Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein

The brief lull in the primary campaign came as nearly the entire field descended on Northern Iowa on Friday night for the Wing Ding dinner, an annual event that has long served as an early testing ground for Democratic presidential aspirants.

In speech after speech, the candidates assailed President Donald Trump and Republicans for their lack of action on gun control, painting the party as allied with white supremacy.

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio recounted his recent trip to Kentucky, where he led protests of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, for not acting on gun control legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

“We need gun reform in America and we need it now,” Ryan said, bringing the crowd to its feet. “People are dying on the streets of this country, getting killed by weapons that were made for battlefields not neighborhoods like Dayton, Ohio.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey used his five-minute slot to deliver a somber sermon on the “moral moment” faced by the country.

“This is a week where I will not let the slaughter of our fellow citizens just disappear within the next media cycle,” he said.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, who received rapturous applause from the crowd, focused his remarks on turning the page from the Trump presidency, describing white nationalism as a “national security threat.”

“We’ve got to win not just the era but the future of this country,” Buttigieg said. “We are going to fix things in this country; we are going to do it together.”

The party fundraiser, held at Clear Lake’s iconic Surf Ballroom, where Buddy Holly played his final rock show before dying in a plane crash in a nearby cornfield, has become an essential stop for Democratic presidential contenders.

Barack Obama spoke here in 2007 before his presidential campaign caught fire. And last year, when Michael Avenatti, the celebrity lawyer, was weighing a presidential bid, he wowed the crowd and presaged the 2020 campaign by urging Democrats to fight as dirty as Trump does.

(Avenatti abandoned his presidential hopes in December. Four months later he was charged in a scheme to extort Nike, the shoe manufacturer.)

Since the mass shootings last weekend, many in the Democratic primary field have heightened their denunciations of Trump, labeling him a racist and a white supremacist. The back-to-back shootings shook the nation, giving Democratic candidates fresh opportunities to contrast themselves with the man they hope to replace.

As he left the White House on Friday night for a vacation at his New Jersey golf club, Trump called for lawmakers to pass “meaningful” background checks, a sign that the president finds himself under new political pressure.

Even so, there were no major signals Friday from the National Rifle Association, the White House or Capitol Hill that action on the politically fraught issue was closer to compromise or resolution.

The speeches at the Wing Ding dinner surpassed the three-hour mark, with 22 candidates delivering pitches in back-to-back-to-back five-minute increments to a sweaty room of Democratic activists. Several opened their comments with cracks about the size of the field, a reality that’s begun to worry party officials and voters.

Setting himself apart from his rivals, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke stayed home in El Paso to attend memorials and visit with shooting victims in his mourning hometown.

“I’m here to make sure that at this moment we do not allow ourselves to be defined by this act of terror,” he said by way of a video message, “but instead by the way this community overcomes this attack.”

Outside, young boosters for a half-dozen campaigns chanted and screamed at one another. Someone played “Come on Eileen” for no discernible reason. And former Vice President Joe Biden slow jogged outside to greet his supporters.

Of course, as Holly once crooned, everyday the caucuses are “a-getting closer” and the race is “a-getting faster.” The weekend signifies the unofficial start of the fall campaign season, a time when the field is likely to narrow as candidates fail to qualify for debates and start hemorrhaging campaign cash.

The dinner comes as the field battles to overtake Biden, who has commanded a steady lead in the race despite a series of gaffes. On Thursday evening, Biden raised eyebrows during a speech in Iowa when he said that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

A new survey in the state shows Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gaining ground and Sen. Bernie Sanders sliding. The Vermont senator’s win in the caucuses three years ago fueled his insurgent campaign.

Both senators will greet voters at the fair this weekend, joining a parade of candidates stopping by the beloved annual event that draws voters from across the state.

Julián Castro took his children on a tour of the cattle barns that included the former housing secretary taking an unfortunate step in cow manure. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard sampled the vegan corn dog, hoping she did not offend Iowans by skipping the famous pork chop-on-a-stick.

Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur who qualified Thursday for the next debate, regaled voters and reporters with his experience eating supersized turkey legs, as he stopped for photos during a tour of the fair.

“I’m a big fan of Renaissance fairs,” he explained.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/politics/iowa-democrats-wing-ding-dinner.html" id="dc85b2b5-0d83-3373-adbd-e7ef9bad82ba">The New York Times</a>.

At Wing Ding in Iowa, Democrats Confront the NRA and White Supremacy

CLEAR LAKE, Iowa — The Democratic presidential candidates paused here for a moment of silence for the victims of the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, underscoring how the turbulent events of the past week have refocused the primary contest.

