DES MOINES — Days before Iowa Democrats went to their precinct caucuses, the news dropped like a bomb.

Leaked poll numbers from what would have been the final Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place with 13 percent.


Biden’s Iowa staffers were floored, according to a person familiar with discussions among several aides at the time.

“None of us thought we were at 13 percent,” the person said. “We can’t be in fourth place. That just cannot be right.”

But it was right. And it confirmed what rival campaigns had whispered for months — Biden wasn’t inspiring Iowa voters and his support was inch-deep.

While the full Iowa caucus results still aren’t in, Biden’s unexpectedly weak performance Monday — he’s in fourth place with 16 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting — has provoked frustration and recriminations within the campaign, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides and surrogates.

Donors needed to be calmed. Staffers began pointing fingers over what exactly went wrong. The campaign parted ways with its Iowa field director, Adrienne Bogen.


Outside the campaign, Biden’s Iowa train wreck revived questions about the durability of his candidacy, and threatened to slow a fundraising operation that was already showing signs of stress.

“We had precinct captains who didn’t know how to run a caucus. And a few didn’t even show. We lost friggin’ people on the second ballot of voting in the caucus. Someone’s head had to roll,” said a top-level Biden campaign staffer Wednesday.

But later that night, Biden’s early state director Pete Kavanaugh, took to Twitter to publicly refute the notion, saying Bogen “has done incredible & tireless work on behalf of the VP and I am proud to be on a team with her. She’s as smart, tough, and committed as they come. For someone to be smeared for committing time to family is as sad as it is pathetic.”


And Bogen’s allies insisted she was being scapegoated by a floundering campaign, and added that she had complained about its dysfunction, which she had blamed on higher-ups.

Several Biden aides had choice words to describe what led to the former vice president’s disappointing fourth place finish.

“It was a cluster-f---” said one. “A shit show,” said another. “A f---ing disaster,” said a third.

Questions swirled among staffers and donors over whether a higher-level staffing overhaul was in order, pointing to both campaign manager Greg Schultz and Pete Kavanaugh, assistant campaign manager of states, as the ultimate authorities in Iowa.

Biden’s Iowa state director, Jake Braun, is moving to a contract position instead of continuing as a full-time campaign employee due to a preexisting commitment to teach a course at the University of Chicago, according to the campaign.

Even Biden, who began Tuesday morning in New Hampshire bragging that he probably did well in Iowa, admitted Wednesday afternoon that he suffered a “gut punch.”

“I expected to do better,” Biden said at a CNN town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, Wednesday evening. “And I expected that our organization would perform better.”

Just days prior to the caucuses, Schultz had given a private presentation to supporters about an expected outcome that was considerably rosier.


That presentation, according to two people with direct knowledge, predicted Biden would finish in the 20s in Iowa and have robust support in a cross-section of precincts across the state, including urban, rural and working class areas.

The implication was that Biden would pick up both Klobuchar and Buttigieg supporters when they failed to reach 15 percent minimum needed to be viable. Instead, it was rival Pete Buttigieg who appeared to do that across the state.

“Clearly the campaign underperformed its own expectations,” said one of the individuals familiar with the presentation.

Those who spoke to POLITICO, many on the condition of anonymity because they still worked for the campaign, complained that precinct captains were not well trained in Iowa, or in some cases, didn’t show up at all on caucus night.

Some of the precinct tallies from election night showed Biden losing support after the first alignment, a sign of weak support or poorly trained precinct captains or both.

Several campaign staffers said the field problems began mounting months ago when Biden’s fundraising tanked in the late summer and it pulled back on hiring and had to go dark on TV.

In the months before the caucuses, aides had butted heads over the need for more polling, with some saying they were “flying blind” about where Biden needed to beef up staffing, according to two aides.

One Biden campaign adviser, however, countered that argument, saying the campaign relied heavily on analytics that gave a complete picture of where to invest resources and where to build Biden’s event schedule.


And some volunteers painted a different picture of caucus night.

“I think obviously there was a gap in the state organization,” said Jim Mowrer, a Biden campaign volunteer who assists in field and veterans outreach, but, he added of the outcome, “I’m not totally surprised.”

“I think a lot of places obviously where they did release the raw vote, he was just short of 15 percent. In my precinct, an urban-liberal place, we were just short of 15 percent. The Iowa caucus-goers have been traditionally liberal.”

Dick Harpootlian, Biden’s top South Carolina surrogate who traveled to Iowa to knock on doors and assist in caucus organization, had a different view on the organization from the night.

“I was attending a caucus training the morning of the caucuses,” Harpootlian said. And the events ran smoothly for the campaign in the precinct where he volunteered, he noted.

But rather than entering New Hampshire as one of the frontrunners, he is badly hobbled. That will only intensify if he’s blown out in Tuesday’s primary.

Amid fears of cash drying up, one adviser described ongoing discussions about how to avoid a repeat — fight harder in New Hampshire? Retrench to Nevada? Or pull all the way back to South Carolina, the campaign’s Feb. 29 firewall?

The upcoming New Hampshire primary doesn’t offer any respite to Biden: advisers within the campaign have long considered the state among the weakest early states for Biden, in part due to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders’ home state proximity. The campaign has also long said Biden would fare better in more diverse places like Nevada and South Carolina.


Biden has trailed Sanders, who is in first place, in nearly every poll taken in New Hampshire this year.

While the campaign remains confident of its advantage in South Carolina, where Biden enjoys outsized African-American support, his position there might not be able to withstand a series of dispiriting defeats.

“We believe South Carolina is our firewall and it is,” said a Biden adviser. “But if we lose three straight in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, the fire can jump the wall.”

To that end, a pro-Biden super PAC recently provided $900,000 in air cover in New Hampshire this week, while the campaign has already started to show more of a commitment to Nevada by committing $76,000 more in TV advertising money in the weeks leading up to its Feb. 22 caucuses, according to Advertising Analytics.

The data show that Biden is on pace to spend a total of $607,000 on TV in Nevada, behind Warren, who is spending less than $1 million, and Tom Steyer, who is spending $650,000.

And more staff is on the way there, the adviser said.

“Nevada is crying out for resources and we should give it to them, but some of us think we can rely on South Carolina and that’s a big mistake,” the adviser said. “Bernie is on the move in Nevada. It’s a caucus state. We just got crushed in a caucus state. Do the math.”

Biden appeared to acknowledge his tenuous position Wednesday, conceding that he “got knocked down.” But he also displayed a more fiery approach by sharply criticizing Buttigieg by name for the first time on the campaign trail.


Supporters liked the new fight in him.

“This was a knock. But he admitted it. He’s going to get up and keep going and fight even harder,” said Sarah Morgenthau, a Biden donor and fundraiser. “Showing that strength and resilience shows that Joe Biden magic. It’s not just that big smile. It’s that he has that ability to identify with the struggles of everyday Americans.”

