North Carolina Shows the Rapidly Changing Battle for the Democratic Nomination

Elizabeth Warren waves to a large crowd at a rally.
The unexpected question that Elizabeth Warren now faces is whether she can keep her candidacy afloat.Photograph by Veasey Conway / NYT / Redux

It was a December night in Raleigh, and the television behind the bar at the Hibernian Pub was tuned to the Democratic Presidential debate. North Carolina’s primary election was weeks away, but more than two dozen supporters of Elizabeth Warren cheered her declamations against corruption, her pitch for an extra two-cent tax on wealthy Americans, and her zinger, when asked about her age, that she would be the youngest woman ever elected President.

Melissa Hecht, wearing an Old Hickory Brewery ball cap, was sitting at a bar table near a sign with Warren’s slogan “Dream Big. Fight Hard.” Hecht had been volunteering for Warren since August, and when she saw an unfamiliar man walk into the room she approached him. Within minutes, he was typing his contact information into a Warren campaign app on Hecht’s phone. Hecht, a thirty-one-year-old Appalachian State math grad who has worked in the software industry, is always on the lookout for voters, and typically wears Warren gear. She told me, “I went into a restaurant last month. Someone pointed. She said, ‘I love your shirt.’ I said, ‘Can I ask you some questions?’ I feel like I’m constantly on.”

Warren’s North Carolina operation was up and running last summer, building on an impassioned cadre of volunteers like Hecht. Led by Maggie Thompson, a thirty-four-year-old political organizer who learned her trade in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Raleigh-based operation embarked on the labor-intensive work of constructing a lattice of personal relationships designed to win delegates on Tuesday, March 3rd, or “Super Tuesday.” The biggest day of the primary calendar, voters in North Carolina and thirteen other states, from California to Texas, Minnesota, and Tennessee, will make their choices. Warren’s initial goal was to win an endurance test that might stretch deep into the spring, or longer. The unexpected question that Warren now faces, after disappointing finishes in New Hampshire and Iowa, is whether her ground game can keep her candidacy afloat.

Bernie Sanders rolled out of New Hampshire last week with a win, while Warren finished a distant fourth, not even reaching double digits. As the rest of the Democratic field vies to go head to head with Sanders, Warren faces the growing momentum of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, whose fund-raising has mushroomed, as well as the television onslaught of Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor. Bloomberg has spent a breathtaking four hundred million dollars on advertising across the country and has hired more than a hundred and twenty staff members in North Carolina alone.

Sanders, who recently held boisterous rallies in Durham and Charlotte and announced the opening of four North Carolina offices, appears to be swamping Warren among voters who say that they want a significant break from centrist Democratic politics. Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina political strategist, thinks that Warren is in trouble in the state, where Democrats are as divided as their counterparts across the country, and that Sanders, in particular, stands in her way. “As long as they split the very progressive vote in North Carolina, there’s no path,” Jackson said, adding that neither candidate has been polling well among African-American voters, who comprise nearly half of the state’s electorate. Even with her superior ground game, he believes, Warren cannot do well in the state unless she finds momentum somewhere, “and I don’t know where that is,” he said.

In a memo released on the day of the New Hampshire primary, Warren’s national campaign manager, Roger Lau, urged her supporters to take the long view and consider “delegate math,” the steady accumulation of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Lau wrote, “The process won’t be decided by simple horse race numbers in clickbait headlines. That’s never been our focus—our focus is on building a broad coalition to win delegates everywhere.” Many candidates have recovered from slow starts, but the fact remains that plenty of voters know nothing but the horse-race numbers, a problem for a lagging candidate. A SurveyUSA poll released this week showed Sanders and Bloomberg in a tie in North Carolina, at twenty-two per cent of likely Democratic primary voters, and Joe Biden in third with twenty per cent, followed by Buttigieg at eleven per cent. Warren was the choice of just eight per cent of voters, with eleven per cent undecided.

Super Tuesday is technically March 3rd, but early voting in North Carolina began on Thursday, with a hundred and fifty-seven thousand voters casting ballots in the first few days, according to state election-board figures. In the November, 2018, midterm elections, fifty-one per cent of the votes cast in the state were cast early. Given the calendar, Maggie Thompson, Warren’s state director, and her team are pushing supporters to vote long before seeing returns from the next two contests, in Nevada, on Saturday, and in South Carolina, on February 29th.

Thompson knows her task well. In addition to working in a string of states for the Obama campaign, she was a longtime Wellstone Action trainer who served as the executive director of Generation Progress, a progressive advocacy group that works with young people on climate change, gun violence, immigration, and affordable education. She first heard of Warren while working at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “I remember them talking about, well, there’s this lady over at the Treasury Department. She predicted the financial crisis and she’s starting a new agency,” Thompson recalled. (This was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established in 2010, after the financial meltdown.)

