Elizabeth Warren’s Long-Game Gambit

Elizabeth Warren has already won the presidential policy primary with her rolling cache of progressive ideas that have been widely heralded for their scholastic specificity and unrestrained ambition, prompting one elected official in Iowa to declare to this reporter that she's the smartest candidate he's ever met, including the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

And yet the Massachusetts senator still faces an electability problem that poses the most significant obstacle to her candidacy catching fire.

If Warren's White House run has been favorably defined by, "I have a plan for that," the nagging response from a considerable number of skeptics has been, "Yeah, but can she defeat Donald Trump?"

When CNN asked Americans to choose a candidate for president late last month, of the six Democrats tested, five came out ahead against Trump.

The only one who did not was Warren.

A separate Suffolk University survey of New Hampshire revealed that the top reason Democrats did not choose Warren as their preference in the first primary state is that "she can't beat Trump."

The data underpins recurring anecdotal concerns about Warren voiced by some anxiety-ridden rank-and-file Democrats, who have openly described her as "shrill." It's a gender-loaded description that some define as sexist, but it also conveys visceral emotions toward her populist presentation.

"Elizabeth Warren is way too strident. Her voice, just the way she talks, she turns people off," says Carol Barreau, a Charlotte, North Carolina, Democrat.

The Warren brain trust is well aware of the perception they're up against. And as with most every major policy question, Warren has a theory for solving her most precarious political quandary.

It's a long-term bet that her Democratic rivals will eventually wilt under the whiplashing pressure points of a marathon campaign – and she will not. It's a gambit that because she's the candidate most steeped in policy, carrying the most coherently distinct vision for how she'd govern, she's unlikely to make a mistake when voters truly engage the race come the fall. It's a wager that her top rivals, at times, are winging it – and that their freelancing will eventually reveal them to be unequipped for the big moment when the entire country is watching, not just the political obsessives.

The payoff, the theory goes, won't be evident until the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, when a top Warren adviser expects the polling needles to "swing wildly" but ultimately settle on a person who has been through the gauntlet, survived this campaign's invasive MRI and emerges, like a well-trained athlete who has steadily built muscle over time and is toned for the homestretch when it matters most.

Warren has studiously built an intellectual and organizational foundation that's allowed her to display presidential timber. But she's also depending on fumbles by her competitors that will put her in a position to shine.

"In the room, she does not stumble," says Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Warren. "The other ones do."

Doubters would point to her "Pocahontas" pickle – her claim of Native American ancestry and subsequential blood test – and call it a political faux pas that foolishly played into Trump's hands. But at least for the moment, Democratic voters appear to have moved past that controversy.

It's other candidates who have been showing instability and vulnerability as the campaign narrative has fixated around policy ideas.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California has struggled with her explanation of support for Medicare for All and whether she would eliminate private insurance since her original off-the-cuff answer at a CNN town hall. The question continued to follow her this week, when she again walked back her original response, saying she meant she favored getting "rid of the bureaucracy."

One top Warren ally, who liked Harris' initial answer, said it was an example of a candidate who showed a propensity for mistakes down the road.

"It was clear she was winging it. She did not go on that stage intending to say that," the Warren ally says. "I think that's what others are going to do in the debates, and in the next eight months in Iowa and New Hampshire. They will get tripped up on questions."

This Warren ally also cited a response by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota during a CNN town hall as a missed opportunity and a lack of preparation.

"Amy Klobuchar gets asked about pizza in school lunches and she takes the bait and, like, goes on and on about pizza and school lunches. It's like, dude, that's not going to win votes. You're not prepared for the pivot into a larger worldview," the ally says. "When they trip and fumble and you're just slow and steady and rising point by point, then you look more electable. It's like, oh, she's not making mistakes, right? It's like process of elimination. They're bad at fighting, they can't even state their own worldview before they get to Trump. This is her life's work. This is not just briefing papers. She knows this stuff cold. She studied it 20 years ago, she knows it all. She can tap into it whenever she needs to, she's not creating it on the fly."

Whereas Harris has shown flashes of doubt, leaning on "having a conversation" to push through thorny questions, Warren has thrown caution into the wind, calculating that voters will reward straight-forward conviction.

Warren eschews political questions, but she's mastered transitioning any response to her larger vision that the current government system is unfair and requires broad structural change at every level.

