The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a daily feature at Daily Kos.
With Joe Biden stumbling and both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar making themselves a presence, the two top spots according to the polls are the two guys fighting with each other.
WaPo:
Sanders and Buttigieg aren’t competing for the same voters Tuesday. But they are competing, and fiercely.
The two top finishers in last week's Iowa caucuses, 40 years apart in age and representing opposite ends of the Democratic Party's ideological spectrum, are heading for a showdown in Tuesday's primary here — each taking increasingly aggressive swipes at the other.
But there is an unusual twist to the new rivalry between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.
The senator from Vermont and former mayor of South Bend, Ind., are not fighting to win over the same pool of New Hampshire voters, though many likely to vote here remain undecided. Rather, according to strategists in both campaigns, each is trying to energize his supporters by vowing to block the other from winning the Democratic nomination — with Sanders, the democratic socialist, portraying Buttigieg as a captive to his billionaire donors, and the more centrist Buttigieg railing against Sanders as a "my way or the highway" leftist.
After Pete officially took more delegates in IA, while Bernie had more votes:
Here’s some congealing Conventional Wisdom (well, it‘s about the convention):
But who can bring in the most new voters while keeping the ones we have? It’s still an open question based on performance, and if swing voters aren’t as numerous as people used to say, moderates are.
Boston Globe:
One thing to watch in Sunday’s poll is whether Klobuchar’s rise and Buttigieg’s fall continue, given that only two-thirds of respondents were asked for their feelings after the debate. By Sunday night, all respondents could have either watched the debate or followed coverage of it afterward.
Dan Balz/WaPo:
A Democratic race among mostly white men leaves many women, minorities feeling abandoned
The fact that this is a battle among white men represents an unexpected turn for a party whose success in the 2018 midterms depended heavily on an outpouring of support and activism by women and whose failure in 2016 was the result, in part at least, of a falloff in turnout among voters of color, especially African Americans. The party’s future depends on both those groups and, overlapping with them, the active support of younger people.
And don’t miss this twitter thread (or read it in story form here):
Jackie Kucinich/Daily Beast:
Democratic Voters Worry Biden Has ‘Too Much Baggage’ After Trump’s Ukraine Smears
The conspiracy theories about Biden amplified by Trump may have been debunked, but some voters say it doesn’t matter—the former VP already has a huge weak spot.
But for some Democratic voters, the damage of conspiracy theories circulated by Trump and his allies has already been done. And while certainly not the first issue voters raised, for some still rattled by the 2016 race any hint of wrongdoing—true or not—is enough to make them look elsewhere.
“I think there's going to be too much baggage there,” said Terri Gilbert, 54, a surgical technician from Newton, Iowa. “I think Trump's gonna make everything up and run with it and play it just like he did Hillary.”
At a rally for Buttigieg in Waterloo, Iowa, Maureen O’Connor, 61, a part-time retail worker, had the same concern.
Democratic voters, of course, worry by nature. But it is a thing you can find on the trail, say the reporters.
WaPo:
Coronavirus deaths climb as China corrals sick in quarantine facilities in outbreak epicenter
Medical experts say available data show the disease — officially named “novel coronavirus pneumonia,” or NCP, by Chinese health officials on Saturday — is much more contagious than SARS, but the probability of death for those infected is much lower.
Oh, and for those not paying attention to Mike Bloomberg: