[M]ANCHESTER, N.H. — Ask Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren about seemingly any challenge and the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate responds with the tagline “I have a plan for that.”
If only campaign staffers had one to help them deal with her sudden surge in popularity.
The first major candidate to enter the race, Warren stumbled this winter when she raised only $299,000 in her campaign’s initial 24 hours (her progressive Vermont peer Bernie Sanders reaped 20 times that) and polled only in the low single digits nationally and in the first primary state of New Hampshire.
Six months later, a new Economist/YouGov poll finds that while former Vice President Joe Biden is topping national Democratic tallies at 26%, Warren has risen to second at 16% and Sanders has fallen to third at 12%.
In the first caucus state of Iowa, the latest CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll shows Biden at 24%, Sanders at 16% (down from 27% in March) and Warren just a point behind at 15% (up from 9%).
In the second caucus state of Nevada, a new Monmouth University poll finds Biden at 36%, Warren at 19% and Sanders at 13%.
In the second primary state of South Carolina, the latest Post and Courier/Change Research poll shows Biden at 37%, Warren at 17% and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 11%, with Sanders tying for fourth with California U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris at 9%.
And in the Super Tuesday third primary state of California, a new Los Angeles Times/UC Berkeley poll finds Biden at 22%, Warren at 18% and Sanders at 17%
Collectively, the results are starting to tip the scales in how the press writes headlines.
“Can Elizabeth Warren Win It All?” The New Yorker magazine is asking this month.
“Is Bernie Sanders Finished?” Bloomberg adds.
Warren, speaking to reporters in New Hampshire’s largest city of Manchester, isn’t ready to declare victory.
“Way too early for polls,” she says. “What this is really about is a chance to talk with people.”
Sanders, for his part, isn’t surrendering. He remains second in the RealClearPolitics.com average of national polls, with Biden at 32.4%, Sanders at 15.2% and Warren at 11.6%.
“While other competitors have improved their position in the Democratic primary, Sanders has maintained his second-place position in every national poll, and many state polls,” his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, emailed the press this week.
But Sanders is the only one of the top three candidates whose percentages are decreasing rather than increasing, and the resulting coverage — “Warren Emerges As Potential Compromise Nominee,” Politico just reported of the candidate it deemed “an alternative to Bernie Sanders” — is agitating the Vermonter.
“The cat is out of the bag,” Sanders posted on Twitter. “The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is publicly ‘anybody but Bernie.’ They know our progressive agenda of Medicare for All, breaking up big banks, taking on drug companies and raising wages is the real threat to the billionaire class.”
As Sanders’ campaign struggles with reports of “surprisingly underwhelming” numbers, Warren’s staff is trying to figure out how to accommodate a growing number of supporters.
This past week, journalists from many of the nation’s top media outlets found themselves sitting on folding chairs on a Manchester sidewalk when they couldn’t fit into a sold-out banquet hall event featuring Warren.
Listening to speeches broadcast on an outside loudspeaker, all posed the same question: Was the candidate’s surge because of her nearly two dozen and counting plans, starting with a wealth tax? The fact she won’t join her fellow Democrats on Fox News? Or that she’s a woman in a field that includes 17 men?
“It’s a little bit of it all,” said a Warren staffer in New Hampshire. “We’re trying to give people the best experience possible. And she is so clear on her vision. It really is connecting with people.”
At first glance, Warren and Sanders are both New England transplants with hardscrabble childhoods running on platforms for working families and against rich and powerful special interests. Ask each about the other and they say they’re friends before proving it by deflecting further questions.
“I’m just delighted to be able to talk about why I’m in this fight,” Warren says when asked about fellow competitors, “and to be there with a lot of other Democrats who are also in the fight and who have good ideas about what we want to see change and how we want to go about it.”
But people are discovering their differences. Sanders, who ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against eventual party nominee Hillary Clinton, promoted democratic socialism in a recent speech in which he played up Depression-era President Franklin Roosevelt, “then the leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”
“Let me be absolutely clear: democratic socialism to me requires achieving political and economic freedom in every community,” Sanders said. “And let me also be clear, the only way we achieve these goals is through a political revolution.”
Warren, for her part, is a self-described “capitalist to my bones” whose favorite president is another Roosevelt — Teddy, who worked to break up the biggest corporate monopolies at the turn of the 20th century. She’s less about revolution and more about reform and regulation.
“It’s structural change that interests me,” she’s quoted in the coming issue of the New York Times Magazine. “If you get the structures right, then the markets start to work to produce value across the board, not just sucking it all up to the top.”
The two also campaign differently. Sanders favors lengthy policy speeches with little or no time for interaction with his audience. Warren, in comparison, shares her personal story and plans, invites questions (more than 2,000 so far, she estimates) and has posed for some 30,000 selfies with any supporter who asks.
Sanders may not be nearly as open to such opportunities, but he still has believers.
“If it seems like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is fighting for his political life amid a series of negative articles, it might be because he always is,” Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi writes. “Sanders is always, literally, embattled, among other things because his version of politics is a battle, a zero-sum clash of economic interests in particular. … The latest brush-fire, a series of negative articles trumpeting a poll surge by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as the latest indication of Bernie’s oft-predicted demise, is just par for the course.”
Even the Bloomberg story “Is Bernie Sanders Finished?” doesn’t conclude anything definitively.
“Sanders does have some assets,” it notes. “He also has plenty of money and the capacity for raising more. He remains well-liked by Democrats.”
Then again, the reason for Warren’s surge could be as simple as her campaign companion — Bailey the golden retriever, named after Jimmy Stewart’s character in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” and current leader in the YouGov poll of the best-named political pets.
“Vermont senator Bernie Sanders did not have a dog during the last presidential race,” the website QZ.com writes, “and doesn’t seem to have gotten one since.”
