Two Democrats in the 2020 primary field find themselves in a Dean-like predicament. Elizabeth Warren’s support skews white, young and highly educated. Pete Buttigieg’s base, most starkly in Iowa and New Hampshire, is older, wealthier and even whiter. Both need to get more support from people of color, or they won’t get far after Iowa and New Hampshire. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt to increase their appeal to working-class whites, who, along with African American voters, have so far given Joe Biden a seemingly impervious base of support.

By “make the turn,” Dean meant pivoting from being, as he put it, a firebrand “who wasn’t going to put up with any crap from any establishment” to being a more polished and unifying candidate, one who knew that the job of president is “to make things work, and that means you can’t exclude people whether you like them or not.”

Dean tried to do that in his campaign speeches, but flinched. “It was really a tug of war. I could actually feel the tugging as I would try to do it,” he said to HuffPost of his internal monologue. “I would try to give a measured speech, and the audience would be completely flat. And I wouldn't let myself leave them flat.” Dean never was able to evolve his persona beyond what his audience had grown to expect.

The 2020 campaigns of Warren and Buttigieg now face similar questions. For a few days in early October, after a run of positive press and big crowds, it seemed as if Warren was poised to break out of her base of college-educated white voters. Yet since Warren peaked in early October and caught Biden in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, she has fallen 12 points and returned to third place. She hasn’t led the past five Iowa polls nor the past four New Hampshire polls.

Buttigieg may be entering his own rough patch. He led in a string of Iowa polls in November, but the first one of December, conducted by Emerson, has him in third place. In just a two-week span, he dropped 7 points in the national Quinnipiac poll. He can take some solace from his 1-point lead in the Dec. 9 WBUR/MassINC poll of New Hampshire. But his most severe problem remains his inability to earn more than a wisp of support from black voters in South Carolina. So far, his support comes from a slice of the white electorate too thin to sustain him throughout a national campaign.

College-educated, affluent white voters often turn a dark horse Democratic presidential candidate into a media sensation, but almost as often the preferred candidate of those voters ultimately comes up short. Expressing a desire to remain neutral in the 2020 race, Dean turned down a request from POLITICO to offer any public advice for the candidates. But I wondered whether other Democratic runners-up and their top aides had advice for how Warren and Buttigieg could do what their campaigns couldn’t: win.

In 1984, Gary Hart ran an especially strong campaign for a candidate with a highly educated base of support. Beginning as a little-known senator from Colorado who was challenging former Vice President Walter Mondale, Hart broke through in New Hampshire, swept New England, won most of the states west of the Mississippi River, and took his campaign all the way to the convention.

“Our weakness politically was Illinois to Pennsylvania, or really, Illinois to New York—the traditional manufacturing base, blue collar,” Hart told me. “I had been on magazine covers with Bill Bradley and a few others as an ‘Atari Democrat’ and that was a big burden in those industrial states to get rid of—that all I cared about were computers and Silicon Valley.”

Hart told me a major pivot—a “turn” like the one Dean says he failed to make—to fix his Rust Belt problem wasn’t considered. “I don’t remember any skull session where we sat around and said, ‘How can I become an industrialist?’” he said. “We just campaigned everywhere.” Even in retrospect, he doesn't think a pivot was a viable option: “Shifting tone, shifting direction, shifting message—it does look too manufactured.”

Buttigieg and Warren both face, as Hart did, a former vice president with strong blue-collar support, plus the added element of a democratic socialist who connects with younger downscale voters. And perhaps their identities—Warren’s gender, Buttigieg’s sexual orientation—pose different and unfair but tough challenges. Whatever the precise reason, so far their campaign style and issue positioning haven’t done the trick with white working-class voters.

Another risk for dark horse candidates is they can rise before they are truly well known, and that makes them vulnerable to assaults on their character. Witness Paul Simon, who briefly became a surprise leader in the 1988 presidential race. The first-term Illinois senator resembled Orville Redenbacher, clad in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses. But he turned that nostalgic look into a strength, explicitly identifying himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt and cultivating a reputation of integrity, which struck a chord primarily with the college-educated. Simon’s breakthrough moment happened on Nov. 16, 1987, with a first-place, 24 percent showing in the coveted Des Moines Register poll. Perhaps ominously, Buttigieg’s breakthrough moment was on Nov. 16 of this year, with a first-place, 25 percent showing in the coveted Des Moines Register poll.

