In late April, Elizabeth Warren embraced a new catch-phrase. Sidelining “nevertheless, she persisted” (co-opted from a Mitch McConnell insult), the campaign began describing the Massachusetts Senator as the candidate who’s “got a plan for that” (borrowed from the headline on a New Yorker online post).
It was magnificent branding—not just the slogan, but leaning into her wonky reputation. It helped distinguish her from the crowd of Presidential wannabes. On the stump and at town-hall forums, Warren turned it into a recurring punch line: yup, whatever topic might come up, I have a plan for that.
Warren was polling in sixth place, according to the RealClearPolitics rolling average, with support from just six percent of Democratic voters, when the campaign began using the phrase. She came out of the summer close to 20 percent, nosing past Bernie Sanders into second, and very much a top-tier contender.
Maybe it wasn’t all the catch-phrase, but the catch-phrase sure helped.
Yet it was gone Thursday night, as the ten leading Democratic Presidential candidates debated on national network television.
Warren never said “a plan for that” during the debate. In fact, over the course of nearly three hours, she didn’t once utter the word “plan” at all.
It didn’t seem like merely a rhetorical omission. Warren’s strategically chosen opening and final remarks pulled from her personal tale of overcoming odds to get educated and become successful. In between, she repeatedly elided opportunities to lay out policy details, opting instead for more emotional-level connections.
On health care reform, as Sanders and Joe Biden argued vociferously, Warren emphasized the image of families struggling with their budgets—even seeming to downplay differences in approach by saying that “the only question here in terms of difference is where to send the bill.”
Similarly, asked about gun violence policy, Warren didn’t even mention the detailed, well-crafted plan she released just a month ago—or the audacious commitment in it to reduce gun deaths by 80 percent. Her answer included a strikingly un-wonky description of more-or-less trying anything to see what works: “We’re going to do it, and we’re going to have to do it again, and we’re going to have to come back some more until we cut the number of gun deaths in this country significantly.”
To be sure, Warren’s campaign rhetoric all summer mixed the “plans for that” with personal history, emotional connection, wide-view assessments, and colloquial humor. This is probably more a shift in balance and emphasis than a total change.
But, to the extent that it is the start of a somewhat different selling of the candidate, it might be a savvy, and well-timed shift. As I wrote back in April, there are limits to the effectiveness of being the candidate with all the plans. All those proposals give individual voters an awful lot of opportunities to find one that they really don’t like.
They can also make her seem too scattered: a candidate promising to implement dozens of policies is prioritizing none of them.
Most importantly, voters ultimately tend to put faith in a candidate for more abstract, character-based reasons than their laundry list of specific policy points.
The branding campaign of the past five months has ensured that Democratic primary voters head to the polls next year confident in Warren’s stockpile of plans.
Now, she needs to work on convincing them of the rest of the Presidential package. Thursday’s debate performance was a solid preview of that effort; a new catch-phrase might not be far behind.
