DES MOINES — The phone calls to Amy Nielsen came around two hours apart.



It was last Monday around 12 p.m., not long after the news broke, when her phone lit up with his name. By then, Nielsen considered Cory Booker “part of [her] family.” He knew her husband. He knew her kids. He knew her kids’ friends. She was the first state representative in Iowa to endorse Booker. So the end of his campaign felt — “and I’m not exaggerating,” she said this week — like “a death.” On the phone, Booker assured her they would stay in touch. “I’m in your life forever,” he told her. “We’re family now.”

The next call came around 2:30 p.m., this time from an unknown number. Nielsen was at the capitol in Des Moines and let the call go to voicemail. What she heard in the one-minute recording, she said in an interview this week, came as a “gut punch.”

It was Pete Buttigieg, calling to seek Nielsen’s support now that her candidate had made the decision to “step aside.”

“What he said was not appropriate, and calling me four hours after [Booker dropped out] was not appropriate,” said Nielsen, who provided a copy of Buttigieg’s voicemail.

“It was a gut punch — like, really? He did not ‘step aside’ for you,” she said. “Like, wow, that’s some nerve right there.”

Later that night, she said, Nielsen heard from one of Booker’s field organizers who said she had already been contacted by the Buttigieg campaign to go door-knock.

Nielsen, a 42-year-old Iowa Democrat who has served in the legislature since 2016, was one of at least six top Booker endorsers who had received calls from Buttigieg the day the campaign ended. It is not uncommon for candidates to try to win over a fallen rival’s supporters — Booker did the same after Sen. Kamala Harris left the race late last year — and some endorsers said they weren’t bothered to hear from him. But for Nielsen and at least three of Booker’s top backers in a state where Democrats expect a personal touch, the timing and content of the calls struck them as tactless and insensitive.

At the end of his voicemail, Buttigieg left a phone number for one of his staffers and asked Nielsen to schedule a time to talk. “I hope we’ll connect down the line,” he told her. “Thanks again.”

With 11 days until the nominating process begins here in February, countless Iowa Democrats are facing a raw and intractable reality: the end. In many cases, this year’s historically large field has lent an atypically large role to endorsers and supporters, with more space and time to grow close to the candidates. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton had dozens of endorsers in Iowa alone. For younger leaders in Iowa Democratic politics like Nielsen, this is their first time playing in a competitive primary as elected officials.

In Iowa, the nominating process is as close as it is personal. Feelings get hurt. There is, Democrats here say, a real “grieving period.”

When Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race hours before the Liberty and Justice dinner, the premier event in presidential politics here, staffers and volunteers gathered near the event site, sobbing and hugging. After she left the race, Harris flew to Iowa to personally thank her team. And last weekend, five days after Booker ended the campaign, his young staff gathered at a dive bar in Des Moines, still dressed in their candidate’s signature blue, red, and black.

A spokesperson for Buttigieg, Matt Corridoni, said the former mayor has “a great deal of respect for Sen. Booker, the campaign he ran, and the voters who supported him and continue to support his vision.”

Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic Party chair whose endorsement lent Harris a significant early boost in the state, warned other campaigns to back off after the California senator left the race. Right away, Harris organizers heard from rival staffers, driving Dvorsky to express her outrage on Twitter.