From the start of her presidential venture some 14 months ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has stood by some big decisions about how to run the campaign. At least, until just recently.
One of those strategies, investing in staff over advertising, has seen a marked reversal since last Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. Another tactic has seen her actively dissuade Super PAC assistance; but this Tuesday, a group of well-connected progressive women reportedly pumped $1 million into a pro-Warren ad campaign through a brand-new Persist PAC. The ads are already airing in Nevada, which holds its caucuses Saturday, but as of this writing Warren’s campaign has not commented on the effort.
Warren has also, for more than a year, refrained from aggressive attacks on her competitors. That seems likely to be jettisoned tonight, at the final televised debate before Nevada’s caucuses.
On the last point, it remains to be seen whether Warren will attack Bernie Sanders, who leads Nevada and national polls; or Pete Buttigieg, who has eaten into Warren’s support with college-educated Democrats.
She seems eager to at least train fire on Michael Bloomberg, who is making his first debate appearance but is not competing in Saturday’s caucus. Warren has blasted him from a distance for a while now. On Tuesday she tweeted that, thanks to Bloomberg “buy[ing] his way into the debate… primary voters curious about how each candidate will take on Donald Trump can get a live demonstration of how we each take on an egomaniac billionaire.”
It’s a good line, but only if she follows it up by actually landing some blows on Bloomberg.
Pummeling the other candidates is trickier business for Warren. Her appeal to Democrats—likely to be spelled out explicitly on the debate stage tonight—is that she can unify all parts of the coalition needed to defeat Trump. That is, she can get the Sanders-led left to the polls, but not drive away moderates and centrists in Buttigieg’s and Biden’s sights.
It’s tough to unify those groups while insulting their standard-bearers. That explains why Warren has limited her considerable argumentative talents to narrow policy differences, such as health care.
She maintained that strategy in the previous debate, even as it was becoming clear that she was headed for a potentially crushing under-performance in the New Hampshire primary.
Warren has made a virtue of staying the course with her strategies, regardless of the twists and turns along the campaign road. But, there’s a point when that turns into failing to learn from mistakes. There are signs that she might be ready for a new debate tactic.
Losing the air wars
As for investing in staff over advertising, there seems to be a shift there as well.
Warren built out a large staff early, hiring by far the most campaign employees in the first three months of 2019. Today the team claims more than 1,000 staffers; she has offices and ground troops in all 15 states and territories that vote on Super Tuesday, March 3, and in many beyond that.
That was a calculated risk. It meant committing to enormous payroll costs rather than socking away funds for heavy ad campaigns as voters began making up their minds.
Compounding the risk were decisions about fundraising that, to date, Warren has not abandoned. As the campaign began, she announced that she would hold no fundraisers or other events where wealthy donors got exclusive access to her presence.
She also repeatedly condemned Super PACs and dark-money groups that might attempt to independently spend money on her behalf—and not in the usual wink-wink but-I-can’t-stop-them way of most pols.
The combined effect, unsurprisingly, has been to quell the big-money support that would make up for the funds spent on payroll.
Even given the advantage of starting with $10 million transferred from her Senate campaign committee, Warren has been badly outspent on advertising by most of her rivals, especially if you include those outside PACs. Biden and Buttigieg have benefited from such outside spending, and a group is reportedly launching a seven-figure ad campaign for Amy Klobuchar.
Warren spent $6.2 million on advertising in Iowa, according to Advertising Analytics; that was behind even Andrew Yang’s $6.7 million.
Biden had $8.7 million worth of ads there, between his campaign and the Unite The Country Super PAC. Sanders spent $9.6 million. Buttigieg spent over $10 million, with additional help from VoteVets, and self-funded Tom Steyer spent $14.4 million.
A similar pattern played out in New Hampshire. Notably, Warren was the only major candidate who did not buy any ad time on Boston broadcast stations, which are viewed in Southern New Hampshire. She advertised only on New Hampshire’s WMUR, cable television, and small stations in Vermont and Maine with Granite State audiences.
The financial limitations were apparent in plenty of time for Warren to have pared down payroll if she wanted to, by laying off organizers in states that don’t vote until March. But, she stuck with the calculation of bodies over ad buys.
What Warren needed, then, was for her organizational strength to produce results that, in turn, would spur a rush of contributions. That hasn’t happened.
Can she take advantage?
Her supporters bemoan the news media for ignoring Warren, but finishing third in a state where she led in polls a few months ago, and fourth in her next-door-neighbor state, are not results that are going to generate positive national buzz.
In fact, Warren’s fundraising of late has been impressive in the face of those poor results. And the campaign appears to be ready now to put that money onto the airwaves.
After initially canceling well over a half-million dollars of reserved ad buys in Nevada and South Carolina after the Iowa caucuses, Warren has gone heavily back onto the airwaves in the Silver State. A new ad is blanketing stations in Las Vegas and Reno, including local Telemundo and Univision outlets, featuring Barack Obama and former Nevada Senator Harry Reid praising Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she established.
The campaign is also keeping pace with the non-billionaire candidates in South Carolina advertising, using a similar ad using only Obama footage.
And now, she is finally getting a boost from big-donor outside spending. The new Super PAC, first reported by Axios, involves political figures who have held high positions with EMILY’s List, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the ACLU, and Warren endorser Julian Castro, among others.
So, if Warren does well in Nevada, will it be due to the extensive organizing team she invested in a year ago, or this late splurge on ads?
If the former, that could bode well going forward: Warren has organized in upcoming states where other campaigns are just now starting up ground operations with staff re-assigned from Iowa and New Hampshire.
But no similar seeding has been done for winning an ad war elsewhere, if that’s the takeaway.
Warren has yet to buy any ad time in any Super Tuesday state, with the exception of Maine. Without the Super PACs and mega-bundlers, it’s hard to see how she can get the money fast enough to replicate what she’s doing in Nevada across multiple large, big-market states.
She might need to make another adjustment to her long-held strategy. Rather than competing for votes, and precious delegates, everywhere, Warren might need to withdraw from a bunch of states and concentrate on just a handful for Super Tuesday. It might not be a path to a majority of delegates, or perhaps even a plurality, but planning for a divided convention might be her only option.
That’s if she does well enough this Saturday in Nevada to keep moving forward at all.