In speech after speech, the candidates focused their fire on assailing President Donald Trump and Republicans for their lack of action on gun control and abetting white supremacy — rather than focusing their fire on each other.

The party fundraiser, held at Clear Lake’s iconic Surf Ballroom, where Buddy Holly played his final rock show before dying in a plane crash in a nearby cornfield, has become an essential stop for Democratic activists and candidates to size up the field.

This year, Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and J.D. Scholten, who is beginning a second campaign against Rep. Steve King of Iowa, won the strongest reception from the audience.

Jerry Dietz, a 79-year-old farmer, said he arrived at the event backing Sen. Amy Klobuchar but left most impressed by Buttigieg, although he worried the country wasn’t ready to elect the first gay president.

“I have relatives who wouldn’t vote for him,” he said.

For many Democrats, the mass shootings last weekend offered just another reminder of their most deeply held desire: Ousting Trump.

Many in the Democratic primary field have heightened their denunciations of Trump, labeling him a racist and a white supremacist.

Outside, young boosters for a half-dozen campaigns chanted and screamed at one another. Someone played “Come on Eileen” for no discernible reason. And former Vice President Joe Biden slow-jogged outside to greet his supporters.

The speeches at the Wing Ding dinner surpassed the two-hour mark, with 22 candidates delivering their pitches back-to-back-to-back in five-minute increments to a sweaty room of Democratic activists. Several opened their comments with cracks about the size of the field, a reality that’s begun to worry party officials and voters.

Of course, as Holly once crooned, everyday the Iowa caucuses are “a-getting closer” and the race is “a-getting faster.” The Iowa blitz this weekend signifies the unofficial start of the fall campaign season, a time when the field is likely to narrow as candidates fail to qualify for debates and start hemorrhaging campaign cash.

A new survey in the state shows Warren, of Massachusetts, gaining ground and Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, sliding.

At Iowa's Wing Ding Dinner, Democrats Assail GOP on Gun Control

Was it the loss of working-class white voters or urban black voters? Too much talk of Donald Trump or not enough? And what about those Russians?

If Hillary Clinton’s decision to skip campaigning in Wisconsin was a problem, the party has that one covered. Democrats selected Milwaukee as the site of their national convention a year from now.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, states where Clinton lost after polling ahead for months, Democratic candidates pop up at coffee shops and farmers’ markets, field questions from audiences in packed high school auditoriums and clog up cellphone voice mail boxes.

“You’re making me confess to a secret,” said Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a liberal who represents the area around Madison. He explained that his voice mail was full and no one could leave new messages. It’s been that way since the beginning of the year, and he said has no plans to clear it out. “That way I don’t have to deal with the candidates,” he said. “We have a few calling, obviously.”

From former Vice President Joe Biden, who kicked off his 2020 campaign in a Pittsburgh union hall, to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s effort to energize her campaign with a Rust Belt bus tour last week, the presidential candidates are eager to show Democratic voters, officials and activists that they’re fighting the next war — by way of the last one.

Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania have become an electoral Bermuda triangle for Democrats, with a pull so strong that they’re frequently mentioned at campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters will set the course for the 2020 primary race.

“We’ve got to put someone at the top of the ticket who can win in places like Iowa and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, right? We all know that,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar told voters during a Saturday campaign stop in Waterloo, Iowa.

Two days later Biden said his candidacy relies on winning the same set of states.

“I’m accustomed to winning places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin,” he told 200 people gathered on the driveway at the home of former Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa. “There’s no way a Democrat can get elected president without winning Pennsylvania, you just can’t do it.”

The Rust Belt bus tours and campaign cattle calls are far more about lingering post-traumatic stress from the Democrats’ 2016 loss than any current electoral strategy. While the traditionally blue states are likely to be crucial to Democrats in a general election, none of the three are scheduled to hold their primary vote before Super Tuesday, the dozen-state primary that’s widely expected to winnow the field in early March.

Of course, the 2020 race bears little resemblance to the last race — or any other primary in modern electoral history. The crowded Democratic field is four times as big as it was at its largest point in 2016, historically diverse and features the widest age gap ever seen in a primary contest. Democrats may have new opportunities in states where demographics are shifting like Georgia, Arizona and Texas. And the nominee will face a sitting president, who has shown some eagerness to intervene in the opposing party primary contest.

The field of 2020 candidates is eager to reassure voters that if they win, they won’t take anything for granted, even as they handle the previous Democratic nominee with extreme care. Earlier this year, Klobuchar quickly called Clinton to apologize, after she launched her bid with promises to win in Wisconsin that were seen as a jab at the former Secretary of State.

Still, the implicit critique rings clear to Democratic voters and donors.

