Amy Klobuchar’s Lackluster Performance in NV Debate Signals It’s Time to Fold
Aimee Allison
Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s meteoric rise in New Hampshire fell as swiftly as imagined during last night’s debate in Nevada. She went from enjoying a rise in visibility in Iowa and New Hampshire to being visibly flustered, unfocused, and combative -- especially toward fellow Midwestern moderate Mayor Pete Buttigieg. She remains behind Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the overall delegate count, and last night’s hot-headed performance signals it’s time to fold it up.
“We know that we cannot win big by trying to out-divide the divider-in-chief,” Klobuchar said in a much-quoted speech after the New Hampshire vote. “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare is that the people in the middle, the people who have had enough of the name-calling and the mudslinging, have someone to vote for in November.” Last night, it was Amy Klobuchar’s frustrations, quips and one-liners that overshadowed her performance.
The real problem is that “people in the middle” is coded language for white, heartland America, the demographic that supposedly makes or breaks election outcomes. Their outsized reputation has been burnished by a million think pieces since 2016 (and arguably earlier), and they continue to be hugely influential in deciding how candidates tailor their messaging. How else could Klobachar demonstrate such disrespect of Latinx voters in the Arizona Telemundo townhall last week, and again last night, when she cringingly pronounced the name of Mexican president Andrés Manual López Obredor. One of four households in Nevada speak Spanish, and she doesn't seem to understand the importance of Latinx voters.
The perception that white voters matter most is faulty and outdated. It’s actually the votes of women of color that will decide the winner of the Nevada caucus and many of the Super Tuesday states. We now make up a sizable portion of the Democratic base, and Klobuchar has virtually no support with us. (Neither, for that matter, does the moderates' Biden-alternative candidate Buttigieg.) Only with our support will any of the candidates ultimately win the Democratic nomination.
Iowa and New Hampshire have populations that skew much whiter than America as a whole, and yet the campaigns and the media treat them as bellwethers for the electoral inclinations for the entire nation. This is a preferential bias for whiteness that continues to warp our elections. The outcomes from Iowa and New Hampshire are not nearly as consequential for candidate momentum as the horse-race news cycle would lead us to think. In fact, in a poll conducted last month by She the People (the organization I founded and lead) to find out what women of color in Nevada think of the Democratic field, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar barely registered, polling at 2% and 1% respectively. Nevada’s Democratic voters, who caucus this week, are 26% women of color, tracking much closer than the first two states to national population statistics.
The top four candidates — former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, billionaire Tom Steyer, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — are all polling in double digits and could win among women of color if they successfully inspire the large number of us who remain undecided.
What we are clear about is that Amy Klobuchar is not a candidate who works for us. Besides casting white middle America as representing all of America –– a de facto exclusion of voters of color –– she also has a questionable record on racial justice. She has worked against us. As the Minnesota’s top prosecutor in 2006, she helped send an innocent young Black teen, Myon Burell, to prison for life. He was convicted of accidentally shooting and killing an 11-year-old girl. Klobuchar proceeded with the prosecution of Burell after campaigning for the role on a platform of increasing penalties for juvenile offenders, the sort of policy that consistently, disproportionately affects children of color.
As pointed out last night, Klobuchar has also consistently voted in favor of Trump’s far-right judiciary picks, helping ensure that the justice system remains conservative and racist for generations to come. During the first two years of Trump’s presidency, she voted “yes” 70% of the time to advance his district court nominees, earning a "D" grade from Demand Justice's 2017-18 report card. In the most recent congressional session, she voted to confirm nearly two-thirds of Trump’s judicial nominees, including extreme right-wing judges such as David Ryan Stras, a former Minnesota Associate Justice who was confirmed to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Klobuchar’s record – which she touts as evidence that she is a candidate who can unite the country to win against Trump – actually shows that she complicit in helping build a structure that will seek to keep people of color at a disadvantage, even as we become the majority population in the U.S.
We can see past the talking points. Even her home state’s two most prominent politicians of color, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison, have declined to endorse their fellow Minnesotan. Klobuchar’s definition of unity excludes people of color, and no Democratic candidate will win without our buy-in. It’s time to stop treating white voters like their views speak for all Democrats, when that hasn’t been true for years. Paying attention to what women of color voters think will pay far larger dividends going forward. Eyes on you, Nevada.