The field has been set, the cattle calls have begun, and the first debate round is looming on the horizon. In other words, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest has moved into a new phase. If the polls can be believed, the people of Iowa are once again taking their "first in the nation" status seriously, and have begun examining the candidates much more closely than voters in other states. That should come as no surprise, since almost all the candidates are now investing heavily in doing well out in corn country. At least, the ones who have raised enough money to invest heavily in any state, that is.

Campaign News

The big news over the weekend was a new Des Moines Register poll, which showed only seven of the 24 candidates getting any sort of traction at all with Democratic voters. Joe Biden led the field with 24 percent, while three others were neck-and-neck in the battle for second place: Bernie Sanders (16 percent), Elizabeth Warren (15), and Pete Buttigieg (14). The other three who moved the needle at all were: Kamala Harris (7), Beto O'Rourke (2), and Amy Klobuchar (2). The other 17 candidates all registered at a single percentage point or worse.

These results are slightly different than the candidates' national poll standings, but not all that different. The national polls all show Biden comfortably out front, Bernie in second place, and a handful of others forming a pack of candidates who can reliably get more than 1-in-100 voters to support them. Or even remember their names.

What is different about the Iowa poll is that more voters are beginning to take a serious look at all the candidates and at least tentatively make up their minds. If you add up the top four numbers in that Iowa poll, it comes out to 69 percent of the electorate choosing what they consider a viable candidate. Add in the next three who managed better than one percent, and you get 80 percent of the poll's respondents backing a popular candidate. In the national polling, this just isn't true yet -- "undecided" still polls higher than virtually every other candidate. Most people outside of Iowa (and New Hampshire) simply aren't paying all that much attention yet, and the national polling is still heavily reliant on name recognition alone.

Two other recent polls were also of interest, one showing both Sanders and Biden beating Trump in Michigan by a whopping 12 points. The other poll showed Biden (but no other Democrat) beating Trump by four points in Texas. Now, turning Texas blue has long been a dream of Democrats, but one poll certainly doesn't guarantee it's going to happen. But the Michigan poll is much more interesting. Trump is not popular in Michigan. Democrats made huge gains there in the midterms, in fact. But Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are all key states that Trump won in order to gain an Electoral College majority.

Team Trump has noticed, apparently, and they are desperately searching for other states which might shore up his Electoral College total in 2020. The word is they've been eyeing New Mexico, Nevada, and New Hampshire as possible pickups. But Politico noted that this may be a rather steep uphill climb:

Still, there's considerable skepticism that Trump can make a serious play in the states -- especially Nevada and New Mexico. Republicans have not won a presidential race in Nevada or New Mexico since 2004, and the last time they carried New Hampshire was in 2000. Democrats won every statewide race in New Mexico last year; in Nevada, they seized a Senate seat as well as the governorship. In New Hampshire, Democrats won control of both state legislative chambers.

Trump's unpopularity was a big factor in that success, Democrats say.

The article also points out that the math isn't all that great for Trump, either: "Trump aides acknowledge they start at a disadvantage in each of the three states, which total 15 electoral votes. (By comparison, Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes, Michigan has 16 and Wisconsin 10.)" So even if Trump managed to flip all three newly-targeted states but also lose Michigan, he'd still be down one elector. If he loses Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well, he'd be down 31 electors. Which might just hand the White House to a Democrat.

But let's get back to the Democratic race. One area where Democrats are fighting hard rather than taking things for granted is in courting Labor. Bernie Sanders appeared at a Walmart shareholders' meeting last week, trying to shame them into upping their minimum wage to $15 (hey, it worked for Amazon, right?). He was unsuccessful in the attempt, but he wasn't the only one appearing shoulder-to-shoulder with workers. McDonald's employees are also pushing for a $15 minimum, and several Democratic candidates are visibly supporting their efforts. Democrats have not shied away from taking on giant corporations by name this election cycle, which is a big difference than years past.

Democrats almost across the board are making an economic case that Trump's economy is hurting Main Street America -- from farmers to factory workers, Trump has not made good on his promises. In fact, things are getting worse for them with Trump's trade wars raging. As a voting demographic group, they've so far been mostly willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, but this is the second straight year that farmers will have to plant while knowing that China isn't buying their products any more. If that rolls over into a third year, though, this may change. China famously takes the long view, and may just decide to wait Trump out in the hopes that he won't get re-elected -- which means a third uncertain planting season in a row. Giving Trump the benefit of the doubt is one thing, but skirting the edge of bankruptcy and losing the family farm is quite another.

Of course, we're all waiting with bated breath to hear who will make the first Democratic debates, and which night everybody drew. With only 20 slots, four candidates are going to get shut out. There will be squabbles about the two nights' lineups as well, most likely. These "working the refs" complaints are going to get much louder in the third round of debates, but that's months away. For the time being, all the candidates except the frontrunners are going to be striving for that magic "breakout moment" during the first debates that catapults their campaign into the limelight.

Which is why it's worth taking another look at the field, before any of those breakout moments happen.

