MILFORD, N.H. — In a church basement in the mid-sized town of Milford, New Hampshire, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet wrapped up a long day of campaigning with repeated swipes at the Tea Party movement to the right and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to the left on Saturday night.
The choice of foils — not Democratic frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden with whom Bennet is most likely competing for moderate voters, not Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren who is surging in the polls and for the most part, not even President Donald Trump who visited the state for one of his signature rallies two days before — more than anything else introduced Bennet to the crowd as a middle-of-the-road candidate, a sober and reasonable figure in a crowded field.
While he hit both targets before several dozen voters at a potluck dinner hosted by the town party committee, Bennet reserved his harshest words for the Freedom Caucus, the lasting result of the Tea Party movement more than ten years later. "They're a minority of a minority in the House of Representatives," he said. "They call themselves the Freedom Caucus. I think that's a very ironic title for a bunch of people who believe they have a monopoly on wisdom, for a bunch of people who thought they were channeling the founding fathers when what they were really channeling was Sarah Palin's cartoon version of the founding fathers."
"They're the most fiscally irresponsible people to show up in Washington D.C. in decades," he continued, his voice rising. "Nobody believes me when I say this but it is a fact and it is true."
Yet in response to the first question of his question-and-answer session and several times after that, Bennet contrasted himself with Sanders, unprompted. The first question, which asked about his views on student debt, actually made reference to Warren and her plan to wipe out student debt for 75 percent of people. But Bennet pivoted to Sanders, who outflanked his progressive rival with an universal student debt cancellation policy in June.
"I do not support Bernie's plan to write off all the student loan debt in this country," he said. He added that people would come knocking and start asking about their mortgage — "Bernie doesn't have an answer for that" — and warned that debt relief would not reduce the cost of college — "There's nothing in Bernie's plan to actually make college less expensive." A former superintendent of the inner-city Denver public school system, Bennet also reminded voters that most Americans do not attend four-year college.
Bennet returned to Sanders, who has advocated a Medicare-for-All system, on health care several minutes later. The Colorado Senator told voters he wanted to "finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act" by passing a public option, a provision that was removed from the original bill after Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster. "I think that's a much easier way to deal with prices than what Bernie's proposing," he said.
He praised Sanders for his "honesty" and his "ideological commitment" on the abolition of private insurance, but warned that millions of people would lose their Medicare Advantage and union-negotiated plans. He also reprised a familiar attack on the Vermont Senator, effective in a room of local party members but generally not effective in a state that backed him 60 percent to 38 percent in the 2016 primary. "Bernie, to be honest and candid about it, won't even call himself a Democrat," he said. "No, he calls himself a democratic socialist."
The criticisms of Sanders, while memorable on a campaign trail that has largely avoided the conflict of the debate stage, all led back to Bennet's crusade against the Tea Party movement and the Freedom Caucus. The Colorado Senator, who was the only swing-state Democrats to win back-to-back reelections in the disastrous cycles of 2010 and 2016, feared that a far-left candidate at the top of the ticket would not win battleground areas.
"Everybody's trying to outmaneuver each other to the left in the primary," he said. "My view is that it's really important that we nominate someone that says the same things in the primary that they say in the general election. When you represent a state like Colorado or a place like Milford, that's a kind of discipline that's built in to our politics."
His reference to Milford, a town that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped several seats in the state legislature in 2018, showed that, at the bottom of the polls and not yet qualified for the third or fourth debates, Bennet is going all in on retail politics. He also invoked former state Speaker of the House Bill O'Brien, a Tea Party legislator who represented the neighboring town of Mont Vernon, New Hampshire and once compared Obamacare to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as a local example of the problem several times.
For all his attacks on the Tea Party as an extremist minority with outsized influence in Congress, Bennet however remained an institutionalist: he does not support the elimination of the filibuster in the Senate, a rule that allows a 40-vote minority to block non-spending legislation. His fellow westerners in the race, Montana Governor Steve Bullock and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, have both campaigned on scrapping the procedure.
Bennet's response to Democrats who dislike when Republicans filibuster their legislation was both very straight-forward and not straight-forward at all: "My answer is what the Milford Democrats did," he exclaimed. "You got to win elections! You have to win elections. You can't lose elections."
With that standard, a benchmark that Democrats care about more than usual in 2020, Bennet spoke from a place of authority. "I'm the only person in this race that's won two national elections in a purple state, in a tough state," he said after the event in brief one-on-one interview. "I'm used to running from behind. We only have close elections in Colorado. And I just need to be in it long enough for it to start to click."
Whether his message will start to click one church basement of local Democrats in New Hampshire at a time is unclear, but Bennet pointed to a history of come-from behind candidates.
"What needs to happen is history has to be our guide," he said. "If history is our guide, the leading candidates [in the polls in the early stages of the campaign] in New Hampshire and Iowa never are the people who win. There's a lot that happens between now and the election when people start to make their decisions about how they want to exercise this incredibly solemn responsibility that they take as seriously as they do [and] that has a way of rewarding of candidates that keep showing up."
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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