Asked in an interview with U.S. News whether her overwhelming focus on policy could get lost with voters searching for a more overarching inspirational vision, Warren laughed off the query.

"I just don't accept the heart and minds dichotomy," she says. "People who are squeezed by student loan debt or struggling to pay for child care are touched in their hearts and their minds. That's where they live. That's what matters, I think."

She adds, "Forty-three million people would get student debt cancellations under my plan. That touches their lives individually. That's hundreds of dollars that goes in their pockets instead of getting paid out every month. I think that's about as personal as it gets."

Rep. Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, who has endorsed Warren, says she is working harder than any other candidates at fleshing out exactly how her policies will impact the American electorate, a trait he says is undervalued.

"There's only one candidate out there that has pointed out those structural inefficiencies and inequities systemically over and over and over again in everything from economics to housing to ethics in government and the way in which our system continues to reinforce them," he says. "Policy after policy, she's out there running at the core of a system that is designed to benefit some at the expense of everybody else. I think that comes back to her benefit, particularly over the course of a long run and an exhaustive campaign."

Warren has also proven a weekly, and sometimes daily, ability to drive the news among the cramped field of candidates, allowing her to stand out and forcing her rivals to react. Just this week, she promised to appoint a secretary of education who was a public school teacher and she became the first Democrat to refuse a Fox News town hall, lambasting the network as a "hate-for-profit racket."

In some instances, she's positioned herself as an even bolder candidate than Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist. For instance, while Warren has trumpeted for impeachment proceedings to begin immediately and called for the break-up of big tech companies like Amazon and Facebook, Sanders has done neither.

And still, perhaps Warren's weakest answer comes when she's confronted with electability. She rests on her handy 2012 defeat of Republican incumbent Scott Brown, who was well-liked, well-funded and attacked her as an elite Harvard professor.

But even some of her own supporters aren't convinced that victory in blue Massachusetts translates to electability nationally, particularly against Trump, a vastly different political opponent than Brown.

Defining electability amid a field of 24 candidates has already stirred a vigorous and sensitive debate in the Democratic Party, which is wrestling with exactly why its female candidates and candidates of color aren't performing better. Even Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay white mayor of Indiana's fourth largest city, has seen some of his polling numbers nudge ahead of the fleet of more diverse, experienced senators, including Warren.

Trump's campaign plans to lump the entire field together as one "big socialist organism with more than 20 heads," says spokesman Tim Murtaugh, but he notes that Warren, in particular, will have to answer for the "massive combined costs of her various socialist policy proposals" in addition to her claim of Native American heritage.

"There's no question that the president has already damaged her pretty badly by very effectively branding her as Pocahontas," Murtaugh says.

Democrats have consistently conveyed that winning matters above all else, even if that means not sharing all of a particular candidate's positions on issues. It's why former Vice President Joe Biden, despite being out of step with current liberal orthodoxy on some marquee issues, is performing so well out of the gate. Paranoia about another loss has created a crop of voters so shaken by Trump's 2016 victory that they are recalibrating their own preferences based on assumptions about the masses. If Biden is beating Trump by a larger margin in swing-state Pennsylvania than Warren is – which current polling demonstrates – why take the risk on her?

"That's the weird thing about the pundit voters, right? It's not about what the primary voter believes. It's this weird kind of 'Inception'-like universe where, you know, progressive voters in Iowa are thinking, 'Oh, what would white male swing voters in Ohio in the general election think?" Green says. "The biggest challenge for Warren or Sanders is ... the pundit voters -- whose heart wants to vote for Sanders or Warren but are told every day big transformational change isn't possible. They're worried so they psyche themselves out."

Warren doesn't necessarily need to win the electability argument, but she needs to neutralize it, which is at least partially out of her control. It could happen gradually if Biden makes more mistakes like confusing Theresa May for Margaret Thatcher and Sanders fails to broaden his coalition beyond his 2016 diehards. In that world, Warren could suddenly look like a bridge candidate, someone advantageously situated between old establishment Democrats and ascendant liberals.

If it sounds completely far-fetched, recall our last two presidential elections.

"I remember when people said Barack Obama couldn't win," Warren says. "I remember when people said Donald Trump couldn't win. And here we are today."