(Bloomberg) -- Amy Klobuchar is enjoying a moment.
But what her enthusiastic staff has dubbed “Klomentum,” could be, in fact, just a moment.
The day before the New Hampshire primary, the Minnesota senator had risen to third place in state tracking polls taken after Friday’s debate. She was the fifth choice of New Hampshire Democrats in a poll conducted for UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion that ended Friday.
“They thought I wasn’t going to make it to the debate and was I at the debate,” an exultant Klobuchar told her growing crowds on Sunday to cheers. “Every step of the way we have defied expectations.”
Her campaign said Sunday it had raised $3 million since the debate.
A third place finish in New Hampshire would be a win of sorts for Klobuchar, who came in fifth in Iowa, despite campaigning in each of the state’s 99 counties and representing neighboring Minnesota in the U.S. Senate. Finishing just behind the front-runners Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg and surging ahead of Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren could cause voters and donors across the country to take notice.
”If she has a third-place finish, they walk away with an opportunity to get voters to take a second look,” said Wayne Lesperance, professor of political science at New England College in New Hampshire. “But it’s certainly a long road ahead for her. Generally, not having developed a national name recognition the way other candidates have signals she does have some challenges.”
In the last few days, she has sprinted through the state attracting at least one crowd of 1,000 people, the most she’s had in New Hampshire. Yet that is half the size of the crowds Sanders is gathering, along with indie rock bands and in other states, political rock stars like congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Ilhan Omar.
Klobuchar has no celebrity surrogates, no musical acts. She has pitched herself as a Midwestern pragmatist who has worked with Republicans in the Senate to pass legislation and has won Republican districts in her home state.
She will have to prove that she is a more experienced, more electable candidate than either Buttigieg, the 38-year-old ex-mayor of a small city who is centrist voters’ current favorite, or Biden, the vice president to Barack Obama who entered the race last April with an aura of inevitability but has not captured voters’ passion.
“I am someone who can bring people with me, that doesn’t shut them up, that is what I have done in the U.S. Senate, that is how I have gotten a lot of stuff done,” Klobuchar said in Manchester on Sunday. Her stump speech includes references to carpenters in Pennsylvania, dairy farmers in Wisconsin and dock workers in Michigan, all states Democrats lost to President Donald Trump in 2016 and that the party needs to win in 2020.
That won’t be easy in the state contests that follow New Hampshire. The Democrats face caucuses in Nevada on Feb. 22, a state where 29% of the population is Latino, and a primary in South Carolina on Feb. 29. Four days later, on March 3, is Super Tuesday, when California, Texas and 12 other states and territories -- including her home state of Minnesota -- hold contests. That day could be decisive, or it could leave the field smaller but still a mixed bag.
She places seventh behind her rivals in Nevada, according to her RealClearPolitics average. In South Carolina, where a majority of the Democratic primary electorate is black, Klobuchar is in eighth place, polling at 2%.
The national picture isn’t much brighter. Her average polling in surveys that cover the U.S. is 4%, behind Biden, Sanders, Warren, Michael Bloomberg and Buttigieg.
(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
On the trail, she largely refrained from engaging in any direct criticism of her rivals, betting on her message of unity, even as Biden, Buttigieg and Sanders turned on one another with insults about age and experience and a savage attack ad from Biden that compared his work on the Iran nuclear deal with Buttigieg’s work to put “decorative” lights under a bridge in South Bend.
“When we reach out to voters we need to keep remembering that what unites us is bigger than what divides us,” Klobuchar said Sunday. “We better not screw this up. I cannot think of a better state that gets this than New Hampshire, with your big tradition of Independent voters.”
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