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I registered as a Democrat just to support Tulsi Gabbard if she gets on the ballot.
She won't though. She has told too much truth about Saudi Arabia.
Jim Estin has spent months following the candidates — he’s seen Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., four separate times — but he still hasn’t been able to pick a favorite.
“I have dated them all,” the 65-year-old psychiatric social worker said. He made the admission sheepishly, as friends and colleagues milled around his Iowa City living room in the closing minutes of a breakfast gathering put on by the Warren campaign. His wife, Ann, a law professor, sided with the senator last fall.
But Estin has regretted some of his past choices, such as supporting former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in the 2008 caucus over Obama, the eventual winner. The shock of Trump winning in 2016 has made him second-guess his instincts even more.
“Democrats really missed something important in the last election,” he said. “I feel a little traumatized.”
The dilemma voters face can be described most simply as the tug of war between the heart and the head, said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines.
The former, he said, "you think is a wonderful candidate; you’d go to the mat for that candidate. It’s the person that makes your heart beat faster,” he said. The head, meanwhile, is “if you look at it coldly, objectively — who would seem to have the best chance of defeating the opposition?”
With no clear candidate checking all those boxes, Goldford said, a large number of voters remain undecided.
“They desperately want to defeat the president and they desperately want to avoid blowing the opportunity to do so,” he said. “So they’re very, very skittish about whose side they should come down on.”
Which candidates do you support? Top two or three? And why.