DECORAH, Iowa _ Deb Tekippe spent much of this year convinced she would support Joe Biden in his 2020 bid for president, but the more she has seen of him on the stump in Iowa and in debates on television, the less confident she has become.
So, on a recent rainy evening she found herself crammed up against the bleachers in Decorah's high school gymnasium to see South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. She came away intrigued.
"I was all in for Joe Biden, but now I'm wondering what happened with him, you know? It's obvious that he's fading," said Tekippe, 63, a retired nurse who now says she won't caucus for Biden and is strongly considering Buttigieg. "Pete is on his way up. There is a lot of enthusiasm for him, and there are so many people who really want to believe in their candidate, and you have to see him in person to see how impressive he is."
Tekippe's experience reflects the new reality in Iowa: Buttigieg has emerged as the major alternative to Biden among moderate voters the former vice president has counted on as the bedrock of his campaign in the first-in-the-nation caucus state.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last Wednesday found Buttigieg in second place in Iowa, a single percentage point behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders in third and Biden in fourth. That followed a recent New York Times/Siena College poll that had Buttigieg with slightly more support than Biden in the state, placing him third behind the more liberal Warren and Sanders.
The Midwestern mayor not only has caught Biden in the polls, but his campaign is also better funded, has drawn larger and louder crowds at events, and has shown signs of a more effective ground operation in a state where the former vice president is making his third bid for the White House. The question remains whether Buttigieg can turn that momentum into permanent support ahead of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3.
His advantages were on full display recently as the top 13 candidates in the field flocked to Des Moines for the state Democratic party's annual fall fundraising dinner, an event so large this year that it drew more than 13,000 people to the downtown sports arena.
There, Buttigieg's supporters made up about one-quarter of the crowd, giving their candidate the loudest applause of the night. Biden had the smallest group of supporters among the major candidates _ with the exception of Sanders, who drew around 1,000 people to a rally outside but didn't buy tickets for supporters inside.
The enthusiasm gap between Biden and Buttigieg was even more evident in the hours before the main event.
More than 2,300 people stood in a steady rain for a Buttigieg rally in a downtown plaza where Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Ben Harper performed, and the candidate gave a speech and thanked the "Barnstormers for Pete," a group of die-hard supporters that travels the country to boost the mayor's candidacy.
"Well, friends, this is what it feels like when you realize you are definitely going to be the next president of the United States!" Buttigieg said to a loud roar from the poncho-clad crowd moments before he led them in a march through downtown to the arena. "This is what it feels like to build a movement. This is what it feels like to insist on change."
A block away and a few minutes later, Biden welcomed his supporters in a convention center ballroom that remained a quarter empty. About one-third of the crowd sat on folding chairs in an accessibility seating section filled with seniors as the local cover band Pork Tornadoes played to little applause.
Harold Schaitberger, the longtime president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, and former second lady Jill Biden talked longer than the candidate, who gave an unusually short five-minute speech. Biden spent most of it telling the story of how he asked his wife to marry him five times before she said yes and thanking the firefighters union, which has endorsed his campaign.
"This is all about you, all about you getting people involved in the caucuses. It's hand-to-hand," Biden said from the stage. "Get involved directly in the campaign. Become precinct captains, if you're not. Volunteer to make phone calls, knock on doors. Ladies and gentleman, it all starts in Iowa on Feb. 3, and we're going to win Iowa."
As the crowd filed out, campaign aides held fists full of tickets for the big dinner, many of them presumably for the six upper-deck sections of the arena that Biden's campaign had purchased tickets for but ended up empty. Giant stacks of free white T-shirts that read "Ridin' with Biden" also went unclaimed while in the room next door, Buttigieg supporters who couldn't score tickets filed into an "overflow" watch party.
"Am I disappointed there were shirts left on a table? No, because I don't think that reflects the actual operation," Schaitberger said as he came to Biden's defense the next day at a fish fry in Cedar Rapids. "Enthusiasm is important, but so is commitment."
So far, both campaigns have more than 20 offices and in excess of 100 paid staffers in the state, but Schaitberger predicts that Biden's ground game will turn out loyal Iowans likely to attend caucuses while implying Buttigieg's newfound support is more fickle. He dismissed the South Bend mayor as the "flavor of the moment" and accused him of busing in hundreds of people from Indiana.
In the 2008 presidential race, Biden made a similar accusation when then-Sen. Barack Obama gave a soaring speech at the Des Moines dinner and flexed his campaign's organizational muscle by drawing the largest and loudest crowd to the event. Biden needled Obama by welcoming that section of the hall with a "Hello, Chicago."
In the end, though, it turned out the junior senator from Illinois did, in fact, have the strongest grassroots operation in Iowa, one that launched him toward the presidency.
"Yes," Schaitberger grudgingly agreed with a smile. "Yes, he did."
