Biden, rivals privately pitching caucus night deals

DES MOINES — Joe Biden and other leading candidates are actively courting lower-polling campaigns in the final days before the Iowa caucuses, hoping to forge election night alliances designed to pick up the supporters of candidates who fail to move past the first ballot.

Biden’s campaign has approached at least two rival primary campaigns, seeking to broker agreements ahead of the Monday night’s caucuses, according to sources familiar with his overtures. And an aide to Tom Steyer said Wednesday that his campaign had been approached by “multiple candidates.”

The Biden campaign reached out to Andrew Yang staffers, according to sources familiar with the conversation, and three Biden aides also approached a senior adviser to Amy Klobuchar’s campaign, Pete Giangreco, this week about a potential deal, sources said. The New York Times first reported the meeting.

In each case, the campaigns said they rebuffed advances.

The outreach efforts are familiar plays in Iowa caucus politics. The caucus system allows backers of non-viable candidates — those who fail to reach 15 percent support in a precinct on the first ballot — to realign with a new candidate on the second ballot, making them a valuable pool of voters who could tip the scales in a tight battle for delegates.

But the frenzy of activity also reflects the significance of second-choice votes in a crowded race that remains unsettled — and where top-tier candidates are preparing robust efforts to woo supporters of rival campaigns.

“It’s common sense to do this, but it’s also easier said than done because it requires a very good organization,” said Sam Roecker, an Iowa-based Democratic consultant who worked on former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s now-finished presidential bid. “Those rooms are crowded, chaotic, and being able to do that quick delegate math, while sending supporters out on the fly, takes planning and training. [But that] makes it very difficult to do that four days out.”

Steyer and Yang are running at 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively, in Iowa — combining for 7 percent of the vote — according to a Monmouth University poll released on Wednesday. Those candidates are widely expected to fail to meet support threshold in many precincts across the state.

Outside of a candidate-to-candidate deal, campaigns are still obsessively preparing for how to draw in caucus-goers who are either undecided or may see their first-choice candidate fail to capture enough support to win delegates.

Mike Frosolone, who led Cory Booker’s now-finished Iowa operation, said the Booker campaign had developed an app for its precinct captains that would allow for fast communication among the organizers and allow them to quickly calculate the delegate math on the spot.

“I expect all the campaigns have some version of that,” Frosolone said.

Staying in a voter‘s consideration set shaped the contours of the primary throughout 2019. Mike Nellis, a Democratic consultant who served as a senior adviser on Kamala Harris’ presidential bid, said, “Everybody’s playing nice up until Iowa because they want to stay everyone’s second choice.”

In addition, organizers for multiple candidates said they expect caucus sites to be populated by some protest voters who will initially support candidates who have already dropped out of the race, such as Booker, Harris and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, who has endorsed Elizabeth Warren.

As candidates have dropped out, their departures reshuffled the remaining campaigns’ second-choice calculations.

Fearful that Harris might endorse Biden, the pro-Sanders online activist group RootsAction.org this week sent an email blast to its California list on Monday, urging her not to endorse him. By Tuesday, about 1,300 members had sent individual emails to Harris urging her not to endorse, said Jeff Cohen, the group’s co-founder.

Uriah McGee, a precinct captain for Biden in Ankeny, said he has prepared volunteers to watch over his caucus site on Monday night looking for other candidates’ supporters who may be movable.

“If we get to the second round and we’re doing what we’re supposed to, we’ll sway some over,” he said.

Mary McAdams, a Warren supporter and the chairwoman of the Ankeny Area Democrats, said she tells caucus-goers that they are “going to need a second choice.”

She said, “People need to think about that and go in prepared.”

Encountering a caucus-goer in Iowa this week who said he planned to caucus for Castro before re-aligning, Castro, a surrogate for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, persuaded the voter to commit to caucus for Warren immediately on Monday night.

“I will sign this for you because I want you to be my vice president,” the caucus-goer, Thomas Lecaque, said.

The effectiveness of direct campaign-to-campaign strategizing is unclear, as supporters of a candidate may not be willing to follow such top-down guidance.

Former Rep. John Delaney, a non-factor in public polling in Iowa despite campaigning tirelessly there since 2017, said Wednesday that he was not aware of outreach to his campaign from any other competitor. He doubted it would be effective.

“The folks in Iowa are so well informed that they know full well who they’re going to go with, and I think they probably have in their minds their first, second and third choices,” he said. “I don’t know how much utility there is in these alliances people are talking about. We’re talking about the most informed voters in the country.”

Yang, speaking to reporters in Des Moines on Wednesday, said that his campaign has “no guidance for our caucus-goers who don’t find us to be viable.”

However, he said, “I think that many of my supporters would naturally head to Bernie...I think that Bernie and I do have a lot of overlap in support. So, it wouldn't be surprising to me if many of our supporters head in that direction."

He said, "I'm not sure [pushing supporters to caucus for other candidates] is my job to say to someone that, 'If it's not me then it should be this other person’ unless it's at a point where frankly, I'm not in a position to be a candidate myself and I'm endorsing someone and obviously we're nowhere near that kind of stage.’”

Biden is narrowly leading in Iowa, according to the Monmouth poll, with 23 percent support. Sanders is running slightly behind him, at 21 percent.

In precincts where Biden is viable but other moderate candidates — such as Klobuchar or Buttigieg — are not, the former vice president is widely expected to gain ground on second balloting. Sanders’ surge in recent polls has unnerved many moderate Democrats who fear that if he wins Iowa, he may become the nominee.

“You talk to people, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, if Bernie’s going to win, I guess we have to go to Biden,’” said Jeff Link, an Iowa-based Democratic consultant.

Still, he said it would likely be “easier to say who not to go to than it is to say who you should caucus for.”

Biden’s rivals view him as weaker in Iowa than polls suggest, seeing Monday as a turning point when superior organizations such as Warren’s or Buttigieg’s may give those campaigns an edge. Klobuchar, who watched her polling numbers rise into the high single-digits in Iowa over the last month, is also on an upswing in the state.

One aide to a rival campaign who received the Biden campaign’s overtures said, “The fact that they brought it up is a big sign of weakness for them [and] reflects a lot of what we’re seeing in the field.”

A Biden adviser dismissed news of the talks as a “nothing burger” and said “these talks happen all the time with everyone.” Added another adviser: “It would be malpractice if people weren’t talking.”

For lower-tier candidates, the potential deal-making could come with some benefits, like taking credit for any bump the more viable campaign might receive or joining the shortlist for prime positions in any future administrations. Or there might be ideological considerations at stake when deciding where to direct their supporters.

Supporters of lower-polling candidates are acutely aware of the calculation that they will have to make on caucus night as concerns about “second choice” have come to color the final days of campaigning.

At a Steyer event in Ankeny this week, Aaron Reynolds, a small business consultant, said he likes Steyer, Yang and Sen. Michael Bennet, but joked that he is “behind all the candidates who don’t stand a chance, so that’s great.” He said he will probably caucus for Steyer and, if he is not viable in his precinct, “default to Biden,” who he views as a “status quo” choice.

Others may prove immovable. Robert Hites, a retired tire builder who wore a Steyer t-shirt, hat and buttons to the gathering, said that if Steyer falls out of the race entirely after the early state caucuses and primaries, he will likely get behind Biden. But he feared caucusing for any other Democrat on Monday could hurt Steyer’s chances in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

If his first choice isn’t viable, he said, “I may just leave.”

Maya King, Marc Caputo, Ryan Lizza and Christopher Cadelago contributed to this report.