Bernie Sanders has spent the equivalent of three full weeks less than Hillary Clinton on the campaign and fundraising trails since late September, baffling progressive Democrats who are anxious to see a livelier presidential primary contest.

The Vermont senator has visited nine fewer states than Clinton, according to a POLITICO review of their travel logs covering the past three months. His schedule from Sept. 28 through Saturday night’s debate — 84 days in total — has included 34 days campaigning or fundraising outside Washington or his home state, including 10 in New Hampshire and nine in Iowa. Clinton’s meanwhile, has been made up of 55 days outside her New York home base, including an almost identical 10 days each in New Hampshire and Iowa.


By ditching the underdog’s playbook — which holds that if you’re not living in Des Moines, you should be living in Manchester — Sanders has left progressives across the earliest-voting states wondering where he’s been.





“I’d noticed it, personally. There’s a barrage of Hillary events going on throughout the state at this point. She’s got a full-court press going on in Iowa at this point, and I haven’t really seen anything from Bernie at all,” said John Colombo, the chairman of the Franklin County, Iowa Democratic Party, on the heels of Sanders’ latest two-day stop in the state. “He’s not really staked his claim in the state for the lead-up to the caucuses. They’re coming up quick, so I’d hope that he would spend more time here if he intends to be a player here, and to win it. It’s customary that these people camp out here for months before.”

“It’s kind of odd,” Colombo added. “It does concern me a little bit. Because I want to see him do well in Iowa.”

Sanders underwent an elective outpatient hernia procedure in late November. And much of the blame for his quieter campaign goes to his full-time job as a sitting senator, his allies and staffers say. He views that role as a top priority, even delaying making his decision to run for the White House this past spring because of his work on the Budget Committee. His attendance and voting records are points of pride, his aides say.

“Bernie, first of all, takes his responsibilities as a sitting U.S. senator seriously,” explained top campaign strategist Tad Devine. “That obviously cuts down on it. It has affected the amount of time [on the road]. He wants to be [in the Senate] as much as he can. If ever there were a vote where his vote would be the deciding vote, he would drop everything to the there.”

But that explanation has gone only so far with Iowa and New Hampshire voters who are used to getting to know candidates before voting for them, and who worry out loud that the occasional two-day swings — like the ones Sanders did in each state this week — will not be enough to take down the front-runner.

“I’ve been asking that same question. We haven’t been seeing Bernie in Linn County,” said that region’s Democratic Party chair Bret Nilles, an undecided voter who said the Sanders campaign had effectively stopped trying to court him, though he wasn’t sure why. “He feels like he needs to spend all the time [he can in Washington] when it comes time to vote. It’s an issue. A lot of people have started to notice it."

Sanders has spent just four days in Iowa over the past seven weeks, compared to seven for Clinton, not nearly enough in an early state where voters are conditioned to expect a significant investment of time and personal attention from insurgent candidates — not just an occasional series of events when they happen to be in the state, as Sanders has been doing. He drew roughly 5,000 people over 13 events in two days there this past weekend, for example, but it was his first stop in the state in a month.

“The key for him to become a serious alternative is to do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s not entirely different from [the situation with John] Kerry in 2004,” said Bob Shrum, who was a senior adviser to Kerry. “We basically even stopped going to New Hampshire in the last several weeks before Iowa, in an all-out push to win Iowa. Then we went to New Hampshire and we were in great shape.”

“If you do what I used to do, yeah, you want them camping out in those states,” Shrum explained, in a sentiment echoed by Joe Trippi, the manager of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.

To neutral Democrats and Sanders skeptics alike, the imbalance between Clinton’s and Sanders’ frequent flier miles reflects the senator’s insistence on running on his own terms. He wants to run a very specific kind of campaign about a very specific set of issues that he’s been zeroed in on for decades, they say. And that laser focus has caused Sanders to ignore the traditional rules of presidential politicking, including blanketing the early states with visits.

Sanders’ Iowa director, Robert Becker, and other top staffers said they expect complaints about Sanders’ absence from the early states to dry up soon, as he fills his schedule in the weeks leading up to the start of voting with stops in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Indeed, Sanders himself has started dropping hints about the upcoming stretch, on Sunday pointing to the importance of volunteer door-knocking from Iowans because, “the problem we have is, I am not all that well-known in Iowa.”

And in New Hampshire on Monday, he promised, “This state is very important, and whether you like it or not, you’re going to see a lot of me in this state for the next couple of months.”

Such previews of things to come are music to the ears of undecided party influencers in the early-voting states who’ve watched the frenetic Republican race from afar, wishing for a more active contest of their own.

“I expected to see Bernie more in the state than I have,” said Colombo, speaking on the phone while visiting the home of a Sanders supporter in his county. “It’s not like he’s way behind and giving up. He’s right there in the running. He could take Iowa and that could set him up for the rest of the nation."