By 2014, Warren was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, and Thompson was working with Generation Progress to address the student-debt crisis by supporting borrowers and exploring what the organization considered a decline in the affordability and quality of higher education. Thompson contacted a raft of senators and asked for help with the launch of a national-campaign called Higher Ed, Not Debt. Warren was the only one who responded. “She got back to us right away, and she was thrilled. She was really engaged with us, worked with us all the time after that. She was always there,” Thompson said.

In the summer of 2019, when Obama alumni were in high demand, Thompson helped organize conference calls to persuade former Obama organizers and campaign staffers to support Warren. She said that several hundred people dialled into the first call, led by Jon Carson, Thompson’s former boss in the Obama campaign and the White House. Though Obama alumni are scattered among the 2020 campaigns, more than two hundred and thirty former Obama campaign staffers endorsed Warren in December. Thompson chose to return to the field, despite its punishing hours and uncertain outcome. “I was, like, it might not be the best life style, the most healthy life style, I’m a little older now,” Thompson told me. “But I do think you just feel those moments in history, and they’re for special candidates, and this is one of them.”

By the time Thompson arrived, in August, Warren volunteers had been holding impromptu events in North Carolina for months. Among them was Melanie Wong, a thirty-nine-year-old fund-raiser for a nonprofit organization. “I would argue with people on the Internet, and I thought I would do something more productive,” Wong told me at the Raleigh debate watch party. She signed into the campaign’s Web space, All In For Warren, and soon connected with like-minded souls, “people that were excited but didn’t know what to do.” A few supporters got together and advertised a “y’all come” event at Clouds Brewing, a Raleigh brewery, in August. Eighty people showed up, Wong said, some driving from as far as two hours away.

Thompson began building a more formal campaign structure. She explained her approach when I met her, in December, at a Durham drinking spot, where one patron was watching the House impeachment vote on a laptop perched on the bar. “We have our organizing program split into two parts,” she said. “One is a very traditional organizing program. We’re working the list, we’re calling hot leads, we’re doing phone banks, we’re doing canvassing. Then we have our community organizing program, which is where our African-American outreach program lives.” Thompson had staffers recruit black voters who were not already on Warren’s lists by visiting churches and community meetings. “That’s deliberate, because you want to show up and be present in the right way and engaging in the right way,” she said, “in order to demonstrate that you’re serious about earning the votes of people, rather than expecting them.”

The first three speakers at the opening of Warren’s Durham office in December were African-Americans, and yet the crowd of more than a hundred people was overwhelmingly white. Spirits were high, with refreshments next to a table covered with campaign flyers and a spot where people could make earrings featuring a photo of Warren. Taped to one wall were twenty-eight manila folders in neat rows, beneath signs that read “Warren has a plan for that!” Each folder had a title, such as “Ending Washington corruption” and “Valuing the work of women of color” and “Universal child care.” Natalie Murdock, a state senate candidate who is African-American and a self-described policy wonk, told me that Warren understands the need to appeal to voters all across the state. “You speak to us,” she said over the din, “when you actually show us what you’re going to do in our community.” The rally ended with an organizer leading the crowd in a call and response: “Dream big!” he shouted. “Fight hard!” supporters shouted back.

On a recent Saturday, I checked in with Murdock after she had finished a round of canvassing in Durham, south and east of downtown. She was not finding many voters committed to Warren. In fact, she wasn’t finding many voters committed to any candidate at all. “Honestly, I was shocked by how many individuals were undecided. So many are wide open, they can be persuaded. That is the bright side,” she said, adding that she remained optimistic. “With a strong ground game, you can overcome anything.”

Buttigieg, who emerged strong from Iowa and New Hampshire, had no such early operation in North Carolina. When his campaign focussed on Super Tuesday states this month, it had staff in only one of them, California. Four staffers were due to arrive in North Carolina and the other Super Tuesday states over the weekend, Tess Whittlesey, Buttigieg’s deputy national press secretary, said. They joined volunteers who have been marshalling forces since last year. “We’re really relying on relationships to break through the noise and introduce people to Pete,” Whittlesey said. “It’s word of mouth, it’s neighbors and friends telling their friends, ‘Hey, I heard about this guy, you should check him out.’ ”

Pete Buttigieg, at Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, North Carolina.Photograph by Logan Cyrus / AFP / Getty

John Wood, a high-school teacher in Durham, told me that he first learned of Buttigieg when he saw a video of the young South Bend mayor campaigning for the role of Democratic National Committee chair. Buttigieg lost badly, but Wood was riveted. “His grace, his humility, his intelligence, just his stature and demeanor,” he recalled. “There’s something about Pete that rallied not only my social-liberal side, with his policies and his vision for the future, but it also satisfied my fiscal-conservative side.” In June, Wood started an Instagram account to build support for Buttigieg, teaming up with a resident who had independently started a Twitter account, “RDU for Pete.” With guidance from a Buttigieg staff member based elsewhere, Wood and his new partners began organizing via social media, inviting “people who were Pete-curious or Pete supporters” to meetups—they call them “Pete-ups”—in libraries, brewpubs, restaurants, and living rooms. “We have five or six people who start the meeting, who say, ‘This is why I’m here with Pete,’ ” Wood told me, explaining that others then join in. “We call them stories of self.”

