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CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Dozens of journalists and photographers have descended on the Hawkeye Downs speedway, all waiting for a man to come to a local picnic on Labor Day.
This man was not Michael Bennet.
"We have a great Labor Day in Iowa," said Mr. Bennett, a Colorado senator and still a presidential candidate, who came forward sharply to speak in front of the assembled fray. 20 minutes earlier for the arrival of Joseph R. Biden Jr. "And here is the Vice President! So let me move away from his path.
Life is not easy nowadays for Democratic presidential candidates of lower rank. Few people know who are they. Fewer come to their events. No journalist covers them regularly.
The indignities do not stop there. On Saturday, a Democrat from Iowa approached a Wall Street Journal reporter and asked him if he was Montana's Governor Steve Bullock. "I do not even have cowboy boots," journalist John McCormick wrote on Twitter about the meeting. Mr. Bullock's campaign did not have yard signs for a Sunday home party; so she borrowed panels used by Andy McGuire at the governor's primaries in 2018 in Iowa and stuck Bullock signs. (Ms. McGuire, who ranked fourth in the primary, sponsored Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as president.)
The real problem of darkness, however, is not having enough donors or a sufficient number of polls to lead the debate. And it becomes a kind of vicious circle: Voters and Democratic activists tend to view debate as a litmus test of sustainability, but candidates can only increase their viability if they hold the debate first.
It is a political wheel that, for half of the Democrats in search of the White House, was almost impossible to escape.
"This is not helpful in the sense that this can become a substitute for not having a successful campaign," said Mr. Bennet, who will not be one of 10 on stage for next week's debate. "I am determined to fight against that."
Last month, four candidates chose not to take the wheel, thinking that their campaigns had not caught fire and that they probably would not have oxygen without the oxygen of a national audience. None had qualified for the debate in Houston September 12th.
CNN, which is holding a seven-hour climate plenary on Wednesday, has only had time for candidates meeting the National Democratic Committee's standard of debate. The gun control organization founded by former representative Gabrielle Giffords only invited participants to the panel discussion at a forum she is organizing in October.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York discovered this summer how ruthless the last rung could be, after trying various strategies to increase the attention she received from the current cable and news voters.
She organized a public meeting on reproductive rights in St. Louis on the eve of Missouri's ban on abortions starting in the eighth week of pregnancy, but no national journalist did not attend. Last month she organized the first event in 2020 with former Senator Tom Harkin, a beloved figure among Iowa progressives. He attracted two national journalists, both of whom came to speak to Mr. Harkin and not to Ms. Gillibrand. She spent more than a million dollars on first television ads. But she could not cross the thresholds of the debate and so left the race last week.
"It was harder to book cable shows that many months ago asked us to participate," said Glen Caplin, Gillibrand's senior advisor. "Last month was considerably harder than ever to generate national coverage."
[[[[Learn more about how Kirsten Gillibrand's presidential aspirations have collapsed.]
Isolated from the debate in September and having little evidence that they will qualify for the October debates and after, the polls find themselves campaigning as in 1992 or 2004. They even invoke the 1976 led by Jimmy Carter, the patron saint of Democratic Long Struggle, whose retail policy throughout Iowa propelled it on the way to the White House.
However, there are some disclaimers regarding this type of wish spread. Bill Clinton left Iowa in 1992 and focused all his attention on New Hampshire. In 1976, Mr. Carter ranked second in Iowa with "no preference". Only 38,000 Democrats participated in caucuses that year, about one-eighth of the attendance expected in February. And the modern political and social media ecosystem, which depends so much on the cover of the cable newspaper, means that voters in Dubuque are receiving the same message as those in Dallas.
Take Mr. Bullock, who has built his political identity around the fact that he is the only Democrat from 2020 to have won President Trump's victory in 2016. On the sidelines of his evening at home Sunday night in Manchester, in Iowa, he justified his decision to continue. .
"Look, I mean, John Kerry was 4% at 31 days," Bullock told the press, consisting of three journalists, only one of whom was old enough to vote when Mr. Kerry won the 2004 caucuses in Iowa. and swept to the nomination. "Al Sharpton was beating John Kerry."
