DES MOINES, Iowa — The Democratic presidential candidates clashed in starkly personal terms Tuesday over who had the best chance to defeat President Donald Trump, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren sought to jump-start her campaign in the last debate before the Iowa caucuses by highlighting her electoral success and that of other female candidates in the Trump era.
Prompted by the moderators, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders continued a debate over the fraught subject of whether a woman could be elected president, an issue that in recent days had caused the first serious breach in their relationship. One day after she confirmed a report that Sanders had told her in a private meeting that he did not think a woman could defeat Trump, Warren trumpeted her Senate victories and then gestured down the debate stage toward the four male candidates.
“Collectively they have lost 10 elections,” she said, before acknowledging the only other female candidate present, Sen. Amy Klobuchar. “The only people on this stage who have won every single election they have been in are the women: Amy and me. And the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican in the past 30 years is me.”
Sanders, Warren’s top rival for progressive support, flatly denied that he had made the electability comment when the two lawmakers met without aides in 2018. He said it was “incomprehensible that I would think that a woman couldn’t be president of the United States,” noting Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote in the 2016 general election.
The Democrats disagreed over international affairs and keeping troops in the Middle East, whether to support Trump’s trade deal for North America and how aggressively to tackle climate change, and, yet again, they sparred on health care. But the issue animating much of the evening was the same question that has shaped the primary race for much of the past year: which of them would be the most formidable contender against Trump.
The contest has increasingly revolved around questions of electability, but the matter has become more urgent for many in the weeks since hostilities increased between the United States and Tehran after the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian commander. Much of Tuesday’s debate, which featured six of the remaining candidates, touched on national security as the Democrats excoriated Trump, urged caution in the Middle East and laid claim to the mantle of being the best potential commander in chief.
Former Vice President Joe Biden came under far less scrutiny than his standing as the national front-runner might have merited in the final debate before voting begins in Iowa on Feb. 3. Just as notable, Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has slipped in Iowa, seemed satisfied to make his own case without sharply criticizing his top rivals.
New polls in Iowa show that Democratic voters are roughly split between four top candidates: Biden, Sanders of Vermont, Warren of Massachusetts and Buttigieg.
But while Sanders was criticized for the cost of his plans, Warren for how many people would be turned off by hers and Buttigieg for the scope of his ambitions, Biden went long stretches Tuesday receiving scant attention.
The debate unfolded at an extraordinarily volatile moment in American politics, with impeachment looming and tensions with Iran escalating. Befitting the setting and the stakes of the debate less than three weeks before the caucuses, multiple candidates — Warren, Buttigieg, Sanders and Klobuchar — all invoked Iowa or retold stories of specific Iowans they had met along the campaign trail, tailoring their pitch to the crucial state.
But it was the contretemps between Warren and Sanders that might have the most effect on voters in the lead-up to the caucuses here. It was a remarkable exchange between the two senators, in part because they are friends and have labored to abide by a de facto nonaggression pact for the past year. But more important, it also crystallized the competing cases that the leading Democratic contenders are making for why they were best positioned to defeat Trump.
Even as Warren said “Bernie is my friend and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie,” she flashed him a smile after Sanders noted that he, like Warren, had once defeated an incumbent Republican. “Just to set the record straight, I defeated an incumbent Republican running for Congress,” he said, before Warren pointed out that it had been 30 years ago.
Acknowledging that she was facing doubts about her chances to defeat Trump, she pointed out that John Kennedy had addressed questions about his Catholicism and, more recently, Barack Obama overcame doubts that he could win the presidency as a black man.
Both times, Warren said, “the Democratic Party stepped up and said yes.” It was an unusual closing argument in Iowa for a candidate who first rose to contention on the basis of her policy proposals, but it reflected the urgency she was facing to reverse her decline in a state where she led in the polls last year.
Sanders used the exchange to make his own case for why he was the most electable candidate: because he could lure a stream of new voters to the polls. “The real question” he said, “is how do we beat Trump? And the only way we beat Trump is by a campaign of energy and excitement and a campaign that has, by far, the largest voter turnout in the history of this country.”
For his part, Sanders did not seem rattled by the confrontation, at least during the forum. But in the immediate aftermath of the debate, CNN cameras captured Warren appearing to refuse to shake Sanders’ hand, and the two of them engaged in what appeared to be a pointed conversation.
Biden, who has increasingly placed his own polling strength against Trump at the center of his candidacy, was just as emphatic that he was best equipped to win the general election.
“The real issue is who can bring the whole party together,” said Biden, citing his endorsements from a variety of Democrats, including many racial minorities. “I am the one who has the broadest coalition of anyone running up here.”
Klobuchar cited her success appealing to a range of voters in Minnesota and even boasted that every one of her Republican opponents had left politics since they lost to her. “I think that sounds pretty good with the president we have right now,” she said.
But Klobuchar struggled momentarily when she sought to highlight the success of other Midwestern Democratic women and forgot the name of Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas before receiving a cue.
“Kansas has a woman governor right now and she beat Kris Kobach,” she began. “And her name, um, is, I’m very proud to know her, and her name is, uh, Gov. Kelly. Thank you.”
In a rare policy split, Sanders and Warren clashed on the new North American trade deal that Trump is trying to push through Congress. Sanders said it was not worth supporting — even if it made a “modest” improvement. “We can do much better than a Trump-led trade deal,” he said.
Warren, however, said that was the reason to support it. “We have farmers here in Iowa who are hurting,” she said.
The exchange was an example of how Warren has sought to position herself as a progressive more willing to get things done than Sanders.
The candidates clashed, as they have in all the debates, on health care. Sanders was pressed by the moderators about the cost of his “Medicare for All” package; unlike Warren, Sanders has not said what his proposal would cost or revealed which taxes he would increase to pay for it.
Buttigieg was asked directly about his lack of support among black voters, whom he will need to activate to win not just the nomination but also a potential general election against Trump. Buttigieg said those who know him best — in South Bend — support him, cited his African American backers in Iowa and noted that his new campaign co-chairman was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
A large part of the electorate remains up for grabs in a contest that many of the campaigns believe will produce record-setting turnout. A Des Moines Register-CNN poll last week indicated that 45% of caucusgoers said they could still be persuaded to support a different candidate.
The four leading candidates in Iowa — Sanders, Biden, Warren and Buttigieg — are knotted so tightly together that Biden was fourth in the poll last week but first in another, from Monmouth University. Sanders topped the Des Moines Register/CNN poll for the first time, putting perhaps the biggest target on his back yet before a debate.
Sanders had the opportunity right from the start to emphasize his pacifist credentials as the debate opened with questions about the heightened tensions with Iran and who was best positioned to serve as commander in chief. Sanders immediately seized the opportunity to trumpet his past opposition to the war in Iraq. “I not only voted against the war, I helped lead the effort against the war,” he said.
Sanders warned that both the Iraq and Vietnam wars had been based on “lies.” “Right now, what I fear very much is that we have a president that is lying again and could drag us into a war that is even worse than the war in Iraq,” he said.
Sanders drew a distinction with Biden, who had supported the Iraq War resolution in the Senate. “Joe and I listened to what Dick Cheney and George Bush and Rumsfeld had to say,” Sanders said. “I thought they were lying. Joe saw it differently.”
Biden said he regretted his vote for that war. “It was a mistake, and I acknowledge that,” Biden said, while noting that as vice president he had brought thousands of troops home from the Middle East.