“I was one of Hillary Clinton’s finance chairs and unfortunately she didn’t come into Michigan enough. They’re not ignoring us now,” said Barry Goodman, a Democratic donor in the Detroit suburbs who is raising money for Biden.

In town hall meetings and diner meet-and-greets, Democrats frequently bring up the 2016 defeat, often as an origin story for how they became more engaged in national politics.

“People continue to come up to me to tell me the story of where they were on the evening of Nov. 8, 2016, how it impacted them, how they’ve since become engaged,” said Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a freshman from the Philadelphia suburbs who’s being wooed by multiple presidential candidates for an endorsement. “It’s seared in the collective memory.”

For others, the shock of that loss transformed them into cable news pundits, eager to project what white Rust Belt voters may — or may not — want in a candidate over what they personally might prefer.

“We have created an electorate full of pundits and strategists, and the result is that we’re puzzling through not who we like but who we imagine someone else will like,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. “It’s a fool’s errand to imagine who will be appealing to someone else.”

The armchair punditry is only exacerbated by a steady drumbeat of polling on the race. After a period of soul searching, pollsters are once again up and running.

A 2017 report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, an industry group, recommended some changes to polling, notably improving accounting for voters’ education levels, surveying people closer to Election Day and pressing those who say they are undecided on which way they might be leaning. But mostly, the report blamed the “large, problematic errors” in state polls on a single culprit: Money.

“It is a persistent frustration within polling and the larger survey research community that the profession is judged based on how these often under-budgeted state polls perform relative to the election outcome,” the report noted.

But Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll in Milwaukee, who helped craft the report, says while it identified some problems and suggested solutions, none were a “magic bullet.” He’s back in business for the 2020 election, with some tweaks to how he surveys voters who say they’re undecided.

“At least, we have to be self-aware of what we are doing,” he said. “You look at all your data and everything you do and you make some adjustments, but in the end you have to trust your data, recognizing that the data can be wrong.”

That’s certainly a lesson Trump remembers. His campaign is trying to recapture the magic by running on the same message of cracking down on immigration, race-baiting and skepticism toward conventional political wisdom — starting with ignoring what he calls “phony polling.”

“I’m going to do it the same way I did it the first time,” he said in an interview with ABC News last month.

Democrats remain far more divided over what lessons their party should draw from the last race.

“There’s something fundamental about the fact that Trump presented himself as a noxious human and still won that is disconcerting and unsettling about America,” said Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist working for a group focused on suing Trump. “But the why, we don’t know. It depends who you talk to.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren rarely mentions Trump in her stump speech, focusing instead on her plans for transforming the country’s economy. Biden takes nearly the exact opposite tack, weaving his opposition to the current president into nearly all parts of his argument. His supporters argue that the race will be won by convincing moderates that the Democratic nominee is a safer choice than Trump.

“We’ve got to get moderate working-class Democrats back,” said former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, who’s backing Biden. “We’ve got to get candidates that they can relate to.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, argues that the path to victory for Democrats runs through energizing the women, people of color, and younger voters that make up the backbone of the party.

Her campaign, along with others in the party, believes that mobilizing these voters in cities like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia could make the difference in the three states in question.

“There are things we all understand about what happened in 2016 aside from Russian interference,” said Adrianne Shropshire, who runs BlackPAC, an African-American political organizing group. “What is clear is that there were key segments of the Democratic base that stayed home.”

Others think that Democrats should spend less time and money in traditional swing states like Ohio and Iowa and instead focus on shifting their map into the rapidly changing Sun Belt, where they found success during the 2018 midterms.

All the uncertainty has left some Democrats urging voters to take a truly radical stance: Just vote for who you believe in.

“Put your money on someone who energizes and excites you,” Jentleson said, “rather than someone who appeals to a voter in a diner in rural Michigan who you invited in your head.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/us/politics/2020-candidates-election-2016.html" id="79249648-55d5-3026-a021-3ac86e93157b">The New York Times</a>.

Defeat in 2016 Guides Game Plans for 2020

WASHINGTON — Democrats still don’t agree on why they lost the White House in 2016. But they have absolutely no intention of repeating their mistakes.

2020 Won't Repeat the Mistakes of 2016, Whatever They Were

A few hours later, when coverage of President Donald Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s president about Biden and his son had reached a fever pitch, the Biden campaign emailed the news media to declare — in bold underlined words — that any story would be “misleading” if it did not state upfront that Trump’s claims were unsubstantiated.

On Sunday night, the Biden campaign released a fundraising appeal on Twitter asking, “Will media see through Trump’s sleazy playbook? Or fall for it again?” And by Tuesday, the drumbeat of warnings to the press had grown so intense that even Lanny Davis, a longtime Democratic operative, weighed in, attacking “innuendo journalism.”

