Won the Rollout

How Kamala Harris Won the Rollout Primary

And Kirsten Gillibrand lost it.

By BILL SCHER

You might have missed it, but the Democratic presidential primary has already suffered its first casualty. The presidential candidacy of Richard Ojeda, the obstreperous West Virginia populist who lost his 2018 House race, ended on January 25. He had launched his campaign on November 11.

Ojeda’s fast fizzle is proof that a presidential primary is one endeavor in which 80 percent of success isn’t just showing up. That’s especially true in a race like the 2020 Democratic primary. Not only do we anticipate a field of well over a dozen candidates, but many of them are not household names.

And because of early voting and changes to the still-unsettled primary calendar, candidates can’t just camp out on the cheap in bucolic Iowa throughout 2019, shaking the most hands and hoping for a late break. Well before the first Iowa caucus-goer stands in a high school gymnasium corner, candidates will need enough coin to bankroll an ad campaign in megastates like California and Texas. A campaign that cannot get sufficient media attention is likely to dry up and close down before we even get to 2020.

That’s why the presidential campaign rollout matters more than ever. Without a good first impression, candidates may fail to achieve liftoff.

So who’s winning the 2020 rollout primary so far, and who is in danger? And what should the candidates who have yet to announce learn from the early jumpers? First, it helps to start with a big crowd. If you can’t assemble a big crowd right away, then you better have a big idea. If you are getting criticized, whether it’s from the left or the right, treat it as an opportunity to stand your ground, and show your strength.

The Champ: Kamala Harris

Harris didn’t have just a great rollout day, but a great rollout week. She made her announcement to the viewers of ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and made clear the link to civil rights history was no coincidence.

The following Wednesday, after finishing an interview on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the host offered, “I think there's a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.”

On Sunday, Harris assembled the biggest crowd of the January rollout season, an estimated 20,000 in her hometown of Oakland, California, for her first major address of the campaign. One day later, she gave a polished performance at a CNN televised town hall, goosing the network’s ratings in that time slot by 75 percent. She even picked up some of the first congressional endorsements of the campaign, earning the backing of California Reps. Nanette Barragán, Ted Lieu and Katie Hill.

Beyond her poise at the lectern and on screen, she also deflected, for now, the first attacks on her progressive bona fides. While several other announced and probable candidates have begun their endeavors with mea culpas, Harris gave no quarter in the face of criticism that she was too punitive a prosecutor as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. She insisted her approach to criminal justice was progressive, and painted her critics as a fringe element of “people who just believe that prosecutors shouldn't exist, and I don't think I'm ever going to satisfy them.”

She hasn’t put the criticism to rest. Harris skeptics will eagerly share the New York Times “Fact Check of the Day” that charged her with “misleading” CNN viewers about her stance, while serving as California’s attorney general, toward legislation that would have required her office to conduct independent investigations of fatal shootings by police officers. And there may still be other elements of her past record that opponents could find a way to exploit. But by refusing to bend, she signaled to perennially panicky Democratic voters that she won’t wilt in the daylight.

As good as her first week on the trail was, she may have made a misstep during the CNN town hall on the tricky subject of health care. Asked by Jake Tapper if her support for “Medicare for all” meant she would “totally eliminate private insurance,” she responded, after a back-and-forth about insurance approvals and paperwork, “Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on.” The problem with that answer is that while a recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that 71 percent back the idea of Medicare for all, only 37 percent still do upon hearing it means we would “eliminate private health insurance companies.”

Several Senate Democrats distanced themselves from Harris’ stance. And the Harris campaign recalibrated the next day, stressing that Harris is also supportive of legislation that moves incrementally toward single-payer. The worst-case scenario for Harris would be if the single-payer kerfuffle becomes emblematic of the argument that the idea of President Kamala Harris, which fueled her gangbusters introduction, is more exciting than the reality.

The Comeback: Elizabeth Warren

Warren had the worst 2018 of all the 2020 aspirants. Donald Trump’s summertime “Pocahontas” taunts punctured her support in polls, and her DNA-test rebuttal only worsened the problem. Having started the year in double-digits in primary polling, by the end she had tumbled into the low single-digits.

Then on the last day of 2018, she announced her presidential exploratory committee. And she regained her footing. Not quite yet a formal candidate, she eschewed a major announcement rally (presumably that will come later). But she otherwise came out strong, in ways that younger, greener candidates will find hard to match.

Her announcement video has racked up more than 850,000 views on Facebook and YouTube, showing that, at minimum, plenty of people are interested in what she has to say. Warren has honed her economic populist pitch for years, going back to 2004 when she was helping middle-class fans of the “Dr. Phil” show avoid crippling debt. So she was able to begin her presidential quest with a clear sense of why she is running, a thorough diagnosis of what ails America, and a slogan handcrafted and gift-wrapped by Senator Mitch McConnell: “Persist.”

While other candidates seem to be cribbing off of Senator Bernie Sanders to fill out their policy agenda, Warren has her own set of signature, detailed policy proposals. By “nerding out” she may run a risk of, as the New York Times characterized it, “being seen as out of touch and too intellectual and offbeat.” But owning her issues has already come in handy.

Elizabeth Warren 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren's announcement video has racked up more than 850,000 views on Facebook and YouTube, showing that, at minimum, plenty of people are interested in what she has to say. | Scott Eisen/Getty Images

Howard Schultz, whose public flirtations with a centrist independent candidacy turned him into a Democratic bête noir overnight, singled out Warren for her “ridiculous plan of taxing wealthy people a surtax of 2 percent … You can’t just attack these things in a punitive way by punishing people.” Warren sent that fat pitch over the Green Monster, firing back on Twitter: “What's ‘ridiculous’ is billionaires who think they can buy the presidency to keep the system rigged for themselves while opportunity slips away for everyone else.”

