, think just the opposite. Biden, the former vice president, even after facing intense media scrutiny and racking up a number of self-inflicted errors, still fares slightly better in head-to-head polling against Trump than either Warren or Sanders.
Cohen, who is concerned that a critical mass of Warren’s supporters would back somebody else besides Sanders if she drops out, has been more aggressively making his case to other progressives, including over dinner last week with other Sanders supporters. It is Warren’s new posture on that issue, though, that has halted her momentum — and it is health care that could unravel her and Sanders’ nonaggression pact. Until she unveiled her own, more gradual implementation plan — after weeks of saying “I’m with Bernie” on Medicare for All — Warren had carefully guarded her left flank to avoid handing Sanders any fodder.
Voting Bernie!
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