For the past three years, every Democratic campaign, politician and activist has operated in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, caught in a cycle of self-recrimination and soul-searching about how to defend themselves against Trump and his Republican allies in 2020. It’s a conversation that began in the hours after Clinton’s unexpected loss, as aides reckoned with their inability to defend her from Trump’s conspiratorial accusations, and has continued ever since, with Clinton herself dispensing advice in private conversations with Democratic primary candidates as they prepared to begin their campaigns.

Now, Biden and his team think they have the answers. Among their conclusions: There are no guardrails. No one else will fight your battles. Responding to accusations from Trump and his allies — even to deny them — only gives them oxygen. And haranguing the referees in the media is a must.

Former Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who has endorsed Biden, has advanced the campaign’s argument that the news media has a unique responsibility to provide the proper context for accusations being tossed around in the political arena — a duty he and other Biden backers said they failed to do in 2016.

“In the old days when the truth was something that was respected and the press could be a source of the truth, that was one thing,” Nelson said. “Now when you have a player on the political stage that will say anything and has been shown to not tell the truth over and over and over, freedom of the press means that there is a new responsibility of the press.”

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat who is unaligned in the primary, was even blunter.

“The coverage of the emails was ridiculous,” he said. “It gave Biden license to come out and say, ‘Are you kidding me? We’re not going through this again.’”

Senior aides on the Biden campaign argue that the Clinton campaign was not forceful enough in responding to the long drip of stories about her use of a private email server and the Clintons’ family foundation. Those news reports, even ones that showed that Clinton and her family did not behave improperly, only helped to feed Trump’s narrative that his rival was an untrustworthy creature of Washington, they argue.

Rather than litigate the specifics in public, Biden aides and allies argue that Clinton and her team should have focused more on privately shaming the media out of investigating already debunked allegations, while leaving Clinton focused on attacking Trump and delivering her own message to voters. The allies spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose conversations about campaign strategy.

“Democrats are very wary of a candidate being Hillary-ed going into 2020,” said Zac Petkanas, director of rapid response for Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Karen Finney, a former Clinton campaign spokeswoman who is unaligned in the 2020 race, said Democrats “spent a lot more time talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails than we should have, given some of the more glaringly troubling actions of Trump.”

Unlike Clinton, Biden is unlikely to ever spend time diving into the details of the allegations, aides said, fearing that doing so would allow Trump’s allegations to further hijack the national political conversation.

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who hosted a Biden campaign in his front yard but has yet to endorse any candidate for president, said, “He understands that you can’t let something like this go.

“But you have to be thoughtful about how you respond to it so that you don’t let the president, with all of his capacity to impact folks like you to write what he says every day, to control the complete narrative,” he added.

Throughout the 2020 race, Biden has pitched himself as the strongest candidate to combat Trump’s attacks. Whether combating Trump through the mainstream media proves correct will provide voters with a critical, real-time test of his strength, as allegations that Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of Biden and his son are at the heart of a political firestorm that prompted Democrats on Tuesday to begin impeachment proceedings.

Biden’s rivals, too, are watching closely: While they have responded to the developments on Ukraine by denouncing Trump’s actions, several camps are privately gaming out how they would handle a similar onslaught from the president and his allies.

“We’ve got to remember that they’ll either find a vulnerability or they’ll invent one for everybody,” Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, told reporters traveling on his campaign bus.

But even some opponents privately worry that this moment could elevate Biden’s campaign if he handles it deftly, putting the former vice president on equal footing with the president and making it hard for his rivals to get their share of attention.

“Trump’s lost it and he’s terrified of Biden, and Biden’s not going to take any of his guff at all,” McAuliffe said. “This is actually good for Joe Biden. It puts him right at the forefront.”

There is no evidence so far to support Trump’s claim that Biden improperly intervened to help his son’s business in Ukraine. But that hasn’t stopped the Trump campaign from pushing the allegations, giving Biden the nickname “Quid Pro Joe.” (Trump himself seems to be sticking with “Sleepy Joe.”)

During a fundraiser in Baltimore on Tuesday night, Biden fired back with a moniker of his own: “He loves nicknames. I’d like to give him a new nickname — former President Trump.”

Keeping the focus on beating Trump is an approach that Biden has held since the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, when he urged the Clinton team during his weekly meetings with her staff to avoid debating topics like the Access Hollywood tape.

“I said, ‘I respectfully recommend she stand there and say, everybody knows who Donald Trump is, let me tell you what I’m going to do for the country,’ and not get into the debate, because it just drags it down,” Biden told voters in New Hampshire earlier this month.

