Sanders Campaign Buoyed by 'Virtual Tie'

By Patrick Healy, The New York Times

02 February 16

illary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont were locked in an intensely tight race in the Iowa caucuses on Monday as Mrs. Clinton’s strong support among women and older voters was matched by the passionate liberal foot soldiers whom Mr. Sanders has been calling to political revolution.

The close results were deeply unnerving to Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as her advisers, some of whom had expressed growing confidence in recent days that they had recaptured political momentum after weeks when Mr. Sanders was drawing huge crowds and rising in the polls. The Clintons had appeared optimistic at rallies over the weekend, thanking Iowans for their support as much as urging them to turn out to vote.

The close vote means that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are likely to split Iowa’s share of delegates to the Democratic convention, and Mr. Sanders will be able to argue that the Iowa result was a virtual tie.

The Clinton team was counting on its huge, well-trained army of volunteers, covering all of Iowa’s 1,681 voting precincts, to counter the enormous enthusiasm of voters who jammed into events to hear Mr. Sanders. But his well-financed Iowa organization was able to convert the energy of his crowds into voters on Monday night, as he drew huge numbers of first-time caucusgoers, young people and liberals who responded to his rallying cry against the nation’s “rigged economy.”

The virtual tie between the two candidates instantly raised the stakes for their next face-off, the primary next Tuesday in New Hampshire. Mr. Sanders holds a solid lead in polls there and has the advantage of being from Vermont; candidates from neighboring states have won the state’s primary in recent decades, and Mr. Sanders is admired in the state.

Clinton advisers said late Monday night that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were discussing bringing on additional staff members to strengthen her campaign operation now that a pitched battle may lie ahead against Mr. Sanders. The advisers said they did not know if a significant staff shakeup was at hand, but they said that the Clintons were disappointed with Monday night’s result and wanted to ensure that her organization, political messaging and communications strategy were in better shape for the contests to come.

At her caucus night party here, Mrs. Clinton sought to put the best face on a tight result that had nearly half of Democrats voting against her. “As I stand here tonight breathing a big sigh of relief — thank you, Iowa!” she said, joined on stage by Mr. Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.

“I am excited about really getting into the debate with Senator Sanders about the best way forward to fight for us and America,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Mr. Sanders, who spoke shortly after she finished, laughed as his crowd chanted “feel the Bern,” his campaign’s unofficial slogan. “Thank you — Iowa, thank you!” Mr. Sanders said.

Noting that he began his Iowa campaign with “no name recognition” and “no money,” Mr. Sanders drew ecstatic cheers as he said he took on the Clintons — “the most powerful political organization in the United States of America” — and drove them into a tie.

“I think the people of Iowa have sent a very profound message to the political establishment, to the economic establishment, and by the way, to the media establishment,” Mr. Sanders said. “That is, given the enormous crises facing our country, it is just too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.”

The results suggested that Mr. Sanders would be a strong opponent of Mrs. Clinton’s for a long time. The voters sent a clear message that income inequality weighed on their minds, with more than one in four Democratic voters saying the issue was the most important facing the nation, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

Mr. Sanders’s strong performance in Iowa was a significant milestone in a campaign in which he began 40 percentage points behind Mrs. Clinton when they both declared their candidacies last spring. Many Democrats privately dismissed Mr. Sanders as a left-wing fringe candidate who had no real chance of defeating Mrs. Clinton anywhere other than his home state of Vermont, where his democratic socialist politics were not as exotic as many Democratic Party leaders found them.

But Mr. Sanders proved to be a rigorously disciplined candidate, delivering the same powerful message inveighing against establishment politics, Wall Street and the benefits enjoyed by the wealthy and the well-connected.

The Clintons are now hoping for a surprise performance in New Hampshire, where they have campaigned and connected with voters since 1992, when Mr. Clinton came in a strong second place in the state’s primary, and Mrs. Clinton won the 2008 primary over Barack Obama, then a senator who had earlier won the Iowa caucuses.

Steve Duprey, a Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire, said if Mrs. Clinton ekes out a clear victory in Iowa, however small, it would give her “some much-needed momentum in New Hampshire — and if she can build that into a New Hampshire win, I think it will start the death rattle of the Sanders campaign.”

George Maglaras, a Clinton supporter who is a commissioner of Strafford County, N.H., predicted that Mrs. Clinton would have a lock on the Democratic nomination if she won New Hampshire on top of a close race in Iowa.

“Any other combination means we are in for a longer nomination process than many had anticipated early on,” Mr. Maglaras, a former mayor of Dover, N.H., added. Referring to New Hampshire residents, he said, “If they vote with their heads it will be Clinton. If they vote with their hearts it will be Sanders.”

After losing the Iowa caucuses in 2008 to Mr. Obama, another insurgent candidate who she led in the polls for months, Mrs. Clinton vowed to campaign differently here this time around, holding small events with handpicked voters to learn about the lives and issues for voters here — and to be shown doing so, humbly and thoughtfully, in Iowa television newscasts. While she long said that Iowa would be a tight race, and improved upon her 2008 performance when she won 29.5 percent and fell to third place behind John Edwards, Mrs. Clinton nonetheless hoped that she would start exorcising the ghosts of 2008 with a victory here, and she campaigned hard for it.

Mrs. Clinton, 68, performed well on Monday night among women, moderates and older Iowans who rallied behind her promises to build on President Obama’s policies and fight for the needs of families. Her shifts to the left on trade, the environment and gay marriage helped her win over Democrats, though not the many liberals and young people who mistrusted her pragmatic style of politics and her ties to wealthy interests and Wall Street.

Mr. Sanders, 74, drew strong support from first-time Democratic caucusgoers, who accounted for more than four in 10 voters, according to polls conducted by Edison Research of voters as they entered caucus locations throughout the state Monday evening. But these voters made up a smaller share of the Democratic electorate on Monday than they did in 2008, when 57 percent of Democratic caucusgoers were first-timers. Mr. Sanders was also widely supported by younger voters and independents, but voters 65 and older accounted for about three in 10 Democratic voters and they strongly favored Mrs. Clinton.

As the results trickled in, the third candidate in the Democratic contest, former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, announced that he was pulling out of the race.

With Iowa accounting for only 1 percent of the delegates at stake in the Democratic nomination race, Mrs. Clinton is already far ahead of Mr. Sanders in the delegate count that matters most, given her support from several hundred superdelegates who count toward the nomination. The Clinton campaign has expressed confidence to allies that she can afford to lose Iowa, as well as the New Hampshire primary because of her strength in big-state, delegate-rich primaries and in the South .

Both candidates planned to fly to New Hampshire overnight and planned to resume campaigning there on Tuesday.

Mr. Sanders developed a better-financed operation here than the Clinton team expected, thanks to robust online fund-raising that netted $20 million in January alone, compared with $37 million for Mrs. Clinton in the last three months of 2015. (The Clinton campaign on Monday declined requests for its January fund-raising number.)

Sanders advisers say he now has both money — $28.3 million on hand, compared with $38 million for Mrs. Clinton — and the political momentum to compete vigorously not just in New Hampshire but in upcoming primaries in South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Georgia and caucuses in Nevada, Minnesota, and elsewhere.

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