Biden put it best himself: “We took a gut punch in Iowa.”
No shit.
Over 48 hours after the vote took place, we’re only up to 99% of precincts reporting.
The Washington Post has had the results up on their homepage for the past couple days, and currently they have Buttigieg with 26.2% of the vote and Bernie with 26.1%.
Biden is a distant fourth, with 15.8% of the vote.
Wow...what happened?
Personally, I think it was these three things:
- Biden is old;
- Biden is unexciting;
- Biden has baggage.
It’s not going to get any better next week, when New Hampshire votes.
There we have Bernie up in the polls right now, with 24% support and Buttigieg with 20%. Biden is coming in third, with 17%.
How long can his campaign continue, with a fourth place finish in Iowa and a third place in New Hampshire?
Nevada is on Saturday, the 22nd, and South Carolina comes up the Saturday after that.
Three days later we’ll have Super Tuesday, and it’ll pretty much be over. I suspect Biden will be all but done by then, and it’ll just be a waiting game for him to drop-out (though I suspect his ego will keep him staying in to get as close to the convention as possible).
Here in Montana, I think Biden’s problems point to a lot of the problems that Cooney is going to have.
Cooney is also old and unexciting, but at least he doesn’t have the baggage that Biden does, with a corrupt son, corruption all over the family, and years in cesspool D.C. (though years in the Helena Bubble doesn’t help, either).
Now, let’s be fair - Bernie is also old, but he’s a lot more popular than Biden. I think this is due to how Bernie talks and the issues he espouses. He’s not establishment; Biden is.
Cooney’s about as establishment as you can get here in Montana.
Cooney also has a lot of similarities to Biden in how much money they waste on staff, and how little this gets them.
For instance, Cooney is paying his campaign manager a whopping $8,880 a month!
I’m not sure what Biden’s campaign manager is getting each month, but I do know that during the 2018 cycle Biden had a PAC raise a lot of money and then 80% of that money went to staffer salaries.
Greg Schultz, Biden’s current campaign manager, got $225,000 from that scheme.
Most establishment Democrats will raise a lot of money and then shuffle that down to their staff. I doubt this is why donors gave those candidates money. Voters reward these schemes by withholding their votes from these candidates.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in Iowa. Now the DNC is saying they want a do-over.
Yeah, right...like that’s going to inspire confidence. In fact, I think that’ll just give the corrupt staffers at the DNC time to fudge the results even further to Biden’s favor.
Don’t forget that these are the Democrats that want to take over healthcare nationally while simultaneously opening our borders to every illegal immigrant in the world.
They couldn’t even do a simple canvas in a rural state. Do you think they’ll do any better with healthcare or the border?
I don’t. Most Americans don’t.
In Montana, Whitney Williams must be feeling good. She has more money than Cooney overall, though Cooney has about $15,000 more than her for the primary.
Cooney is lucky that Whitney doesn’t know anything about policy, from what I’m hearing from her campaign stops. Cooney is a policy wonk, but sadly, this typically bores voters.
Cooney is also lucky that - like Liz Warren - Whitney is incredibly unlikeable. This comes about from the high-brow persona she gives off, which comes from her family upbringing and its money. Her out-of-state hobnobbing with the rich and famous doesn’t do anything to impress common voters.
So it’s not all bad for Cooney, he just needs to exploit Whitney’s weaknesses before she exploits his.
Still, Iowa should be troubling. Biden and Cooney are pretty much the same guy, and Biden did bad. I suspect Cooney will do bad, too.
His campaign needs to take a full timeout and figure out what’s not working, and why. If they don’t, I think they’ll do as well as Biden did in Iowa - a very embarrassing finish...a gut punch.