Simon’s unapologetic support for New Deal-style spending programs soon raised electability concerns regarding his ability to reach more moderate, less educated voters. But the candidate didn’t see a problem, Simon’s campaign manager Brian Lunde said to me.

“In his mind,” said Lunde, “he didn’t think he had to pivot because he was for Gramm-Rudman-Hollings”—a law designed to constrain spending, as well as a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. (By simultaneously running on increased spending and balanced budgets, Simon was in fact embodying the spirit of FDR’s 1932 campaign.)

Simon’s rivals saw a vulnerability and exploited it. “They began to coordinate among themselves; how do we stop Simon’s rise in Iowa?” Lunde said. A few weeks after Simon took the lead in Iowa, several rivals hammered Simon during a nationally televised debate by yoking him to the antithesis of FDR: Ronald Reagan.

After Simon assured voters he was a “pay-as-you-go Democrat,” Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt shot back that Simon was a “promise-as-you-go Democrat” who, like Reagan, promised balanced budgets and didn’t deliver. Then Gephardt landed the killer blow: “Simonomics is really Reaganomics with a bow tie.”

Others piled on. Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt accused Simon (and Gephardt) of “flim-flam,” because they wouldn’t commit to raising taxes. Rev. Jesse Jackson said Simon’s balanced budget amendment was “ham and egg justice.” He proceeded to tell a fable of the chicken and the hog that worked together to make a ham and egg sandwich: “The chicken dropped an egg and moved on, but the hog had to drop a leg.” In other words, the balanced budget amendment’s constraints seemingly would be applied fairly, but in practice they would hit the poor the hardest.

“That chipped away at his honesty, when he wouldn’t get specific” said Lunde, noting that Simon’s image as a man of virtuous character was a crucial factor in his appeal. Instead of shifting gears, he stood in place, while his opponents stripped him of his main strength. He was knocked back into second place when Iowans caucused. He soon bottomed out.

Warren has never shown an interest in wooing deficit hawks. But in gripping her position on single-payer health insurance even tighter, her opponents have found opportunities to chip away at her honesty. Her insistence that a multitrillion dollar program can be funded without raising taxes on the middle class failed to convince “Medicare for All” skeptics that she’s hiding something. And her legislative strategy was criticized as needlessly protracted and convoluted, prompting some Bernie Sanders supporters to question her sincerity.

The recent signs of slippage in Buttigieg’s poll numbers may also be related to attacks on integrity. He has been on the defensive regarding his past work as a corporate management consultant, especially his work for Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield, which his leftists critics—most prominently, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which backs Warren—claim contributed to layoffs.

Long-shot white candidates from the North, with little experience politicking in the South, also tend to meet resistance from that region’s crucial black voters. In 1992, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas scored an upset win in New Hampshire, powered by what were then called “Volvo Voters.” Tsongas won some more primaries in the Northeast and West, following the path of Gary Hart. Then in March, he hit a brick wall in the South. Arkansas’ Bill Clinton—a moderate who knew the South intimately—painted Tsongas as a “cold-blooded” conservative who peddled “trickle-down economics.” Clinton’s blowout victories across the Deep South left Tsongas staggered and put Clinton on a path to the Democratic nomination.

“We couldn’t remake Paul to fit the Southern profile,” then-campaign manager Dennis Kanin said. “He was who he was, and I think that’s true of most candidates.” The business-friendly Tsongas was exactly the kind of Democrat that, today, Warren would tag as too close to corporate donors and too eager to constrain spending. But like Tsongas, she is a socially liberal Massachusetts Democrat, and there is no evidence she has figured out how to break through in the South. Buttigieg also has no Southern ties, and his inability to register among South Carolina’s African Americans has become so glaring that “Saturday Night Live” thought it worthy sketch fodder.

Unlike some past runners-up, Warren and Buttigieg have early money and grassroots infrastructure. The Tsongas campaign didn’t start raising real money “until about a week before New Hampshire,” Kanin said, making it difficult to compete wire-to-wire. Both Hart and Kanin argue that wins in Iowa and New Hampshire could generate enough momentum to overcome resistance among voters in the industrial Midwest and the South.

Simon’s campaign manager Lunde was particularly bearish on Warren’s prospects, arguing a move toward the middle once had merit, but now it’s too late. “She needed to pivot during her rise,” Lunde said. “Do it before anyone is looking.”