But the governor, the answer, you have not been to 4% in any of the polls. "We still have a long way to go from this perspective," Bullock said.
Neither Mr. Bullock nor Mr. Bennet attained even 2% in any of D.N.C. eligible survey this year. Of the seven eligible polling stations in August, Mr Bennet reached 1% in one of them and Mr Bullock out of three.
These are hardly the only ones locked out of the debates that continue to campaign, arguing that there are valid reasons to stay in the race at least until the February caucus.
Tom Steyer, a billionaire from California who, with an additional 2% poll, could participate in the October debate, held his own climate forum Tuesday in Oakland, California. The representative of Tulsi Gabbard, from Hawaii, could participate in the October forum with two other eligible polls. , also toured Iowa at Labor Day picnics and parades. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio has campaigned in South Carolina.
"We may not have qualified for the September debate, but we will not be indifferent," Ryan said in a fundraising call on Tuesday.
Despite calls to run for the Senate, Mr. Bullock eliminates discussions about race change and has had no conversation about it with the Democrats in Washington. He now has 30 staff members from Iowa and announced last week a new list of political advisers and four new endorsements in the state.
Bennet dismissed Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as "soft" runners.
"My own polls tell me that the support of the leaders in this race, the leaders with an apostrophe at the end of the ies, not just Joe Biden but also the others, is very sweet, except for Bernie," A Mr. Bennet said in an interview with Raygun, a T-shirt shop in Iowa, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Joe and Elizabeth, they have less support than I expected."
And the campaign's author for self-authoring author Marianne Williamson has been provocative during a fundraiser for the weekend. "Marianne is not leaving this race, not now," Patricia Ewing wrote. "Why would she come down from a train that speeds up?"
But none of the non-drummers drew the attention to the highest-ranked candidates in the state last weekend: Mr. Biden, Ms. Klobuchar and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind. CNN sent more journalists, four, to watch Mr. Buttigieg walk Monday on a Cedar Rapids bridge than the entire press who had gone to see Mr. Bullock the day before.
The Iowa Democrats who had come to see MM. Bennet and Bullock last weekend said they appreciated the candidates' ideas, but also empathize for a beleaguered campaign.
"I just want to help," said John Hernandez, a retiree who brought sound to Mr. Bennet's appearance in case it was necessary. A sound system was already in place, but Mr. Bennet stopped using it when it was clear that the three dozen people in the room could hear it without him.
David Hennessy, retired professor from Ryan, Iowa, said he was impressed by Mr. Bullock's franchise, but did not think he would likely be in the huddle again.
"If you do not hire more than 5% of the public, you have an incredible chance to take you anywhere," said Hennessy.
Deb Lechtenberg, a retired postmaster from Dundee, Iowa, said the three candidates she envisioned were Mrs. Warren, Mr. Bullock and "Mark Bennet".
While offering the usual platitudes it is up to voters to decide, the main candidates are more and more willing to give way to those in their rear-view mirrors.
"We are seeing the pitch win for a reason," Buttigieg told a group of reporters after talking to 800 people at an Iowa City Park on Monday. "We are entering a whole new phase of the campaign, where people are starting to decide where they will engage."
When asked if she would be better if the candidates who did not participate in the debate were dropped, Ms Klobuchar replied with a word: "Of course."
Mr Biden said he would prefer to go to the debate stage with fewer than 10 candidates.
"I hope that when you arrive on the spot, suppose we are there, we will have a real debate, as I had it with the candidate for the vice presidency, or as we do it. had had when we tried to get the appointment in 2008., "he said.
For less educated voters, Iowa still hopes a new wave of support will propel them into the next debate at the next Iowa turn. "Of course, I hope I'll be," Bullock said, questioned about this possibility. "Yeah."
For many political veterans of Iowa, however, winnowing is a natural step in the nomination process.
"This is happening since the day after the 2018 elections," said Bret Nilles, the party chairman in Linn County, which includes Cedar Rapids. "Every day it will become more and more difficult for the lower candidates. People are starting to discover who they support. "
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