If you were among the 8 million people who watched this month's Democratic primary debate in Ohio, you might think Democrats are chiefly concerned about health care or foreign policy. To hear Joe Biden, you might even suppose taxes on people "clipping coupons in the stock market" is something their voters care about. But you would be wrong.
Poll after poll suggests an overriding concern about defeating President Donald Trump. And voters are willing to select whichever candidate they think likeliest to do that.
While this has given rise to an arcane debate on the left about whether "electability" is even a thing (left-wingers, who win few elections, say it is not), Democratic voters might consider that one of their primary candidates already has a history of pegging back Trump's electoral gains.
That is U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — whom the Economist recently joined aboard her new "Amy for America" bus in eastern Iowa.
Brisk, diminutive, with a line in self-deprecating humor — and another in comfortable cardigans and shoes — the 59-year-old Klobuchar offered herself to the small crowds of Midwesterners awaiting her as one of their own. The title of her autobiography — "The Senator Next Door" — "might have been written for Iowa!" she joshes in Cedar Rapids.
She can see Iowa from her front porch in Minneapolis, she says in Sigourney, a flyspeck of coffee and antique shops amid vast acres of corn.
She can see Canada from it, too, she adds, in a pop at Sarah Palin, between listing her center-left policies.
Klobuchar is for making Medicare more available but not free for all. She is for expanding access to public college, but not free four-year degrees. She is for banning assault weapons but not forcibly buying back the millions in private hands.