First Tier

The first tier of Democrats hasn't changed since the last horserace article I wrote. Joe Biden is way out front of Bernie Sanders, who is likewise leading the rest of the pack.

As the race has sharpened up, more and more Democrats are realizing that they've got to come up with a way to eat into Biden's current dominance in the polling. This is a tricky tightrope to walk, because Biden is so personally likeable. Democratic voters think pretty highly of Biden as a general rule, even if he was on the wrong side of some issues decades ago. His avuncular affability is tough to fight against, because of the risk of a backlash from the voters. And so far Biden has trained all of his attention on beating Donald Trump, which is a near-universal goal among Democrats.

But while it is too early to say that the knives have come out for Uncle Joe, the other candidates are beginning to directly challenge him on the issues. Well, maybe "directly" is too strong a word, as every single other Democrat running is hewing to the rule of thumb that you should never actually utter your opponent's name, because that just helps him get more name recognition. So all of Biden's challengers have been using dog whistles rather than just dropping Biden's name. Bernie gave a speech last weekend in California which heavily leaned on a sort of call-and-response theme: there could be "no middle ground." This, for those in the know, was a direct attack at Biden, since one of his campaign staff was reported to have used that phrase a few weeks ago to describe Biden's "middle ground" stance on climate change. Bernie applied it to many other subjects dear to him, though, as he takes on Biden from the left.

He's not the only one doing so, either. Biden stumbled last week in his stance on the Hyde Amendment, first answering a question from a voter by indicating that he was against the Hyde Amendment. His campaign then issued a clarification: Biden had misunderstood the question and did, in fact, support banning the use of federal money to pay for abortions. This sparked an uproar among the other Democratic candidates, led by the women. They all decried the Hyde Amendment and condemned Biden for supporting it. Within a few days, Biden flip-flopped and announced in a speech that -- now that Roe v. Wade was under such fervent attack from Republicans -- he could no longer support the Hyde Amendment.

This was an early stumble, so it's certainly possible that Biden will get over it and it will be long forgotten by the time people vote. But it certainly didn't show any sort of principled leadership -- quite the opposite, in fact. It wasn't the subject matter or the flip-flop, but the rather inept and amateur way it was handled by both Biden and his team. If that particular problem persists, it could hurt Biden on other issues.

Biden, for now, seems content to coast. He has skipped the first three major cattle calls of the season (in California, Georgia, and Iowa), which made it all that much easier for the other candidates to attack him for being (literally) out of touch. Sooner or later Biden is going to have to get up to speed in this race, although it may take a dip in the polls to spur him to this point. Until that happens, though, Biden continues to act like he's already the nominee and he's training all his fire on Donald Trump. It's a good strategy for a frontrunner with such a solid lead, at least for the time being.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, continues to hold his own in second place. In the Real Clear Politics rolling averages of national polls, Biden stands at 33.6 percent (down a couple points) while Bernie is slightly up, at 17.0 percent. Once again, Bernie is only pulling roughly half the support of Biden. It should also be mentioned that most of the movement in the RCP chart over the past week was due to one poll from Economist/YouGov, which may or may not prove to be an outlier. We'll see, after the next few polls get posted, in other words.

Bernie has a hardcore fanbase among the voters, obviously, but he hasn't gained much traction with everyone else. Even among progressives, there are now more candidates to choose from than just Sanders. But even though Warren and Buttigieg have made some gains, they cannot yet be included in the frontrunner category.

Second Tier

The second tier of candidates lost one name this time around, as Amy Klobuchar continues to fade into the background. This leaves five candidates in the pack, or at least "the pack with any hope of catching the frontrunners." While there has been some tiny movements in the polls for some of these candidates, they really haven't budged much at all in the past few weeks.

Leading the wannabe-frontrunner pack is Elizabeth Warren, with 7.8 percent in the RCP poll-of-polls. This, however, is down two points from where she was a few weeks ago. Warren has very slowly been moving up, so this reversal of the trend should be worrisome for her. Warren's campaign has a new slogan: "She's got a plan for that," which is an excellent way for her to differentiate herself from the rest of the field. More than any other candidate, Warren has been rolling out position papers on all sorts of issues, and staking out some very progressive ground in doing so. She is earning some respect for the depth of her platform, both among the voters and among her fellow candidates (who are now scrambling to catch up). But while she may be enticing former Bernie supporters over to her side, she still has a long way to catch up -- her poll numbers are still only half of Bernie's.

That's nationally, of course. In Iowa, she's doing much better, and has pulled within a single point of Bernie in that recent Iowa poll. Warren had an advantage in Iowa, since she had a Senate campaign chest with $10 million in it, which has allowed her to hire a whole bunch of staffers in the state -- but Warren has also been throwing herself into the "retail politics" campaign as well. She's holding as many town halls as she can squeeze in, and she's apparently connecting with the voters more than she's yet managed nationally. The excitement factor seems to be on her side in Iowa, at least for now.

