FORT DODGE, Iowa — A Democratic presidential race that started as a struggle between the activist left and the moderates has become something far less ideological and more emotional as the first nominating contest has come into view: Should they fight or unite?
Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “I’m fighting back” and the “revolution” mantra of Bernie Sanders’ campaign have only grown louder for the confrontational approach to beating President Donald Trump and to the challenges that await the next president.
On the other side of the divide, in calls for consensus on what would likely be a traumatic post-Trump transition, Joe Biden says the next president must foremost “be a healer,” while Pete Buttigieg talks increasingly of an America “worn out from fighting.”
Both are powerful competing political impulses that illustrate the choice before Democratic voters in Iowa.
There is no clear trend to show whether fight or unite is winning.
“I know how bad Trump is. I want to know what we can do together,” said Des Moines County Democratic Party Chairman Tom Courtney.
On the other side of the debate, Lonnie Tyler, a meat cutter from Waterloo, walked away from a rally for Sanders with an air of defiance. “I think they’re going to have to bend to his will if he becomes the nominee,” he said.
Audiences across Iowa have been wrestling with the themes of consensus versus confrontation, neither of which are mutually exclusive but which have come to define the top candidates as they approach the stretch run to the Feb. 3 caucuses, which set the tone for the nominating contests to come.
Warren has owned the language of a more combative argument throughout the campaign.
“The danger is real,” the Massachusetts senator told an audience in Muscatine in eastern Iowa, referring to economic and social threats to the poor, women, minorities and children.
“We have to decide whether to give into the fear or whether to fight back,” Warren said. “Me, I’m fighting back. That’s why I’m in this. I’m fighting back. I’m fighting back because we are at our best as a nation when we fight back. When we see big problems and we take them on and we fight back.”
Buttigieg has become Warren’s rhetorical opposite, especially as he rose sharply in the Iowa polls last fall.
Biden, a veteran of decades of congressional battles who served as Barack Obama’s right-hand man, strikes a balanced tone.
In Ames last week, he said, “One of the things a president has to do is you have to be a fighter and a competitor, but a president also needs to be a healer. You have to heal the country.”