She also benefited from a backlash among grassroots Democrats to the public questioning of her “likability” that greeted her initial announcement. A flood of progressive commentary defended Warren and dismissed the nebulous likability metric as inherently sexist. But such think pieces wouldn’t have helped Warren much if they hadn’t coincided with a string of well-attended and well-received stump speeches in Iowa that buttressed the case.

And while conservatives, including the president, mocked her Instagram beer drinking as a pathetic attempt to seem as hip as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in fact, Warren has deftly executed a social media strategy that reflects her own persona. She regularly shares with her 1.2 million Instagram followers snapshots of the trail and thoughts from her kitchen. A video of her campaigning with “the two guys in my life,” her husband and her dog, racked up nearly 100,000 views on Facebook and Instagram. Another of her calling a preschool teacher who gave her $10 earned more than 300,000 views.

Two weeks after the rollout, Warren got a noticeable bump in the POLITICO/Morning Consult tracking poll, going from 3 percent in mid-December to 9 percent in mid-January—good enough for third place.

However, now she has ticked back down to 6 percent, as Harris jumped into third place with 10, indicating that Warren hasn’t fully addressed lingering concerns about her candidacy. Nevertheless, she’s back in it. You might even say she has persisted.

The Bust: Kirsten Gillibrand

If there’s anyone running a serious risk of failing to launch because of a poor rollout, it’s Gillibrand. After Gillibrand announced an exploratory committee to an enthusiastic audience on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she took the logical next step with a visit to “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Before the interview, Maddow delivered a withering introduction, taking viewers through Gillibrand’s “transformation” from “card-carrying member of the Blue Dog Democrats from an upstate conservative district” to “the senator who has voted against President Trump and the Trump agenda more than any other senator.” And she included the obligatory mention of Gillibrand’s role in the ousting of Al Franken from the Senate over sexual misconduct allegations, which continues to divide Democrats. Maddow then turned to Gillibrand, asked her to explain her “evolution,” dwelled on her previously harsh rhetoric regarding immigration, and told her that “you are going to have to give explanations … about why you changed your mind on things like that.”

Gillibrand’s responded that “when I became senator of New York state”—which was by appointment, not election—“I recognized I didn’t know everything about the whole state.” She “regretted that I didn’t look beyond my district” when it came to immigration, and added that “I don’t think it was driven from my heart.”

These were not only unsatisfying answers, but they also soon conflicted with the message she tried to deliver in her subsequent trip to Iowa. To prospective caucus-goers, instead of saying her time as a rural district congresswoman cramped her understanding of key issues, she used it as an argument for her general election viability, because she won in a House district known for having “more cows than Democrats.” She didn’t even try to square the fact that she won upstate by running to the right, in contradiction to her current positioning on the left.

Gillibrand ended her rollout phase without establishing a distinguishing persona or a signature policy. In the POLITICO/Morning Consultant tracking poll, she started the month of January at 1 percent, and she ends it at 1 percent.

Perhaps she will make a splashy announcement that can define her candidacy, after her exploratory commitment phase ends and her formal campaign begins. But she needs to retool, and fast.

The Whiffs: Julián Castro and Pete Buttigieg

It’s hard to go from the bottom tier to the top tier on rollout alone, but at some point, a lesser-known candidate needs a breakout moment to become better known. In May 2002, then-Vermont Governor Howard Dean didn’t make any waves when he formed his exploratory committee. His star turn didn’t come until nine months later, when he began a speech to Democratic National Committee members with, “What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq.”

In their rollouts, former San Antonio mayor and secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg didn’t get their breakout moments. And they may not have nine months to find one.

Fortunately for them, their announcements were not ignored. Castro generated a fair amount of news coverage centering on his Mexican-American roots, his potential to rally the Latino vote (which could be decisive in California and Texas) and go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump over immigration. He had a turn in the center seat on ABC’s “The View” and was a guest on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday show.

Castro is setting bars for other campaigns to clear. He made his first post-announcement campaign stop in Puerto Rico, not Iowa. Warren soon followed in Castro’s footsteps, and others are expected to make the trip, not wanting to allow Castro to run away with the Latino vote. And Castro is angling for young, union-friendly voters by pledging to set his campaign staff’s hourly minimum wage at $15, and embrace any attempt by his staff to unionize, putting pressure on other campaigns to follow suit. The problem with setting bars for other campaigns, however, is that they can be cleared, making it difficult to distinguish yourself from the pack.

Buttigieg, who announced only last week, hasn’t been as active as Castro, and doesn’t have much in the way of signature ideas yet. But he managed to rack up nearly 1 million views for his announcement video, which put heavy emphasis on his youth and his sharp dismissal of his political elders: “We can’t look for greatness in the past.” And he’s scheduled to be appear on the “The View” this Thursday. His status as an under-40, gay veteran from the Midwest naturally attracts curiosity, but he’ll have to make some bigger moves soon to capitalize on it.

The Dumpster Fire: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

When your campaign team is leaking to the media that you are “indecisive and impulsive,” and the campaign manager abandons ship, and the announcement rally hasn’t even happened yet, that’s a bad sign.

When you have to explain to Democratic voters why you once broadly opposed gay rights and helped promote “conversion therapy,” which teaches that homosexuality is wrong and can be reversed, that’s not good.

And when your initial announcement sparks a credible primary challenger for your current House seat, raising the real possibility that this whole presidential endeavor may end your political career, maybe you should be rethinking your life choices.