Amy Klobuchar has earned an asterisk next to her ‘Minnesota Nice’ moniker.
That’s primarily because after her drawing a series of sharp contrasts between herself and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg during Thursday night’s debate millions of viewers have now seen a feisty Midwestern alternative to the millennial candidate on the rise. And it’s all by design.
“Pete gave us the opening,” a top Klobucharworld source said when pressed on the strategy behind the pile-on. “It was a huge gift and opening. She just felt big and up to it and confident.”
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In interviews with multiple sources familiar with the senator’s thinking, her sustained line of attack on Buttigieg, where she repeatedly presented the case that he lacks the type of experience needed to be the most powerful person in the world, had been brewing for a while–and there was much to gain from doing it now. He’s surging in Iowa and she’s in single digits. He’s atop the newscycle, but that can change with one breakout moment. He’s a “local official,” as Klobuchar herself called him, she’s a United States senator. The bevy of strategic and, at times, personal reasons (“she can sometimes be petty,” one source close to Klobuchar told The Daily Beast), help illustrate a fuller portrait of a candidate eager to pick off voters just six weeks before the Iowa caucus.
“Pete’s a little too robotic. It shows his inexperience,” the source said.
To be sure, Klobuchar is hardly the only candidate growing exceedingly irritated with the mayor. In early October, The Daily Beast first reported that nearly all of his rivals have expressed private frustration over his unabashed tendency to take cheap shots at their expense, setting off, in part, a news cycle that placed increased scrutiny on aspects of Buttigieg’s résumé as it relates to his rivals, including a former vice president and several sitting senators.
Team Pete no doubt sees it differently. And when Klobuchar, who has struggled to gain consistent traction during the Democratic primary, reminded viewers that she likes winning very much—having defeated Republican opponents time after time for her Senate seat, often in ruby red Trump-friendly districts—Buttigieg defended parts of his own record as just as substantive.
“Pete clearly won the exchange in the debate about how Washington experience is not only experience,” a campaign official told The Daily Beast. It gave him “the opportunity to illustrate two powerful parts of his biography: his military service and his personal coming out story.”
For weeks, Buttigieg was ensnared in a notch-for-notch tussle with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) over financial transparency, which spilled onto the national stage for the first time on Thursday, and caused Klobuchar to attempt to play referee.
“I came here to make a case for progress—and I have never even been to a wine cave,” she said, attempting to defuse the dispute between Warren and Buttigieg, the latter of which recently held a high-dollar fundraiser in a crystal-adorned wine cave, which has its own rich and shady history. “I've been to the wind cave in South Dakota,” she joked.
But the velocity with which Klobuchar went after Buttigieg showed a renewed commitment to the nominating contest, several Democrats contended, and is in line with her previous remarks. During an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Klobuchar decried the double standard women candidates face, calling out Buttigieg in the process.
“Of the women on the stage… do I think we would be standing on that stage if we had the experience that [Mayor Pete Buttigieg] had? No, I don’t. Maybe we’re held to a different standard,” she said.
“I’m the one from the Midwest that’s actually won in a statewide race.”
One Klobuchar ally went on to say that as she travels through the early voting states, she’s become a voice for female voters who reiterate the importance of having the first female president as the field winnows.
“There’s been a lot of women who have said, ‘thank you for saying what you said,’” the source said about Klobuchar’s comments about a higher standard in passing reference to Buttigieg, which she has reiterated several times.
“The frustration she hears from women and the validation she gets back is that this is fucking bullshit,” the source continued, in reference to Buttigieg’s credentials. “They are personally offended by Pete.”
Still, with Klobuchar’s campaign placing a particular focus on Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state where voters like to meet their candidates several times, she must earn a top finish in order to compete ably in the later contests. Hailing from neighboring Minnesota, she is already a known and liked quantity there who boasts strong favorability numbers. Buttigieg, meanwhile, is offering something totally new.
“She sees him as a threat for the nice person vote,” a separate longtime Democtraic aide said about the mayor.
In typical Klobuchar fashion, according to interviews with multiple knowledgeable sources, the personal and the political can be intertwined, and the Los Angeles debate was all part of that dynamic. At one point, Klobuchar even took a shot at Buttigieg’s failed attempt to become head of the party apparatus, the Democratic National Committee, a post he competed for in 2017 before launching his presidential bid.
Both have already qualified for the next debate in January, meeting the DNC’s stricter polling and individual donor thresholds announced on Friday, and joining Biden, Sanders, and Warren on stage in Des Moines. Candidates must now have 225,000 unique donors and at least 5 percent of support in four national or early state polls.
That is to say, the Klobuchar-Buttigieg clash could spill over to next month, with some Democrats wondering if the senator’s strong performance on Thursday is enough to give Buttigieg reason to panic before then.
“Nope,” one well-placed Iowa Democrat said flatly when asked directly. “It will take a lot more to truly break out.”
So far, the fresh beef among ideological bedfellows offers no shortage of strategic annoyances for the senator looking to break out of low single digits. Klobuchar is aiming to ascend to a top finish against not just Buttigieg, but Sanders, Biden, and Warren, who are all outperforming her by double digits there. The latest Iowa State University poll places the Minnesota senator at just 4 percent, 20 points behind the South Bend mayor.
Other surveys offer a more optimistic look. In an Emerson University poll from December, Klobuchar rose to 10 percent, her highest number in the state, prompting onlookers to ponder if an onslaught of “Klomentum” was coming. And a November Monmouth University poll gives perhaps the strongest indication of potential benefits that could arise from hitting Buttigieg hard: she is the second choice for 15 percent of his voters in the state, and the second choice for 9 percent of all voters, up sharply from just 2 percent in August.
It was with that spirit that she fired off shot after shot, often cogently rebuking his critique of the types of Washington boardrooms that Klobuchar reveres.
“I just think you should respect our experience when you look at how you evaluate someone who can get things done,” she said. After Buttigieg dismissed her points about experience levels by saying there’s “bigger fish to fry” Klobuchar was on cue: “I don't think we have bigger fish to fry than picking a president of the United States,” she said, to applause.
Asked about her truest feelings towards Buttigieg, one source speculated that her private thoughts mirror her public statements quite closely.
“Personality-wise, I would think it has something to do with him being a young upstart who hasn’t accomplished anything,” the source said.