The stories about Clinton’s email server and family foundation fed into an already existing narrative of corruption that Republicans had been pushing for decades; that is a challenge Biden does not face. For decades, he was consistently ranked one of the least wealthy members of the Senate.

The allegations against Trump — that he used the power of his office to influence a foreign government to help him politically — are also far more serious than during the 2016 race.

“Biden doesn’t have to answer for nothing,” said James Carville, Democratic strategist and longtime adviser to the Clintons. “There’s one story here. The president of the United States tried to sic a foreign government on a political opponent.”

This article originally appeared in

Biden Plays Offense Against Media to Frame Ukraine Narrative

WASHINGTON — When a reporter asked former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday if he had spoken to his son Hunter about his work in Ukraine, Biden jammed his finger into the reporter’s chest and shot back: “Ask the right questions.”

With Trump seizing on a familiar defense, saying Democrats were undertaking a “witch hunt” against him on Ukraine, Biden called on the House of Representatives to begin a new investigation of whether the president sought the interference of a foreign government to bolster his reelection campaign.

“This appears to be an overwhelming abuse of power,” Biden said during a campaign swing in Iowa. “We have never seen anything like this from any president.”

Trump is said to have urged the Ukranian president on a July 25 phone call to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who did business in Ukraine while his father was vice president. Trump’s request is part of a secret whistleblower complaint in the intelligence community that is said to involve Trump making an unspecified commitment to a foreign leader, according to two people familiar with the complaint.

The sharp accusations between Trump and Biden elevated the president’s dealings with Ukraine as a potentially significant new issue in the presidential race, and offered voters a preview of what is likely to be an extraordinary general election contest if Biden were to win the nomination.

The controversy has focused on whether Trump manipulated foreign policy — a military aid package to Ukraine had been delayed at the time of the phone call — to pressure the country’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to take action to damage Biden’s election bid.

On Saturday, Trump sought to deflect attention from that question by accusing Biden of acting improperly as vice president in calling for the ouster of a Ukranian prosecutor who had overseen an inquiry into corruption related to the oligarch whose company employed Hunter Biden.

Trump defended his own conduct as “perfectly fine” and routine.

“Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone ‘bust’ on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it the Ukraine Witch Hunt,” Trump wrote on Twitter. He said that any effort to investigate him would fail, comparing it to the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Intensifying a line of attack he and his allies have stoked for months, Trump said the real problem was Biden and questions about what the president described as “the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son.”

Referring to his conversation with Zelenskiy, Trump said: “Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster.”

No evidence has surfaced to support Trump’s claim that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal. But some State Department officials had expressed concern that Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine could complicate his father’s diplomacy there.

The issue strikes a particular nerve for Biden, who has long feared putting his family under the harsh spotlight of a presidential campaign. During a two-minute encounter with reporters on Saturday morning, he grew irate, angrily insisting that he had never spoken with his son about any overseas work.

“You should be looking at Trump,” Biden said. “Trump is doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”

Even as they avoided mentioning Biden, other Democratic presidential candidates moved quickly to capitalize on the new dynamic in the race. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who rarely mentions Trump in her stump speech, opened her remarks at a cattle call on Saturday afternoon by excoriating both the president and congressional Democrats.

“He has solicited another foreign government to attack our election system,” she told a crowd of 1,200 cheering Democratic voters gathered in Des Moines for an afternoon of primary speeches. “It is time to call out this illegal behavior and start impeachment proceedings right now.”

Warren, who first called for Trump to be impeached in April after the release of Mueller’s report, went further on Saturday, arguing on Twitter that by failing to act on impeachment, Congress had become “complicit in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in U.S. elections.”

Though he has yet to call for impeachment proceedings against Trump — as have several of his rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination — Biden on Saturday tiptoed closer to embracing the idea that has been gaining support on Capitol Hill despite opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Biden, whose appearances on the campaign trail can be halting and sprinkled with misstatements, has generally delivered his strongest performances when focused on Trump. Speaking about the president allows Biden to discuss foreign policy and national security, issues that his campaign has said differentiate Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, from the rest of the 2020 Democratic field.

While Trump’s attacks give Biden the one-on-one showdown with the president that his campaign has spent months trying to create, it also exposes him and his son to another round of probing questions about Hunter Biden’s lobbying business in Ukraine.

The Biden campaign moved quickly to warn the news media over the story, underscoring a deep concern about how allegations about the younger Biden’s work will be received by voters. “Any article, segment analysis and commentary that does not demonstrably state at the outset that there is no factual basis for Trump’s claim, and in fact that they are wholly discredited, is misleading reading and viewers,” said the deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, in an email to reporters.