Biden faces a different challenge. Until recently, the former Vice-President looked dominant in North Carolina. Indeed, after his fourth-place showing in Iowa, his aides began talking about finding salvation in South Carolina and, four days after, the Super Tuesday contests in North Carolina and other states. Mike Gwin, the deputy director of Biden’s rapid-response operation, put it this way: “Super Tuesday has been an area of strength for us throughout, because we know that his support and his base look different than Iowa and New Hampshire. Once you get past the first four states, it really becomes a delegate fight. It’s not just about winning at the state levels, it’s about collecting delegates at the congressional level.”

Yet Biden did not name a North Carolina state director until late December, and his ad spending has only been a fraction of that of his rivals’. Over the weekend, hoping to bolster his slipping prospects, Biden moved staff from Super Tuesday states, including North Carolina, to Nevada and South Carolina. Leaning heavily on name recognition and longtime political contacts, he banked a valuable endorsement last year from Rep. G. K. Butterfield, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, who has known Biden since 1982. When I spoke with Butterfield, he said that Biden has been “tested, time and time again” and can succeed as a trustworthy centrist. “Joe Biden has never been a zealot. He is clearly the moderate, and that will not turn off Democratic voters,” Butterfield said, without mentioning Sanders by name. “He knows how to reach out to Republicans when it’s needed. He’s practical, he’s pragmatic, and most North Carolina voters are pragmatic, on both sides of the political spectrum.”

The core of Biden’s polling strength has been black voters, a point that he has repeatedly emphasized recently to help explain his struggles in overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire. At a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, on the night of the New Hampshire primary, as his dismal fifth-place finish became clear, Biden said to a racially diverse audience, “I hope you love me as much as I love you guys.” Biden said that 99.9 per cent of the country’s black voters had not yet cast ballots and declared, “It ain’t over, man. We’re just getting started.” Morgan Jackson, the Democratic strategist, sees it very differently. He told me the next day that Biden is “like the groundhog that sees its shadow and plows on, despite a near-certain forecast of more winter.”

If Biden continues to falter, Bloomberg could be well positioned to siphon votes from him in North Carolina, where the former New York mayor is spending heavily. Bloomberg’s staff hires quickly dwarfed Warren’s, and he recruited four “outreach directors” to target Latino, African-American, and L.G.B.T.Q. voters, as well as members of the faith-based community, according to James Mitchell, a Charlotte city-council member and Bloomberg’s state director. When Bloomberg released a strategy paper aimed at wooing Latinos, the campaign invited thirty people to the Charlotte office to discuss it, plus forty more for a lunch presentation two days later, Mitchell said. (Mitchell is being paid fifteen thousand dollars a month to run Bloomberg’s campaign in the state, according to the Charlotte Observer.)

With essentially unlimited money to spend, Bloomberg is “pretty ubiquitous” on the airwaves and in digital and print media, his campaign’s director for eastern states, Rob Diamond, told me. Video ads are tailored to particular cities, regions, and demographic groups, Diamond said, and focus on a range of issues, from gun violence and health care to climate change. “We have the size and the infrastructure and the talent to run very different campaigns on a localized basis,” Diamond said. While campaigning in Raleigh last week, Bloomberg called himself the “un-Trump” and pocketed the endorsements of the Charlotte mayor, Vi Lyles, and the former governor Bev Perdue.

Sanders, meanwhile, returned to North Carolina at the end of the week, drawing large and loyal crowds in Raleigh and Charlotte. In an interview with the WCOS reporter Joe Bruno, he rejected worries that his nomination, as a self-described democratic socialist, would hurt the chances of Democrats in November. Sanders predicted that his nomination would spark a “record-breaking turnout” of working-class voters and young people that would “trickle on down to all Democratic candidates.” Jackson, the political strategist, was skeptical. “As this primary gets further and further to the left in the rhetoric, in a place like North Carolina, that concerns us. We want folks that can compete for every vote,” he told me, contending that there is a ceiling on Sanders’ support. “At the end of the day, there are a lot more capitalists in North Carolina than there are socialists.”

Searching for an uncommitted voice, I called MaryBe McMillan, the president of the North Carolina A.F.L.-C.I.O., which is staying neutral, for now, in the Democratic race. With the Senate seat of the Republican Thom Tillis up for grabs, along with the governorship and the state legislature, she said that she knows local Democrats who are certain that North Carolina needs a centrist at the top of the ticket. She also knows Democrats who believe, as Sanders and Warren argue, that a progressive candidate who promises dramatic change will generate much-needed excitement. “A lot of folks are just all over the map in terms of which candidate they support,” McMillan told me. “There’s folks that wish there were a stellar, outstanding Democratic candidate that would inspire us, that we could all get behind.”