There are two other candidates neck-and-neck with Warren nationally: Kamala Harris at 7.2 percent, and Pete Buttigieg at 7.0 percent. Buttigieg is also outperforming his national standing in Iowa, where he is polling at twice his national level. He is still somewhat of a media darling, and he has used this to his advantage perhaps better than any other candidate in the field. Free media is free media, and Buttigieg has accepted just about every offer to appear on the airwaves, to good effect. A few months ago, nobody even knew how to pronounce his name, and now he's arguably in fourth place -- that's a pretty good track record, at least for the moment.

Harris, on the other hand, is concentrating more on South Carolina than Iowa, it seems, and her polling in Iowa seems to reflect this (she's polling about the same in the state as she is nationally). Harris could be angling for an upset in South Carolina, which could be key to breaking the hold that Biden so far has over African-American voters. The black vote didn't break for Obama right away, either, please remember -- it wasn't until he had won a few primaries that he was taken seriously as a possible contender. Harris is obviously hoping the same thing will happen for her.

There are really two "packs" within the second tier. Warren, Harris, and Buttigieg are all polling between 7.0 and 8.0 percent. Then there are two others: Beto O'Rourke at 3.8 percent and Cory Booker at 2.8 percent. Both of these candidates are holding steady for the moment, but that's after they saw an initial bump fizzle. Neither is currently close to slipping back into the third tier, but they've got to be worried about the prospect.

Third Tier

The only news here was that Amy Klobuchar fell from the second tier to join the horde which are all polling at a single percentage point or worse. Klobuchar is even doing pretty dismally in Iowa, which may finally prove that just being from a state that touches Iowa doesn't mean you have any sort of home-field advantage (more like a field of dreams, to keep the metaphor local). To put this another way, Klobuchar is walking the same path pioneered by Michele Bachmann, who was supposed to do well in the state next door to Minnesota. But that Minnesota magic may be vastly overstated, as Klobuchar is also finding out.

Klobuchar becomes the third sitting senator to join the bottom ranks. Michael Bennet is going nowhere and Kirsten Gillibrand is scraping bottom. Bennet and Klobuchar are trying to win the nomination by being the most centrist -- scolding the party for "going too far to the left," which isn't really what the typical primary voter wants to hear right about now. Gillibrand has her own set of problems with hardcore Democrats as well.

At least Klobuchar managed to get a full 1.0 percent, though. Bill de Blasio was the only other candidate to do so in the third tier. That means 15 candidates are polling at less than a single percent. Here's the full list of the bottom tier, just in case you've forgotten them all: Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, Julián Castro, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mike Gravel, John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Wayne Messam, Seth Moulton, Tim Ryan, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang.

Conclusions

I wrote an article last week that summed up the state of the race in more detail than space allows here. It basically boils down (at the current moment -- things could always change) to whether anyone can dethrone Biden or not.

Joe Biden is the clear favorite. You can call it a love affair from the media or the establishment of the Democratic Party, but the voters also clearly prefer him over the field right now. Perhaps this is a result of his near-universal name recognition, but then again perhaps not. Joe Biden is an easy guy to like, and a lot of Democratic voters seem to like him just fine.

The other candidates are taking note and training some broadsides against the inevitability of Biden. They're doing so cautiously, never once bringing personality into it, in the hopes of not alienating Democrats who right now are in Biden's camp. These attacks will likely get sharper, but they will also likely remain in the realm of policy debates rather than personal attacks.

Biden, meanwhile, is shoring up his support when forced (as on the Hyde Amendment), but mostly just riding the wave. He's trained all his attacks against Donald Trump, and he's trying to make the case that he'd be the best candidate to go toe-to-toe with Trump in the general election.

Direct competition between the candidates has begun... well, sort of. They are now regularly appearing on the same stage in front of the same audience, but not simultaneously. The D.N.C. rules are clear -- there must be no multicandidate appearances because they've staked out this ground for their own debates. So instead, the candidates all appear in series, one after the other. Last weekend, 19 of them took the stage at an Iowa event, and that followed a similar appearance in California by 14 of them. They (obviously) only get limited time to make their cases -- if they got even 10 minutes apiece, that would take over three hours (if 19 candidates appeared). But this will hopefully be good practice for the first round of debates, which will also feature very limited time on camera for each candidate.

So far seven Democrats (eight, if you still count Klobuchar) have risen to the level of having more than 1-in-100 voters behind them. That's a decent field all on its own, really. In a normal year, people would be saying: "There's just too many to choose from between all eight of them." This year, however, that is the stripped-down field, as there are 16 (or 17) others trying to make the grade.

Of course, this is unsustainable. Within three or four months, the total field will shrink -- perhaps drastically. Candidates who don't make the first two debate rounds are likely going to be toast. Candidates who turn in poor debate performances are also likely to go the way of the dodo.

We're still in the phase where any hopeful candidate can plausibly write off all the bad polls as "just name recognition." But starting with the first debate, that argument is going to crumble. If the nation's voters see a candidate perform and still look away, then it should become obvious that that candidate has virtually no chance of winning the nomination. So while we've just concluded the season of "who else will jump in?", what will come next will be the start of the winnowing. With 24 in the field, this winnowing may become just as frenzied as the rush to jump in the race has been for the past few months.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant