If you're convinced Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been erased from the election conversation in spite of her top-three finish in Iowa, Politico is here to prove you wrong.
"Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy suffered a blow with her third place finish in Iowa. And if polls are accurate, it could be that bad or worse in New Hampshire, despite her neighbor-state status," Alex Thompson writes in the lede of a Tuesday piece hyping the notion that her "second loss looms." And yet, as Thompson notes, Warren rallies have continued to be relentlessly upbeat with a concentrated emphasis on party unity—a message she repeats in almost every venue.
"Look, I don't like to knock other candidates," Warren told MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell Monday night, "because the number one thing we have to do is come together as a party and beat Donald Trump. That's what I think I am best positioned to do.”
If there's one thing mainstream journalists have latched on to over the last couple days, it's Warren's message discipline. Politico, the Washington Post, and CNN all ran similarly themed stories on Warren’s laser-like focus in the past couple days. In fact, reporters and rival campaigns seem simultaneously awed and mystified by it, when conventional wisdom suggests that she must pivot to attack mode now. But former Clinton aide Brian Fallon notes that Warren can't afford to go negative now after staking out her lane as the unity candidate.
"To shift now and go on the attack to chase a news cycle or two would undermine their theory of the case, which is to be a unity candidate who can meld the two wings of the party together," Fallon told Politico.
One of the best explanations of Warren's fealty to that strategy came in a Medium post by Warren supporter Rachel Happe.
"[Warren] is playing to win. She is playing to be President of the United States. Not the President of Iowa. Not the President of the Democrats," Happe wrote last week following the Iowa caucus. Rather than being driven by a zero-sum, winner-take-all mentality, Warren "has a vision of what America can be at its best and it has nothing to do with how it compares to Sanders, Buttigieg, Biden, or Trump. ... So Warren isn’t focused on the competition — she is focused on creating a shared vision of what could be."
Whether Warren has a chance to execute that vision will be a function of whether more voters substantially buy into it. As many outlets have reported, she has positioned her campaign for the long haul, with around 1,000 staffers scattered throughout some 30 states. Only billionaire candidate Mike Bloomberg has put more staffers on the ground nationwide.
In nearly all the latest national polls, Warren’s position has largely held steady even as other candidates are making significant shifts. Here’s a very typical national dynamic from Monmouth out Tuesday morning, with Biden in free fall, Bernie gaining a few, and Buttigieg on the move.
But the volatility of this race is nowhere near over as we head into the much more diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina, where a potential realignment of voters of color appears to be under way. Warren’s core seems solid but she needs to become the alternative for some other candidates’ disaffected voters and perhaps deliver a surprise first- or second-place finish between now and Super Tuesday. Whatever the case, her campaign is executing the strategy it devised and trusting the chips to fall where they may.