EXETER, N.H. — Senator Bernie Sanders had simply completed addressing supporters right here Saturday afternoon, reprising his stump speech requirem
EXETER, N.H. — Senator Bernie Sanders had simply completed addressing supporters right here Saturday afternoon, reprising his stump speech requirements about elevating the minimal wage, addressing local weather change and implementing common well being care when a voter raised her hand to ask a couple of subject he didn’t point out however which had more and more loomed over the race.
How do Democratic presidential candidates, the voter requested with out straight mentioning Mr. Sanders’s conflict with Senator Elizabeth Warren, keep away from infighting?
Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, briefly criticized the information media — which he mentioned “usually needs and exaggerates battle” — earlier than noting he had not focused any of his rivals in his remarks.
“The most effective factor for all of the Democratic candidates,” he mentioned, was to “give attention to problems with the working households of America.”
But after Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, angrily accused each other of mendacity about whether or not he had informed her a lady couldn’t defeat President Trump, and with simply over two weeks till the Feb. three Iowa caucuses, supporters of the 2 progressives and erstwhile political allies remained upset.
“I used to be actually disillusioned,” mentioned Jayne Cousins, an ardent Sanders supporter who attended his rally right here. She predicted Ms. Warren’s declare, which Mr. Sanders denies, would adversely influence Ms. Warren as a result of, she mentioned, it was so implausible.
However when Ms. Warren returned to Iowa for the primary time since her confrontation with Mr. Sanders on the controversy stage in Des Moines, it was not tough to search out voters who mentioned the other: that Mr. Sanders would pay a value for what they noticed as his insensitivity on one of the vital fraught points within the main.
“I’ve a number of associates who mentioned they gained’t vote for him,” due to the incident, mentioned David Jansen, who attended Ms. Warren’s town-hall-style assembly in Newton, Iowa, on Friday.
The tensions between the 2 candidates started every week in the past, after a report that Mr. Sanders’s marketing campaign had informed its discipline organizers to characterize Ms. Warren’s base as prosperous and elite, which brought about the Massachusetts senator to say she was “disillusioned” in Mr. Sanders.
The following step was extra drastic: Ms. Warren mentioned in a press release that in a personal assembly in 2018 between the 2 senators, Mr. Sanders informed her {that a} girl couldn’t win the presidency. Mr. Sanders vehemently denied he had mentioned that, which prompted Ms. Warren to confront him after the controversy.
It’s too quickly to know the political fallout, but it surely comes as Mr. Sanders seems to be gaining energy and Ms. Warren is struggling to reignite her marketing campaign. If these trajectories are accelerated or reversed, it could be traced again to the second their longstanding nonaggression pact fell aside.
The candidates themselves try to douse the flames.
Ms. Warren repeatedly declined to handle the rift with Mr. Sanders when she spoke to reporters after her Iowa occasion Friday. And Mr. Sanders declined to reply a query from a reporter Saturday in New Hampshire earlier than alluding solely glancingly to the matter when the voter introduced it up
But he’s clearly taking steps to inoculate himself with ladies voters. Recognizing the chance the accusation poses, his marketing campaign started airing an advert in Iowa that highlights his help of ladies’s rights.
“Bernie Sanders is on our facet, and he at all times has been,” a feminine narrator says within the industrial, trumpeting the senator’s help for abortion rights, for household depart ensures and for equal-pay laws.
In New Hampshire, he added a cease on the Ladies’s March in Portsmouth to his schedule and was launched there by the writer Naomi Klein. In Exeter, Mr. Sanders saluted feminine leaders of the resistance to Mr. Trump and added a promise to his stump speech.
“I wish to thank the ladies of this nation for main the opposition to Trump at each stage,” he mentioned. He then vowed: “I’ll by no means nominate any particular person to the Supreme Courtroom or the federal courts who will not be 100 % professional Roe v. Wade.”
Ms. Warren didn’t add new remarks about gender in her journey to Iowa, however one in every of her marketing campaign co-chairs, Consultant Deb Haaland of New Mexico, launched her with a nod towards her history-making potential.
“Elizabeth Warren runs by means of airports and runs by means of prepare stations — she’s a lady on a mission,” Ms. Haaland mentioned. “And in case you haven’t heard,” she added, “she’s a lady that may win the White Home.”
Ms. Warren’s supporters in Iowa mentioned the episode with Mr. Sanders, which had prompted his supporters to hurl assaults at her on-line and even seek advice from her with a snake emoji, was all too harking back to his remedy of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
At a Deliberate Parenthood occasion with Ms. Warren in Des Moines Saturday, two ladies talked about the forwards and backwards with Mr. Sanders and one mentioned that she was getting flashbacks to the final presidential race. One girl requested Ms. Warren what her plans had been for “shutting him down and…