all right. i expect we will see beto o rourke very shortly. i don t think he ll wait too long to make some new pictures today. thank you, leyla. joining us now, nia-malika henderson who is involved in the entire beto o rourke saga, we ll get to that in a lil by the. john than martin, and rachel blade, congressional reporter for the washington post. i want to put up on the screen the latest poll numbers from iowa where beto o rourke is to show where he is. he s at 5%, in fifth place right now, joe lockhart, and that s down from where he is in december. so why, then, do democrats seem to care so much? why is there so much buzz about this guy at 5% in iowa? i wouldn t put too much stock in the 5%. looking at the iowa numbers there seems to be a penalty for not getting in. biden s numbers have dropped over the last couple of months. beto s have. i think there s a mythology that s built up around beto
talked in very miss tiystical t about i m born to do this, it will figure itself out. no. he s running against how many other democrats in this primary? he s going to have to get up to speed and he s going to have to have some sort of staff and structure if he wants to be successful here. i think there s something else to watch in the next few weeks, and that is that how does the far left react to beto and react to biden should he get in? i mean, as i mentioned before, people in texas, progressives, threat got behind beto. but right now i can tell you from kplcapitol hill, we re see a lot of infighting from the progressives and moderates. and it s going to be interesting to see do the far left and progressives go after them and hurt these new or centrist moderate candidates in such a way that it cripples them in a general election by attacking their positions and try move them further left.
i think that s yet to be seen and the infighting in the party is really going to heat up in the next few weeks. real fast, guys, john, if i could, there s a lot of obama compare sons to beto for reasons that are understandable in terms of both their youth and their charisma and the fact that they try to align being defiant with one wing of the party or another. it was easier fore obama to pull that off in 07 and 08, in part because of the overriding issue of that election was the iraq war. and in the eyes of the draltic primary voters, obama was on the right side of the iraq war. it s a different moment now in the democratic party. there is a sort of turn to the left. there is more pressure to be a kind of down the line progressive on a lot of issues in a way that obama did not face those kind of litmus tests in 07 and twae 08. it s going to be tougher for beto to pull this off in dancing around the specifics of where he is on x, y, and z policy issue
this broader unease with beto among kind of old democratic pros who see a lot of a lot of, you know, charisma there, certainly, but question what s underneath the hood. but alex burns, there is something that has made all the other campaigns so nervous. there was something that brought in $80 million in the texas senate race and did generate a national buzz there. oh, there s no question about that. i mean, he would not be running for president right now had he not captured the imagination of democratic voters nationally. and in texas as well. but the question now is did he capture that imagination, did he create that moment in texas last year because of a specific set of circumstances related to democrats and republicans being passionately hostile to ted cruz, the sort of dream of taking the senate in the midterm elections, the sense that this was a guy who was challenging trump on the border in, you
to say, you know, i agree with joe biden, but i m 30 years younger and, you know, more could do all of these things. so i think it s going to be really interesting shaking out over the next couple of months. and i would suspect by the summer if we look at the iowa numbers we re going to have a much better idea of, you know, sort of what the contours of the race are. rachel, it was so interesting we had harry enten on last hour where he showed us the continuum of where all the candidates are idealogically on the spectrum and joe biden and beto o rourke are right next to each other as most moderate. so does it announcement by o rourke change biden s colonel cue lous? joe biden is clearly not there. his top officials say he s 95% in. but obviously his heart is still in those last 5% so he has not jumped in yet. the interesting thing about beto is he s able to sort of bring up all this new jersey and really