After the shock of the Iowa caucus debacle eight days ago, New Hampshire could deliver a surprise of its own, with the previously unheralded Amy Klobuchar making a late surge as the state votes in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
Klobuchar has been often relegated to an afterthought in discussions about the likely presidential nominee, yet two polls on Monday showed her running third in New Hampshire – ahead of the supposed top-tier candidates Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
It would represent a remarkable turnaround for Klobuchar, who came an expectedly distant fifth in Iowa. The Minnesota senator had all but vanished from public view as the media focused on the travails of Biden, the freshness of Pete Buttigieg and the liberalism of Bernie Sanders and Warren.
But Klobuchar has been a consistently strong presence in the Democratic debates and it seems her gloves-off performance in Friday night’s latest installment – when she dismissed Buttigieg as a “cool newcomer” who would rather watch cartoons than sit through Donald Trump’s impeachment trial – has had an immediate impact on voters.
“She did a great debate on Friday night, I thought that was really good,” said Jean Shiner, one of more than a thousand people who attended a Klobuchar rally in Exeter, New Hampshire, on Monday afternoon.
“I’ve been undecided. I was leaning towards her, but now I’m gonna vote for her. She has as good a chance as Biden or anybody of them of standing up to Trump. She can really stand up for herself.”
Separate polls by Suffolk and Emerson, conducted on Saturday and Sunday, found Klobuchar with 14% support in New Hampshire, where she had been polling in the single digits until a week ago. Klobuchar’s campaign, meanwhile, said she received $1m in donations on Friday night alone, with $2m more flowing in over the weekend.
“I’ve really wondered with Amy why it’s taken this long to get there, because the debates, she’s won them, and only in the last two has she really been recognized for that,” said Dan Hummel, who said he had been a Klobuchar supporter “from the get-go”.
“She has sincerity,” Hummel said.
“She’s been in all phases of life. She’s been in the business world, she was a prosecutor, she knows how to fight, she knows how to get things done.”
Hummel, who was at Klobuchar’s Exeter rally with his daughter and two grandchildren, has acted as a one-man campaign for Klobuchar in Exeter. He said he had persuaded 25 friends to vote for the senator in recent weeks.
“I would say of those 25 people who I know that I’ve convinced, all of those 25 were voting for someone else. Now many of those people have Amy signs that I’ve gotten for them in their front yards.”
Monday’s rally, held at Exeter town hall was overflowing with supporters, leaving some people standing outside. Others packed into an upstairs room, where they didn’t have eyes on the Minnesotan but could hear her voice being beamed in.
Their stamps of approval were audible from below, delighting Klobuchar, who appeared to be in a buoyant mood. She aimed a series of insults at the president, maligning his hair, his failed sojourn into the casino industry and the hundreds of millions of dollars he inherited from his father, drawing guffaws from the crowd.
When she said she would best Trump in a debate, one spectator interrupted to suggest he might not participate in the presidential debates.
“He’ll have to,” Klobuchar said, quickly. “If he doesn’t, I’ll just call him a chicken.”
What hasn’t been immediately obvious on the debate stage is that Klobuchar is a funny and gregarious campaigner. At one point she sold herself to the crowd by recalling her history of electoral victories.
“I’ve won every race, every place, every time, all the way down to fourth grade,” she said.
“My slogan, which I’ve since abandoned, was: ‘All the way Amy K.’”
This magnetism wasn’t especially obvious in Iowa, either, where Klobuchar labored to fifth place, and it would be wise not to get too carried away. Klobuchar is unlikely to win New Hampshire, and she has problems in Nevada and South Carolina, the two other states to vote in February.
Still, in a wide-open Democratic race, with several candidates apparently around for the long haul, Klobuchar seems to be finally getting her moment in the sun.
“We are on the cusp of something really great,” Klobuchar told supporters on Monday. They won’t have to wait long to find out if she is right.
