Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who lost badly in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, plans to make up for those defeats with a successful Super Tuesday, according to a campaign memo.
Warren on Tuesday finished a distant fourth in the New Hampshire primary, grabbing 9.2 percent of the vote to finish behind apparent winner Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, according to The New York Times.
Warren said Tuesday night, however, that “our campaign is built for the long haul and we are just getting started,” according to The Boston Globe.
“We might be headed for one of those long primary fights that last for months,” Warren said. “The question for us Democrats is whether it will be a long bitter rehash of the same old divides in our party, or whether we can find another way.”
Warren campaign manager Roger Lau wrote in a memo to Warren’s supporters Tuesday that the Massachusetts progressive’s team is planning for a “drawn-out contest,” according to the Washington Examiner.
Lau called the Democratic contest a “volatile and unpredictable” primary race.
“After New Hampshire tonight, 98% of pledged delegates will still be up for grabs,” he wrote, according to The Hill. “And as the race consolidates after Super Tuesday, we expect the results to show that Elizabeth Warren is the consensus choice of the widest coalition of Democrats in every corner of the country.”
The Super Tuesday voting on March 3 covers 14 states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia, according to Ballotpedia.
Nevada and South Carolina vote before then.
Lau claimed Warren can reach at least 15 percent support in more than half of the Super Tuesday states, and will snare a trove of convention delegates in the process.
“Warren is poised to finish in the top two in over half of Super Tuesday states (eight of 14), in the top three in all of them, and is on pace to pick up at-large statewide delegates in all but one,” he wrote
“The process won’t be decided by the simple horse race numbers in clickbait headlines,” Lau said, according to The New York Times. “That’s never been our focus — our focus is on building a broad coalition to win delegates everywhere.”
In the memo, Lau said Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden were the only long-term viable candidates, setting aside Buttigieg and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“Sen. Sanders starts with a ceiling that’s significantly lower than the support he had four years ago,” he wrote.
As for Biden, Lau claimed the long-time front-runner was tumbling.
“Biden entered this race as the clear front-runner, reaching over 40 percent in national polling last spring. He’s now polling under 30 percent even among older voters and African-American voters, who have been his strongest supporters, and his support among younger voters has fallen to just 6 percent,” the memo said.
Lau also said Buttigieg has had it easy so far.
“Former Mayor Buttigieg’s most significant challenge is yet to come, as the contest moves into states with more diverse electorates, and he still hasn’t answered tough questions about his record in South Bend,” the memo said.
Warren herself was talking optimism.
“There are a lot of folks who are going to talk about what’s not winnable, what can’t be done and definitely about who can’t do it,” Warren said in the days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, according to The Times.
“They’re going to talk about it right up until we get in that fight, we persist and we win.”
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