Bernie Sanders is soaring in the polls. Joe Biden is making increasingly loud noises about joining the race. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers are working methodically to build the fail-safe they think can secure the nomination, and it’s pegged to a single day on the calendar: March 1, 2016. Super Tuesday.
That’s when, according to their plans, Clinton’s financial advantage, combined with early planning and strategizing, can deliver the knockout punch.
Some of this is the product of a compulsion to avoid the mistakes made in 2008 that allowed Barack Obama to swoop in. Indeed, her aides began planning for Super Tuesday before the campaign even launched, back when her inner circle was more worried about Martin O’Malley than Sanders.
But uncertainty in Brooklyn about how Clinton will fare in the early-voting states increases the urgency of organizing in the March states.
Eleven states will vote on March 1, including delegate-heavy Texas, Virginia and Colorado. And while her aides say that Clinton can and will compete vigorously in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, her fate will depend on dispatching challengers in March — something she critically failed to do last time around.
If it works, the former secretary of state will have wrapped up the party’s nomination before spring ends — with only 32 states and two territories having voted — thereby avoiding the kind of protracted battle that consumed much of 2008.
Already, the focus is shifting to those later states. While Clinton still visits the February states regularly — she was in Iowa on Wednesday — in recent weeks her campaign and fundraising stops in the March states have skyrocketed in frequency, while her team sends in surrogates for public events and staffers for behind-the-scenes meetings with local influencers.
Legions of elected officials who’ve backed Clinton have been headlining regular organizing meetings — like when Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin and one of his predecessors in the governor’s mansion, Madeleine Kunin, held an in-state event for Clinton less than a week after Sanders kicked off his own campaign, blocks away from his launch site.
And, in the clearest sign yet that the campaign is looking straight at Super Tuesday states, it recently hired its first paid staffer there: a former top aide to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, tasked with delivering Clinton that state’s caucuses. More similar hires are expected in the coming weeks.
“The Clinton campaign is clearly getting a huge head start on this, being able to put the resources on the ground. Others can do it, but the question is how big a head start she gets,” said Mo Elleithee, a veteran of Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
“When we did move past the early states [in 2008], they [the Obama team] had a leg up. They had the boots on the ground, they had the organizational infrastructure, they had the press relationships that we didn’t have. So when the history is told of the 2008 campaign, that is an important piece of it.”
Still, Sanders in particular is working to throw roadblocks in Clinton’s way by doing some organizing of his own. The Vermonter’s camp disputes the notion that Clinton’s organizing will be enough to deliver her the nomination by Super Tuesday.
“I concede that they start off with an advantage because Secretary Clinton has been through this before and has a network of supporters, but we’re coming at this as someone who is new to the process — much as President Obama was in 2008,” said Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist. “Having worked for Walter Mondale [in 1984], I saw how a candidate who’s not well known — in that case Gary Hart — could make waves on Super Tuesday in the wake of success in New Hampshire.”
While Clinton appears to maintain a significant lead in Iowa polling, a pair of recent surveys has shown Sanders ahead in the Granite State as most others show the two in something close to a dead heat.
“If you’re able to generate early support and momentum, and able to develop a lead in terms of pledged delegates, it’s very, very hard for someone to catch up to the front-runner,” explained Devine, detailing Sanders’ own hope. “Even in [Super Tuesday] states where we don’t think we’ll win, we think we can effectively split delegates.”
Nonetheless, the fact remains that Sanders’ massive rallies in liberal cities haven’t stopped Clinton from keeping large leads in national polling and most other states with reliable surveys. And while he has pledged to campaign in red states, Sanders’ travel schedule has not been as focused on the March states as Clinton’s.
As far as those destinations go, Clinton has already spent time — or announced upcoming appearances — in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. It’s an itinerary she can afford to maintain thanks to her campaign’s deep pockets.
“There is definitely much more outreach from the Clinton camp than the others,” said a prominent and unaffiliated Democrat in Massachusetts, one of the states where Devine said he thought Sanders could seriously compete for delegates (along with Minnesota and Colorado). “In the past, a lot of campaigns have used Massachusetts like an ATM, so people have really appreciated it so far.”
That appreciation is all part of the plan to mimic Obama’s 2008 organization, which ultimately overwhelmed an unsuspecting Clinton campaign that started building in-state operations too late in many of these states.
“It was about this point eight years ago where, in my part of the universe, I began to see the Obama campaign’s long ballgame. It was late summer, early fall when I would get calls from reporters in Georgia saying, ‘[Obama campaign manager] David Plouffe just did a conference call with us about the Georgia plan.’ The next day I’d get the call from Tennessee, or Wisconsin,” said Elleithee, who now runs Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.
“We were very focused on the four early states and maybe a couple of Super Tuesday states, but at the press level we weren’t doing that level activity. But here they were. Some of it might have been smoke and mirrors, but knowing what we know now, they were looking way down the road, and it gave them a tremendous advantage.”
This time around, Clinton’s campaign paid staffers for the first 10 weeks of her campaign to build organizations in all 46 states that vote after February. Each of those states now has volunteer networks operating with varying degrees of intensity.
In some — like Virginia, where the state party led by close Clinton friend Gov. Terry McAuliffe has hired 69 paid staffers for its November 2015 state Senate elections — the campaign is fully expected to take over existing party or campaign infrastructures.
Such preparation, said Elleithee, is evidence that Clinton’s campaign has been incorporating Obama’s tactics — and that Sanders had better step up his own organization soon.
If he can’t seriously start planning for March, Elleithee explained, “it becomes very difficult.”
“Math is math, as we learned the hard way in 2008.”