But Biden advisers also seized on the furor to portray Trump as fixated on, and worried about, a potential general election race against Biden.

“There is only one candidate the president is trying to get foreign governments to dig up bogus dirt on,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden, said.

The effort by the president and his team to shift the focus to Biden could boomerang, transforming him into a sympathetic figure unfairly attacked with foreign help. It could just as easily mark a defining moment for Biden, a 76-year-old politician first elected to the Senate in 1972 and long accustomed to playing by the more genteel political rules of a different era.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman who led the party through Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump three years ago, said the exchange on Saturday “in many ways feels like 2016.”

Just the prominent discussion of the actions of Biden and his son in Ukraine, regardless of the merits of the president’s accusations, has the potential to hurt Biden, Brazile said.

“We’re basically creating a political story which right now is undermining Joe Biden when I do believe the real focus should be getting the substance of the complaint out to the American people as soon as possible,” she said.

On Saturday morning, Trump posted a video mash-up of TV news footage of stories about Biden’s son. “This is the real and only story,” the president wrote.

Citing the reports by journalists seemed contradictory given the president’s claim that the media had not reported on Biden. But the tweets signaled that Trump and his campaign organization would be doing as much as possible to sow doubt about Biden.

Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Biden backer, said that no matter who emerges as the Democratic nominee in 2020, that person will face misinformation and slashing personal attacks by the president and his campaign.

“You have any other nominee, Trump will do something comparable to try to disadvantage that nominee,” said Coons, as he walked with Biden into a Polk County Democratic Party event. “I don’t see anything about this story that is specific to Joe Biden.”

So far, Biden’s rivals, nearly all of whom descended on Iowa this weekend, have been quick to assail Trump while avoiding commentary about how the president’s accusations against the Bidens would affect the Democratic nominating contest.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose campaign manager on Friday released a memo stating he would have to drop out of the race if he failed to raise $1.7 million before the end of September, remarked that “this is not a partisan issue.” He and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas reiterated their calls for Trump to be impeached.

Even if Biden’s primary competitors don’t take direct aim, the perception of Biden’s son leveraging his connections cuts a stark contrast with two leading rivals, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who have centered their candidacies around a fierce populist message of rooting out corruption in Washington.

It’s a message that worked in 2016 for Trump, who cast Clinton as the avatar of establishment self-dealing, a past-her-prime creature of Washington unable to adjust to the times and to produce real change.

Biden’s team is acutely aware of that comparison, and a few hours after Biden’s non-comment, his campaign decided to go further.

Sensing an opportunity to highlight Trump’s fixation with Biden, his campaign released a statement in his name blistering the president for “abhorrent” conduct and demanding Trump release the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian leader and allow the director of national intelligence to release the whistleblower’s claims to Congress.

Advisers to Biden said his initial reluctance reflected his prudence about discussing sensitive national security matters rather than unease with the work of his son in Ukraine. But the former vice president is highly sensitive about questions regarding his family, and it was not until other outlets had confirmed the initial Wall Street Journal report that the Biden campaign determined it should try to go on the offensive.

Complaint From Whistleblower Arms Both Sides in Election Race

DES MOINES, Iowa — Allegations that President Donald Trump courted foreign interference from Ukraine to hurt his leading Democratic rival, Joe Biden, dominated presidential politics on Saturday, as Biden demanded a House investigation of Trump’s phone call last month with Ukraine’s leader and as Trump lashed out, denying wrongdoing without releasing a transcript of the call.

With Trump seizing on a familiar defense, saying Democrats were undertaking a “witch hunt” against him on Ukraine, Biden called on the House of Representatives to begin a new investigation of whether the president sought the interference of a foreign government to help bolster his reelection campaign.

The sharp accusations between Trump and Biden, who leads the field for the Democratic presidential nomination, elevated the president’s dealings with Ukraine — and the secret complaint by a whistleblower in the intelligence community against Trump — as potentially significant new issues in the presidential race.

The controversy has focused on whether Trump abused his power by trying to get foreign actors to look into a possible political foe at home. But the president is also trying to deflect attention and refocus it on the past financial dealings abroad of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at a time when a new brand of anti-Washington populism is ascendant in both political parties.

As reports that Trump sought help from the Ukrainian government shake the country, Biden and other leading Democrats struggled with the realization that next year’s election could be an even more bitter version of their last presidential contest.

Trump on Saturday dismissed news reports that he urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son, and defended his own conduct as “perfectly fine” and routine.

“Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone ‘bust’ on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it Ukraine Witch Hunt,” Trump wrote on Twitter. He said that any effort to investigate him would fail, comparing it to the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.

