According to the video, the woman asked the 2020 Democratic hopeful about his performance in Iowa. Even though the polls had put him as the frontrunner, Biden managed to only finish fourth in the caucuses. “How do you explain the performance in Iowa and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?” she asked.
Biden admitted it was a legitimate question, however, he then began to press the woman who questioned him, asking: “Iowa’s a caucus. Have you ever been to a caucus?” After she responded, the Democratic party candidate responded with “No, you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier,” in a reference to a John Wayne movie, one of Biden’s favourites. He then went on and said that he didn’t think the Iowa caucus is a good measure of how a candidate will perform in other states.
Although the response to the question prompted laughter in the crowd of Biden’s supporters, Madison Moore, a 21-year-old student at Mercer University in Georgia, told the Washington Post later that she thought she’d asked a legitimate question.
“I read an article that he said [Iowa] was a punch to the gut, and I’m not one to just push on wounds. I’m not trying to humiliate anyone,” she said. “He wasn’t sitting in at the Senate trials for impeachment, so he had Iowa to himself. And then you’ve been a politician for like decades — how are you not way above all the other candidates?”
The results of the Iowa caucuses had faced numerous problems while counting the state-delegate equivalents, with officials blaming inconsistencies related to a new mobile app used for vote counting for the unusual delay in the state, which traditionally starts the Democratic race for the nomination.