Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) appears to be scaling back further on her advertising after placing a disappointing fourth in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night, calling the future of her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination into question.
Warren needed a win in the Granite State to maintain any kind of momentum in her floundering presidential campaign and, by all accounts, failed miserably, netting an abysmal 9%, nearly 20 points off winner Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and ten points off upstart Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) who has recently overtaken Warren as the Democratic Party’s best hope for a female nominee.
With only Nevada and South Carolina to look forward to before Super Tuesday, Warren appears to be staring at the end of her effort to secure the White House, and her campaign is making desperate moves to raise her profile in the west before things get really dire.
According to Medium Buying, Warren is pulling ads from South Carolina and focusing that money on Nevada, in the hopes that she can stay alive through one more caucus.
Elizabeth Warren is canceling ad schedules that had been booked in SC for later in February
Current buy runs through 2/16; set to go dark after that
— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) February 12, 2020
The campaign will, instead, focus on radio and print ads in South Carolina, reaching a much smaller audience, but at a lower cost to the candidate, who is now outspending her fundraising, according to Bloomberg News. The Warren campaign is also looking to purchase ads in Maine, a Super Tuesday state, in the hopes that she can come out of the contest with at least some delegates, keeping her in the competition for just a little bit longer.
The outlook isn’t great: in South Carolina, Warren is polling in a distant fourth at 11%, per FiveThirtyEight, and in Nevada, she’s in third with 11%. Both of those polls, though, were taken before New Hampshire’s results and, more importantly, before Amy Klobuchar’s blockbuster debate performance last Friday. Klobuchar barely registers in either polls.
“After New Hampshire tonight, 98% of pledged delegates will still be up for grabs,” Warren’s campaign manager wrote in a sorrowful email to supporters Tuesday night, trying to look on the bright side of the New Hampshire loss. “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 campaign, HuffPost says, “asserts that its internal data shows Warren hitting or exceeding the 15% vote threshold necessary to receive delegates in more than two-thirds of the districts that will cast ballots on Super Tuesday, compared to 98% for Sanders and 96% for Biden.”
At best, though, that makes Warren a potential player in a brokered convention, not a “consensus” candidate. Her path to victory, even per her campaign manager, is convoluted.
“If the early states deliver mixed results for the field, and no seismic event shakes up the top three, the remaining viable candidates for the Democratic nomination as of Super Tuesday will be Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren,” he wrote. “In that three-way race, Elizabeth Warren is the candidate with the highest potential ceiling of support and the one best positioned to unite the party and lead the Democratic ticket to defeat Donald Trump.”