The news reports he was referring to have revealed the existence of a secret whistleblower complaint that is believed to have been filed, at least in part, in response to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The New York Times reported Friday that Trump, in a July call, pressed the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

On Saturday, Trump, intensifying a line of attack he and his allies have stoked for months, said the real problem was Biden and questions about what the president described as “the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son.” Trump, referring to his conversation with Zelenskiy, said: “Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster.”

No evidence has surfaced to bolster Trump’s claim that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal.

The issue strikes a particular nerve for Biden, who has long feared putting his family under the harsh spotlight of a presidential campaign. During a two-minute encounter with reporters on Saturday morning, he grew irate, angrily insisting that he had never spoken with his son about any overseas work and assailing the president for an “overwhelming abuse of power.”

Though he has yet to call for impeachment proceedings against Trump to begin — as have several of his rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination — Biden on Saturday tiptoed closer to embracing the idea that has been steadily gaining support on Capitol Hill despite opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The revelations offered voters a preview of what is likely to be an extraordinary general election contest if Biden were to win the nomination, one in which attacks by the president and his team could boomerang, transforming Biden into a sympathetic figure under attack with foreign help.

It could just as easily mark a defining moment for Biden, a 76-year-old politician first elected to the Senate in 1972 and long accustomed to playing by the more genteel political rules of a different era.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman who led the party through Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump three years ago, said the exchange “in many ways feels like 2016.”

“We’re basically creating a political story which right now is undermining Joe Biden when I do believe the real focus should be getting the substance of the complaint out to the American people as soon as possible,” she said Saturday.

While the new report gives Biden the one-on-one showdown with Trump that his campaign has spent months trying to create, it also exposes him and his son to yet another round of probing questions about the younger Biden’s moneymaking activities in Ukraine.

The Biden campaign moved quickly to browbeat the media over the story, underscoring a deep concern about how allegations about the younger Biden’s work will be received by voters. “Any article, segment analysis and commentary that does not demonstrably state at the outset that there is no factual basis for Trump’s claim, and in fact that they are wholly discredited, is misleading reading and viewers,” said deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield, in an email to reporters.

But Biden advisers also seized on the furor to portray the president as fixated on, and worried about, a potential general election race against Biden.

Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, have reportedly pressed for an investigation of the Bidens for weeks, after reports this year in The New York Times and elsewhere examined whether a Ukrainian energy company had sought to buy influence in Washington by hiring Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had a lobbying business in Ukraine while his father was vice president.

Biden’s team believes the accusations that his son improperly leveraged his family name on behalf of his lobbying clients have already been widely debunked in the news media. Still, the re-emergence of the younger Biden’s business dealings this past week invites a new round of scrutiny from the press, allies of Trump and Biden’s many remaining opponents in the primary.

So far, Biden’s rivals, nearly all of whom descended on Iowa this weekend, have resisted taking the bait. Several of his competitors were quick to assail Trump on Friday, while avoiding commentary about how Trump’s accusations against the Bidens would affect the Democratic nominating contest.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose campaign manager on Friday released a memo stating he would have to drop out of the race if he failed to raise $1.7 million before the end of September, remarked that “this is not a partisan issue,” while Booker and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas reiterated their calls for Trump to be impeached.

Warren, who first called for Trump to be impeached in April after the release of Mueller’s report, also renewed those demands, but went even further, arguing that by failing to act on impeachment in preceding months, Congress had become “complicit in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in US elections.”

“Today’s news confirmed he thinks he’s above the law,” she said. “If we do nothing, he’ll be right.”

Even if Biden’s primary competitors don’t take direct aim, the perception of the Biden family leveraging its connections cuts a stark contrast with his two leading rivals, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who have centered their candidacies around a fierce populist message of rooting out corruption in Washington.

It’s a message that worked in 2016 for Trump, who cast Hillary Clinton as the avatar of establishment self-dealing, a past-her-prime creature of Washington unable to adjust to the times and produce real change.

Sensing an opportunity to highlight Trump’s fixation with Biden, his aides released a statement in his name blistering the president for “abhorrent” conduct and demanding Trump release the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian leader and allow the Director of National Intelligence to release the whistleblower’s claims to Congress.

Ukraine, Whistleblower Issues Emerge as Flashpoints in Presidential Race

DES MOINES, Iowa — President Donald Trump, under growing pressure on Saturday over his private conversations with Ukraine’s president, lashed out at former Vice President Joe Biden in an attempt to shift the focus of intensifying questions about whether Trump sought help from Ukraine to hurt Biden’s 2020 bid against him.

