MANCHESTER, N.H. — Along the concourse of Southern New Hampshire University’s 11,000-seat sports arena on Saturday, supporters of the remaining Democratic presidential contenders took pictures with life-size cardboard cutouts of their favorites, pinned buttons to their coats and streamed into the stands equipped with light-up signs and noise-makers.
On the floor, donors sat alongside a “who’s who” of New Hampshire Democrats to dine at round white tables that sat attendees for at least $200 a head, pooled into the state party’s coffers and marking one its largest fundraisers of the year.
And on Monday, a day before the first-in-the-nation primary, fans of President Donald Trump will gather here at the same arena to hear the president’s re-election pitch.
For Democrats to win the election in November, it’ll take support from members of all three of those groups — the grassroots, the donors and the conservatives — and a candidate who can bring them all together under one vision, party officials and candidates told thousands of New Hampshire Democrats at the annual McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner.
“Americans in small rural towns, in industrial communities and yes, in pockets of our country’s biggest cities, are tired of being reduced to a punchline to Washington politicians and are ready for someone to take their voice to the American capital,” said former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg to open the evening.
The dinner, which has evolved over more than 60 years into the last chance for voters to hear the candidates together before the primary, gave the Democratic slate a different opportunity than Friday night’s official Democratic debate nearby. They gave short stump speeches that were heavy in vision and light in details — all that the few minutes on stage allowed.
Vice President Joe Biden, the tone of his voice rising in decibels, insisted that Mr. Trump does not embody New Hampshire values — and that only Democrats can heal America.
“We’re being led by a president who has no empathy, no sympathy, who mocks people, who makes fun of people with disabilities, who does everything he can to demean,” Mr. Biden said. “He doesn’t have a shred of decency in him.”
The election in November will come done to convincing voters “that the heart of America is bigger than the heart of the guy in the White House,” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said, and who better to remind them than someone who has won in red districts her whole career, she added.
“Democrats, we have to remember that when we bring people with us, we put someone on the ticket who gets it,” said Ms. Klobuchar, whose remark was followed by a chorus of “Bernie!” chants from the several hundred supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gathered in their own section.
“Hi, Bernie people,” Ms. Klobuchar quipped, waving playfully toward them.
Though the thousands of Democrats universally cheered the more generic messages of party unity, supporters of Mr. Biden and Mr. Buttigieg sparred at times, embodying the feud that’s developed between the candidates at several events this week in New Hampshire, including the debate.
When Mr. Buttigieg criticized Democrats who believe “you must either be for a revolution or you must be for the status quo,” Sanders supporters booed. When he started to talk about health care, they chanted “Medicare for All” — one of their candidate’s signature proposals that Mr. Buttigieg has criticized.
Mr. Sanders, joking that he can tell there are differences of opinion in the room, said they won’t matter in November.
“What I wanted to say is that despite the differences of opinion and the candidates that we are supporting, I know that I speak for every candidate in that no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, we are going to come together to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of this country,” Mr. Sanders said.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren erred more to the side of revolution than status quo in her speech, insisting that Americans are at their best when they see a problem and “fight back.”
“This is not a time for small ideas. This is not a time to nibble around the edges of problems. This is not a time to be vague and elusive,” Ms. Warren said, her supporters holding light-up signs that spelled out ‘Choose Courage.’ “This is a time to step up and when we see a big problem, offer a big solution and fight for it.”
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, whose supporters were up in the third-level rafters, joked that the crowd size was likely 80,000 deep — a “Trumpian estimate” — then followed the joke with a speech based around his pitch for a universal basic income.
“We have to let our fellow Americans know that economic value and human value are not the same things,” Mr. Yang said, “and that we each have intrinsic value as Americans, as people and as owners and shareholders of the richest country in the history of the world.”
Julian Routh: jrouth@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1952, Twitter @julianrouth.
First Published: February 9, 2020, 3:11 a.m.