Activists hoping to draft Elizabeth Warren to run for president are giving themselves a three-month timeline to get her into the race, mobilizing supporters to make personal pleas to the Massachusetts senator before mid-February.
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Warren has so far rebuffed calls from the left wing of the Democratic Party for her to run for president, insisting she’s not interested. But that hasn’t stopped the super PAC Ready for Warren, the main vehicle pushing her to run.
In an attempt to change Warren’s mind, Ready for Warren on Tuesday will enlist their tens of thousands of online supporters in a campaign to inundate the senator with personal hand-written letters and postcards encouraging her to run.
On February 16th — President’s Day — they also plan to deliver “a whole boatload” of signatures from people who sign a seperate online petition.
The date is significant, as it’s the timeline the group is setting for themselves to achieve their goal of getting Warren to run. “Warren is well-known enough already that she could jump into the race far later and still win. But the fact is that we’ll soon be one year out from the Iowa caucuses, so we can’t afford to wait,” founder Erica Sagrans writes in an email to supporters announcing the campaign, which will be sent Tuesday morning.
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Kate Albright-Hanna, the group’s new deputy campaign manager (and former MSNBC employee), said Warren fans “need to step it up” if they hope to get her into the race. “We only have three months to convince her to run,” she told msnbc. “We know that the odds go down greatly if she hasn’t made up her mind by then.”
The “Time for Warren” campaign is an “old-fashioned, grass-roots effort,” said Albright-Hanna, though it also includes a slick new video.
The group sees a three-phase plan from here on out, which they describe in the email to supporters:
First, get 100,000 supporters to write to Warren. Second, “make a lot of noise in the early states.” And third, run “an aggressive and creative media strategy,” modeled on the insurgent gubernatorial campaign Zephyr Teachout ran in New York this year. Albright-Hanna served as communications director of that campaign.