Now, as reports that he sought help from the Ukrainian government shake the political world, former Vice President Joe Biden, the monthslong leader in the primary race, finds himself grappling with the fallout of a still-secret whistleblower complaint that is said to be about Trump and his dealings with Ukraine.

For Biden, it is both the contrast he wants and the controversy he would rather avoid.

The revelations offered voters a preview of what is likely to be an extraordinary general election contest if Biden were to win the nomination, one in which attacks by the president and his team could boomerang, transforming Biden into a sympathetic figure under ugly attack with foreign help.

While the new report gives Biden the one-on-one showdown with Trump that his campaign has spent months trying to create, it also exposes him and his son, Hunter Biden, to yet another round of probing questions about their moneymaking activities and personal family struggles.

At a time when some of the candidates had been shifting their strategy from trying to chip away at Biden’s persistent lead to attacking the ascendant candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the new reporting once again places Biden at the center of the 2020 campaign.

Yet Biden’s initial response was to brush off the new revelations and stick to his campaign schedule in Iowa, offering only a meager retort.

“I have no comment except the president should start to be president,” he told reporters, walking quickly to a waiting van.

At issue are demands from Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that Ukraine examine Biden’s dealings with the country when he was vice president at the same time that his younger son, Hunter Biden, was doing business there.

Trump and Giuliani have reportedly pressed for an investigation of the Bidens for weeks, after reports this year in The New York Times and elsewhere examined whether a Ukrainian energy company had sought to buy influence in Washington by hiring Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had a lobbying business in Ukraine while his father was vice president.

Biden’s team believes the accusations that his son improperly leveraged his family name on behalf of his lobbying clients have already been widely debunked in the media. Still, the re-emergence of the younger Biden’s business dealings this week invites a new round of scrutiny from the press, allies of Trump and Biden’s many remaining opponents in the primary.

Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana said Trump had exhibited the “behavior you’d expect from an incompetent mobster.” Rep.Tim Ryan of Ohio urged Congress to hold hearings and investigate the whistleblower’s allegations. And Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose campaign manager on Friday released a memo stating he would have to drop out of the race if he failed to raise $1.7 million before the end of September, remarked that “this is not a partisan issue,” while Booker and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas reiterated their calls for Trump to be impeached.

“I’m going to keep the focus on the fact that Donald Trump has broken the law if this report is accurate and he should be impeached,” former Housing Secretary Julián Castro said during an interview Friday night in Cedar Rapids. “That’s where the focus belongs right now.”

Warren, who first called for Trump to be impeached in April after the release of a report by the special counsel Robert Mueller, renewed those demands, but went even further, arguing that by failing to act on impeachment in preceding months, Congress had become “complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in U.S. elections.”

Even if Biden’s primary competitors don’t take direct aim, the perception of the Biden family leveraging its connections — even if little more than a conspiracy theory — cuts a stark contrast with his two leading rivals, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have centered their candidacies around a fierce populist message of rooting out corruption in Washington.

Sensing an opportunity to highlight Trump’s fixation with Biden, his aides released a statement in his name blistering the president for “abhorrent” conduct and demanding Trump release the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian leader and allow the director of national intelligence to release the whistleblower’s claims to Congress.

“There is only one candidate the president is trying to get foreign governments to dig up bogus dirt on,” said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden.

But Biden stopped short of offering a full-throated endorsement of moving forward with impeachment proceedings, an idea that has been gaining traction on Capitol Hill and within the Democratic primary field despite opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

His appearances on Friday were marked by moments of testiness.

While taking questions outside a Cedar Rapids nature center Friday afternoon, Biden offered a sharp retort to Angie Weiland, a 59-year-old dental hygienist, who pressed him to support a single-payer health care plan like one backed by Sanders and Warren.

“God love you, you’ve got the right candidate in Bernie or Elizabeth or whoever you have,” Biden said. “Tell Elizabeth it’s going to cost a lot of money and you have to raise people’s taxes.”

A few hours later, Biden snapped at the female moderator leading a forum on LGBTQ issues after she questioned his decades-old votes for laws outlawing same-sex marriage and prohibiting gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, as well as his contention, offered in February and then quickly retracted, that Vice President Mike Pence is “a decent guy.”

Before an audience of 700 activists at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Biden sarcastically called his inquisitor, the Cedar Rapids Gazette columnist Liz Lenz, “a lovely person,” prompting her to reply: “Just asking the questions people want to know.”

Offstage after their exchange, she wrote on Twitter that Biden had called her “a real sweetheart,” a comment she said in a subsequent interview that she found to be “a little condescending.”

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Since President Donald Trump defeated them nearly three years ago, Democrats have warned that Trump would once again benefit from the interference of foreign governments to help bolster his reelection bid.