Elizabeth Warren Unites Sanders and Clinton Loyalists in Small Town, USA
PETERBOROUGH, New Hampshire—Outside Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) event in a tiny picturesque town in New Hampshire, bumper stickers with “Bernie 2016” were plastered on cars scattered nearby, resurfacing remnants of the party’s hard-fought civil war that started nearly four years ago.
But inside the crowd of 850 attendees, nearly one-seventh of the town’s population, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders loyalists braved the sweltering heat to hear the Massachusetts senator’s pitch—and they liked what they heard.
Peterborough, a small, western town in Hillsborough County, is exactly the kind of place Warren needs to pull away from Sanders in 2020. In 2016, Democratic voters preferred the Vermont senator to Clinton by nearly 24%.
And Monday it was clear, among the attendees assembled here: Warren was emerging as a consensus choice for voters who radically disagreed over the last primary election.
“I supported Bernie Sanders in the [2016] primary,” Sam Tardiff, a 22-year-old resident from Dover, said. “I haven’t quite made up my mind, but right now I’m leaning towards Warren.”
Tardiff is just one of the thousands of young liberal voters who helped propel Sanders to a landslide victory in the first-in-the-nation primary. When asked about making a potential switch to Warren, with his previous preferred candidate also running in 2020, Tardiff said he admired her penchant for planning and willingness to answer questions directly.
“I’ve met both Sen. Warren and Sen. Sanders multiple times,” Tardiff said. “Sen. Warren always wants to talk to voters. She’s always going at 100 percent and she always does her homework.”
Waiting in a long line that stretched into the hallway, Brendan Williams, a health care expert from Manchester, said he was in Sanders’ camp last election, assuming Clinton would lose.
“I originally supported Sanders as the alternative to Clinton,” Williams said. “The revolving door that she speaks of,” he continued, referencing parts of Warren’s speech that heavily touched on corruption, “I’ve seen it time and again.”
Williams, who is president of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, said has studied similar topics to those Warren addresses on the trail. “I’ve written about it in my own academic writing and I appreciate her calling that out,” he said. “There is a lot of corruption there.”
Recent polling indicates Warren is gaining momentum in New Hampshire. While still behind Sanders, she has narrowed his lead. In the latest CBS News/YouGov survey taken from late May to mid-June, Sanders earned 20 percent of support, while Warren came just three points below at 17 percent among Democrats. She’s also been heavily canvassing the state, hosting campaign events in over two dozen towns.
Another former Sanders supporter, Constance Merrick, who lives part-time in Hancock, said she’s “desperate” for a female president, and wished Warren would go farther in her wealth tax proposal, arguing for a tax on the top 5 percent of the country’s richest people.
“She should tax people who are only making a few million,” Merrick said.
But for all the former Sanders voters who joined a line that snaked around the historic building to get selfies, plenty of Clinton loyalists were alongside them and inside the venue, eager for their chance to talk to another female candidate.
“I was a Clinton supporter in 2016,” Louis Mitchell, a Democratic voter from Walpole, seated alone after the event, said. “I think Warren can win.”
Mitchell, a self-styled moderate, said he’s considering several candidates, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), but believes Warren has improved significantly since he first heard her speak in January. “She’s definitely on my shortlist,” he said.
Before addressing indoor attendees, Warren started off by speaking to an overflow audience gathered outside the event space, where she immediately thanked her grassroots supporters. Earlier in the day, her campaign manager Roger Lau sent an email announcing more than $19.1 million in donations from over 384,000 people, totaling more than 683,000 donations in the second quarter of the year. Sanders raised roughly $1 million less in the same time frame.
In her main remarks inside, Warren dedicated a significant portion of time to her anti-corruption platform, ticking off the small-donor talking points that have become hallmarks of several 2020 campaigns, while taking indirect jabs at President Trump.
“I have the biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate,” Warren said to cheers. At another point in the speech, she mentioned overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which received particularly loud applause.
“When you’ve got a government that works great for those with money, works great for those who can hire an army of lobbyists and lawyers and bought-and-paid-for experts, when you’ve got a government that works for those at the top and isn’t working for much of anyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple,” she said.
Nearing the front of the selfie line, Deb Riley, a Hancock resident who previously supported Clinton, said it’s “really obvious” that Warren knows what she’s doing. “Everyone else is really vague,” she said.
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