'Bailey' vs. 'blood and teeth': The inside story of Elizabeth Warren's collapse

[brooklynite]

Politico

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign brass realized they had bungled her budget at the worst possible time.

Several weeks before the Iowa and New Hampshire elections, they discovered their fundraising projections for the fourth quarter of 2019 were far too rosy. The army of organizers they hired when fundraising and polling were at their peak — it ultimately ballooned to over 1,000 people — had become a straitjacket. Donations nosedived after an Oct. 15 debate, when Warren was bombarded by her rivals.

Strapped for cash, the campaign didn’t have enough money to run the TV and digital ads they had originally planned for the early states. Even then, they were forced to obtain a $3 million line of credit at the end of January.

The crunch was exacerbated by the disaster of the Iowa caucuses, which dominated headlines and deprived Warren and the other top three campaigns of bragging rights and a potential fundraising boost.

That was just one of several mistakes campaign officials are grappling with now as they contemplate how Warren’s once-surging campaign ended without placing above third in any of the first 18 contests. The campaign’s collapse has led to finger-pointing and self-doubt among Warren staffers and outside allies, who believe that even with the headwinds of sexism and electability she faced, the nomination was within reach.

[BusyBeingBest]

1. Financial mismanagement is something I didn't expect from her.

I thought her advisers steered her wrong sometimes politically, but I thought they'd be better fiscally and organizationally-speaking.

[MineralMan]

2. Nobody is ever sure about how to run a presidential campaign.

There are too many variables, really. Personally, I think everyone focused too much on the first two primary events. Tradition, I suppose, but it was a mistake. Another candidate ignored them altogether, which was another mistake.

Super Tuesday caught everyone off guard. Had Biden not scored big in South Carolina, he would not be in the position he is today. But, that happened, and here we are.

The answer for the future is to forget about Iowa and New Hampshire next time. Move four important states into the first primary events and make those early events truly important to the overall primary campaign.

Next time, make those first four primaries representative of the demographics of the USA, and pick them from different regions. Make their results meaningful by choosing states with enough delegates to really matter.

Not California and Texas, but states like South Carolina, Michigan, Delaware, and Washington. Spread them out across the country and make them important enought to give people a picture of how the nation really feels.

Iowa and New Hampshire? Who cares?

[brooklynite]

4. If you had plugged another State in up front, Warren's problem would be the same...

They assumed robust national polling which assumed robust national fundraising. Whichever State they were targeting first, they'd still run out of money because of the national polling and fundraising drop.

[MineralMan]

6. You're probably right. Running for President is a huge challenge.

It doesn't matter what the sequence of primaries is. Still, we're doing it wrong right now. We need to rethink the entire primary process. We need to get down to three or four candidates right away. 2020 started out as an overcrowded melee. We can't do that again. That's what led to Trump for the Republicans.

We're not completely out of the woods in 2020, but we're well on our way. Biden is the stable front runner and is someone who can beat Trump. We need to get behind him and put the primary race behind us and get started on the general election campaign ASAP.

I really like Warren. She was always my second choice. But...she stumbled early and couldn't recover. On the progressive side, Bernie just had too much presence for her to compete with. He's a force of nature, really. He never could win in November, but he had enough going for him to dominate that side of things.

Biden was the natural candidate for the bulk of the party, but had too many others in the race with the same ideas and plans. Thank goodness for South Carolina and its message from black voters!

[genxlib]

3. That doesn't sound like "bungling" to me

The had to project incoming donations and they had reason to believe that the campaign was surging.

It became a problem when the donations didn't materialize but that would have been a problem no matter what was projected.

[brooklynite]

5. Deeper in the article, they discuss the campaign's mistakes in messaging...

...which exacerbated her funding drop.

[BeyondGeography]

7. Roll out the Monday morning QB's

Some good points, some pointless musing.

Health care was of course completely bungled. And, as a related point, “Bernie, but better,” was always the way to go.

But let’s not ignore the impact of Buttigieg and his soft-edged banalities, which had IA and NH swooning. He went after Warren for her supposed “my way or the highway” style and criticized her for saying “fight” too much. It registered and peeled off college-educated voters from Warren.

Voters also didn’t care a bit as it turned out about Warren’s corruption argument, which was point #1 in every stump speech. No mention of that in the article. Is that her fault too?

At the end of the day, this wasn’t Warren’s time. She could have run a better campaign, but being true to herself was to ask too much of voters:

-Believe she could change the way government works.

-Believe she could restructure the economy.

She was head-and-shoulders above the field on both points, but people have one thing on their mind: beat Trump. As it turned out, she was never going to be option #1 on that one, no matter what her campaign did.

[customerserviceguy]

8. Had it not been for

Amy Klobuchar's unusually great debate performance in New Hampshire, Pete Buttigieg might have been a clear front runner. While he would have likely done poorly in SC, he could have rebounded in a lot of Super Tuesday states.

[BeyondGeography]

9. He was a major part of the story

And omitted completely from this analysis.