Sanders’ plan

Inside Sanders’ plan to chip into Clinton’s lead

His team is planning more television appearances, but not only on news shows.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Bernie Sanders, on his heels once again in the contest with Hillary Clinton, is prepping a more targeted strategy aimed at solidifying his strong positions in Iowa and New Hampshire so that he can start clawing into her lead among groups like women and minorities.

To soften his image among these critical demographic groups — and to introduce a softer side of himself to early-state voters — Sanders has almost entirely dropped his megarallies in liberal college towns and will soon start more regularly touring coffee shops and diners throughout the early voting states.

His team is planning more television appearances, but not only on news shows. Instead he wants to replicate his experience on programs like "The Ellen Degeneres Show" and "The View" to reach voters who see him largely as a gruff underdog. And he will deliver a series of policy speeches on issues like foreign affairs and economics over the next 10 weeks.

These steps come as his staffers, led by chief strategist Tad Devine, spend hours recording a series of get-to-know-Sanders ads that will run in Iowa and New Hampshire media markets — and only weeks after Sanders finally relented and let his aides hire a national pollster. (Sanders' camp released its first ad, a 60-second spot to run as part of a $2 million buy, on Sunday.)

For a campaign that bills itself as revolutionary, these are notably traditional maneuvers for the pre-primary stage, conceded Sanders’ national strategists and lead aides in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa. But, they think, this plan may be his best and only shot at catching up to Clinton.

“We still have a whole set of goals, and one of those is introducing Bernie to constituencies like the Hispanic community and the African-American community, who just don’t know him because he’s not been a national figure,” explained one top Sanders aide.

"But the first goal is to exceed expectations in Iowa and to do well in New Hampshire, in order to reach that point.”

Sanders grabbed headlines in October by more explicitly comparing his positions with Clinton’s in the days after her strong debate performance and appearance before the congressional committee investigating Benghazi. And it’s clear why: Polls leading into October showed him pulling even, even overtaking her in Iowa and New Hampshire. But by the end of the month, Clinton had mostly erased his gains in those states, and expanded her leads elsewhere and with women and minorities.

Clinton now has a 49 percent favorable rating among all women, and 63 percent among nonwhite voters, according to the latest national CNN/ORC national survey.

“The polls are showing that he’s still trailing among Latino and African-American voters in the Democratic primary, working class voters as well,” said Monmouth University poll director Patrick Murray: “The only group that he’s doing fairly well in is the younger voters, and they make up such a small percentage of those that caucus or vote in the primary that it will make it very difficult for him.”

Sanders’ headquarters recently brought on California-based pollster Ben Tulchin, who worked for Howard Dean during the 2004 primary campaign, to help the senator’s senior advisers slice the numbers and devise new approaches.

Meanwhile, the campaign is building up its early-state outposts: The New Hampshire team brought on new senior staffers in October, the Iowa team is bringing in surrogates — including one-time Chicago mayoral candidate Jésus "Chuy" García — and the South Carolina operation opened its fourth office last week, according to state director Chris Covert.

That kind of investment is far from revolutionary, said a handful of Democratic strategists and campaign officials. In fact, as members of Sanders' team acknowledge, unremarkable infrastructure-building is likely his best shot at keeping up serious pressure on Clinton.

“He can’t bring his own base in, in sufficient numbers,” explained Murray. “He has to fight a more traditional battle. That’s what it’s all about.”

It’s not to say that his original strategy didn’t serve him. It did: Huge rallies in progressive enclaves scored television coverage and national attention. But it didn’t help him build enough support beyond young, highly educated white voters.

So the new tack is aimed at building a broader and deeper coalition among voters who actually participate in primaries, all part of a tried and true practice for an insurgent trying to claw into an establishment front-runner’s lead.

"It’s the natural progression of the race,” a Sanders adviser said, noting that having staffers preview a brawl on television is different from having a candidate draw contrasts with his opponent on the stump. It’s not like Sanders will suddenly start centering his events, or his campaign strategy, around Clinton-bashing — contrary to some attention-grabbing headlines, the aide said.

When Sanders unleashed a sustained critique of Clinton’s flip-flops at the end of October, for example, he was in fact stringing together concerns he had already raised — not kicking off a high-octane barrage.

"As the race gets into a situation where you actually have debates and forums where they’re both on the stage on a regular basis next to each other, it naturally happens,” the adviser added.

Still, the new phase in Sanders' campaign took some Democrats aligned with Clinton aback because of the long-held assumption among party leaders that the two leading candidates would refrain from going after each other. Polls shows that Sanders’ supporters like Clinton, and if Clinton wins the nomination, she will probably need to appeal to Sanders voters in the general election.

But for all their attention-grabbing, Sanders’ stump-speech contrasts are hardly the biggest shift for the man-of-the-people candidate. That title may go to the change that's brewing as the Vermonter steps up his campaign travel in the coming weeks, Devine conceded: “We may have to break down and not fly commercial for a couple of days to get to three or four states.”