Hart, who has endorsed fellow Coloradan, Sen. Michael Bennet, similarly warned against making too many strategic adjustments in the middle of a campaign. “To become somebody else, or sing a different song, I would think it would not work,” he said. “It will seem too programmed and too kind of conniving to work.”

But Warren did pivot during her rise. It just was a pivot leftward. She began the campaign with a more flexible posture on health care. In a March town hall on CNN, Warren said she would prioritize smaller health care reforms such as lowering prescription drug costs. She mused about various incremental steps toward Medicare for All, including a buy-in option for Medicare or lowering the age for eligibility. She even said “there could” be a role for private insurance companies.

Then three months later, in the first 2020 debate, Warren emphatically declared, “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All.” For a time, that leftward shift helped her gain ground, but it seems to have damaged her ability to grow among the pragmatic.

Buttigieg executed an early pivot as well. When he first burst on to the political scene in the spring, he was a progressive partisan who emphasized abolishing the Electoral College and skewered Vice President Mike Pence on social issues. Then after a stagnant summer, he reemerged in the fall as a moderate unifier. He now speaks of how he can “bring the country together,” chides Warren’s approach to governing as “polarizing our country further” and slams single-payer health care for denying Americans a choice for insurance plans.

Tacking to the center has worked, at least in Iowa, to expand the ideological breadth of Buttigieg’s support. In Monmouth’s previous Iowa poll in August, Biden held the support of 36 percent of moderates and conservatives, and Buttigieg only 8 percent. In its November poll, the two candidates were tied among moderates and conservatives at 26 percent.

But Buttigieg still has not made inroads with South Carolina’s African American community. And Warren doesn’t perform much better. In a Dec. 9 YouGov poll of South Carolina, Buttigieg’s support among blacks was only 1 percent, and Warren’s just 7 percent.

Warren and Buttigieg probably do not believe they have to make any sudden moves to expand their support among African Americans, or among white working-class voters. After all, they both already have policy proposals and campaign rhetoric geared to those constituencies, and they may believe success is a matter of perseverance, not pivots. The defeats of Dean, Tsongas, Simon and Hart don’t offer reassurance for that path. But there is one Democratic nominee they could use as a model to emulate.

Not Barack Obama, who also started out as a favorite of college-educated, affluent whites. But the man who became the first African American president didn’t need a major campaign overhaul to add African Americans to his coalition; he just needed to prove his viability by winning Iowa.

The Democrat besides Obama who won the nomination with an initial upscale, white base was Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

He survived the 1988 primary without making any significant adjustments along the way, partly because he was one of the best-financed candidates, and partly because the field was weak. Unlike 1992 when Bill Clinton owned the South, in 1988 the South divided along racial lines between Rev. Jesse Jackson and Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee. The top Midwesterner in the race, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, failed to become the candidate of the working-class after the Dukakis campaign savaged him as a flip-flopper. When Dukakis leaned on white-collar suburban votes to win Florida and Texas on Super Tuesday, he avoided being tagged as a regional candidate. “It was the last guy standing with money,” Lunde said of the 1988 campaign.

Like Dukakis, Warren and Buttigieg are financed for the long haul. And the sprawling field may be fractured enough to allow one of them to eke out just enough plurality wins across the country.

Yet the Dukakis example comes with its own warning label. Dukakis didn’t have to shake up his strategy, but in the process of securing the nomination, he failed to build a broad intraparty coalition that could help him withstand the severe blows he eventually suffered from the George H.W. Bush campaign. Cultivating appeal across demographic lines in the primary helps to steel the nominee for the general election.

Perhaps most important, Dukakis’ success hinged upon the failures of others. While it’s well within the realm of possibility that Warren or Buttigieg could win because Biden makes one gaffe too many, or Sanders hits a socialist ceiling, or Klobuchar never creates a spark in Iowa, a better campaign wouldn’t wait to have its destiny determined by its competitors.

Hart and Kanin are right to caution against abrupt shifts that look phony. And Lunde is correct that it’s best to pivot “before anyone is looking.” But both Warren and Buttigieg must recognize that neither has a sufficient diversity of support to win the Democratic nomination at the present time, and something has to change for them to earn it. Fortunately for them, earlier in the campaign, each successfully performed a critical pivot. Now it’s time for one more.

