Democrats, With New Rifts Exposed, Debate Against Volatile Political Backdrop

New polls in Iowa show Democratic voters are roughly split between four top candidates, the longstanding nonaggression pact between Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is in tatters after Warren leveled an explosive allegation at Sanders, and half the contenders onstage are about to leave the campaign trail in the crucial days before the caucuses to serve as jurors at President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

Adding to the uncertainty are the tensions in the Middle East, which former Vice President Joe Biden has sought to capitalize on by emphasizing his foreign policy experience, while Sanders has used the episode to press his pacifist credentials.

Sanders had that opportunity right at the start as the debate opened with questions about the heightened tensions with Iran and who was best positioned to serve as commander in chief. Sanders immediately seized the opportunity to trumpet his past opposition to the war in Iraq. “I not only voted against the war, I helped lead the effort against the war,” he said.

Sanders warned that both the Iraq and Vietnam wars had been based on “lies.” “Right now, what I fear very much is that we have a president that is lying again and could drag us into a war that is even worse than the war in Iraq,” he said.

Sanders drew a distinction with Biden, who had supported the Iraq War resolution in the Senate. “Joe and I listened to what Dick Cheney and George Bush and Rumsfeld had to say,” Sanders said. “I thought they were lying. Joe saw it differently.”

Biden said he regretted his vote for that war. “I was a mistake and I acknowledge that,” Biden said, while noting that as vice president he had brought thousands of troops home from the Middle East.

A large part of the electorate remains up for grabs in a contest that many of the campaigns believe will produce record-setting turnout. A Des Moines Register-CNN poll last week indicated that 45% of caucusgoers said they could still be persuaded to support a different candidate. And Tuesday’s debate was sure to reach more voters than any other event in the dwindling days before the Feb. 3 caucuses.

The four leading candidates in Iowa — Sanders, Biden, Warren and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana — are knotted so tightly together that Biden was fourth in the poll last week, but first in another, from Monmouth University. Sanders topped the Des Moines Register/CNN poll for the first time, putting perhaps the biggest target on his back yet before a debate.

And while he was mired in the single digits, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey built a strong Iowa organization and his supporters are now up for grabs in the wake of his decision this week to drop out of the race.

Yet those numbers could shift depending on what ultimately develops from the hostilities that have recently cropped up between Sanders, of Vermont, and Warren, of Massachusetts.

After nearly a year of mostly working in tandem against their more moderate rivals, the two progressives and political allies entered Tuesday’s forum in the midst of their most serious skirmish of the race.

On the eve of the debate, CNN reported that in December 2018 Sanders told Warren in a private meeting that he did not think a woman could win the presidency. Sanders vehemently denied that he had said such a thing, calling the claim “ludicrous” and suggesting political foul play in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Then one of his top aides went on camera and almost demanded that Warren correct the record.

“I know what she would say — that it is not true, that it is a lie,” said Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager.

But without offering any advance warning to Sanders, Warren on Monday night issued a statement corroborating the substance of the report, comments that sent shock waves across the race.

“Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed,” she said, adding she was hoping to put the issue behind them.

The rift has the ability to shake up the race if it divides the liberal camp and weakens either Sanders or Warren, or both of them, and produces a stronger moderate lane chiefly occupied by Biden.

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Progressive activists who have hoped that either Sanders or Warren would emerge from a scrambled primary race were hoping that the sudden left-on-left violence would abate. And there were signs that both the Sanders and Warren campaigns would try to de-escalate the tension

But in a sign that Sanders, whose most fervent online supporters have long faced claims of sexism, recognized the grave political risk of the accusations, his campaign began airing an ad in Iowa on Tuesday morning that highlighted his support of women’s rights.

“Bernie Sanders is on our side and he always has been,” a female narrator says in the commercial, trumpeting the senator’s support for abortion rights, support for family leave guarantees and equal pay legislation.

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Even if the two candidates attempt to put the contretemps behind them, Sanders and Warren, as well as Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Michael Bennet of Colorado, are confronting another looming challenge: how to mount a successful Iowa campaign while their duties in Congress require them to be in Washington.

With the senators likely to be in the Capitol up to six days a week for the impeachment trial of Trump, they will be unable to make their final appeals to Iowa voters in person as frequently as Biden and Buttigieg.

That could make for a most unusual ending of the caucuses in their over-four-decade history: a split-screen between candidates hustling for votes in the state’s high school gyms and union halls and others seated at their desks in the Senate chamber deliberating about whether to remove from office the president they are trying to defeat.

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For Biden, who has stepped up his efforts to win the caucuses outright and build a formidable head of steam, the prospect of additional attention offers opportunity and risk. Since Trump ordered the killing this month of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran and Tehran responded with missile attacks on American bases in Iraq, the former vice president has repeatedly highlighted his national security credentials. A super PAC backing Biden released a new ad on Tuesday in Iowa that flashed the word “Iran” on the screen and talked about the need for a leader who “understands the gravity and the consequences of their decisions.”

The possibility of repeating that ready-on-Day-1 message around the state while his rivals are stuck in Washington delights his supporters. Yet his campaign aides always grow nervous at moments when he faces additional attention, fearing that Biden, prone to gaffes, will commit a self-inflicted error.

Perhaps even more than Biden, Buttigieg, 37, is eager to take more of the spotlight in Iowa in the race’s final weeks. Having lost the lead there that he built late last year, Buttigieg is under immense pressure to claim the top spot in the caucuses and win the sort of momentum he will need to broaden a coalition that at the moment is heavily white and affluent.

If he does not win Iowa, Buttigieg may find it difficult to recover in New Hampshire, where Sanders won in a landslide four years ago and where Warren is well known thanks to having represented neighboring Massachusetts for the past seven years.

Iowa is even more critical for Klobuchar, a Minnesotan who has visited all 99 of the state’s counties and based her candidacy in large part on her Midwestern credentials. The debate here could represent her last best chance to lift her campaign past one of the top four contenders and give her a rationale to continue into New Hampshire.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .