‘CALL ME ELIZABETH’: INSIDE WARREN’S PHONE LIST
Senator’s outreach cuts deeper than usual power brokers
Gideon Kidd of Cedar Rapids is the driving force behind one of the larger social media megaphones in Iowa. He has built a following of more than 340,000 with his @Ivepetthatdog Twitter account where he posts — truth in advertising — photos of him petting dogs.
Last summer, when his own beloved dog, Walter, passed away, Gideon received an outpouring of support, some local news coverage and one condolence voicemail message from a 2020 candidate for president: Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Gideon cannot vote for Warren, or anyone, in 2020. He is 11.
“It was very touching and sweet,” said Gideon’s mom, Rachel Braunigan, who added that the family was staying neutral in the caucuses.
Warren is betting that call — and many more like it — are worth making anyway.
Beyond offering preteen pet-passing sympathies, she also makes sure that activists, celebrities, elected leaders and local Democratic officials keep picking up the phone (or checking their voicemail) to hear the same five words: “Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren.”
She has made thousands of such calls over the past two years to key political leaders and influencers, according to her campaign, and Democratic officials said she stands apart for her prolific phone habit. She makes her case against President Donald Trump, seeks out advice and tries to lock down endorsements.
It is a huge investment of the campaign’s most precious resource — Warren’s time — that advisers hope will pay a crucial goodwill dividend in the run-up to the first votes of 2020.
The breadth of her call list serves another purpose: It reinforces the campaign’s message that she is a team player for the party, looking to lift candidates up and down the ballot despite running as a populist outsider threatening to shake up the system. And her efforts as a party builder and leader differentiate her from a key rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent rather than as a Democrat, and whom far fewer Democrats described calling them out of the blue.
Early this year, Warren announced that she would not be courting or calling big donors, a fact that has become central to her campaign. “I don’t do call time with millionaires and billionaires,” she declared at the most recent debate. Warren instead uses her calls to small donors — heavily publicized and advertised on social media — to burnish her populist credentials and these less talked-about political calls to woo the establishment.
Warren occasionally makes the calls on the long walks she takes in the morning; she likes to get her steps in and can sometimes be seen, sans entourage, briskly roaming the streets of whatever city she woke up in that day. But most often her calls are made in car rides in between events.
“Call me Elizabeth,” the senator from Massachusetts often says, a suggestion that most opt to ignore. The excuses to stick with an honorific vary. “I would love to,” Peter Leo, the Carroll County chair in Iowa, replied when they first spoke, “except my wife’s name is Elizabeth.”
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-san Diego, and chair of the Latino Caucus in the Legislature, got a call from Warren this fall soon after a bill that Warren had supported was signed into law. Gonzalez had not been planning to endorse when the phone rang.
She said she had no intention of publicly supporting a competitor to Sen. Kamala Harris, D-calif., who was still in the race, or to Julián Castro, the only Latino candidate. But when Warren asked her directly to commit, Gonzalez did so on the spot.
“I guess I couldn’t help myself,” she said. She now travels on behalf of the campaign, going to Nevada and representing Warren in the spin room at the recent debate in Los Angeles.
Goldmacher writes for The New York Times.