Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina speaks to the media Thursday after the early debate at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. (Photo: John Minchillo/AP)
CLEVELAND – Carly Fiorina insisted that she wasn’t worried about not making the main Fox News debate stage on Thursday. But so did everybody else who was stuck in the non-primetime debate that preceded it.
An hour or so before the former Hewlett-Packard CEO took the stage here with six other lower-tier Republican presidential candidates and delivered a standout performance, her spokeswoman and I chatted in the bowels of the Quicken Loans Arena about Fiorina’s strategy.
I asked Sarah Isgur Flores if she wished the super-PAC supporting Fiorina — Carly for America — had done more in June and July to boost Fiorina’s national name ID by buying up TV time. Ohio Gov. John Kasich entered the race less than a month before the first debate and, with the help of a $1 million TV buy from his supporting super-PAC, was waltzing onto the main debate stage.
Isgur Flores said she’d actually watched the Carly super-PAC closely — by law, the campaign cannot formally coordinate with it — in hopes that it would not spend a good portion of the $3.4 million it raised in the first half of 2015 on TV.
Isgur Flores dismissed the idea that it was vital for Fiorina to be one of the top 10 candidates Thursday in order for her to break through with voters.
“It’s the first debate. It’s August,” she said.
On the phone Friday morning, Isgur Flores clarified that she hopes the super-PAC spends its money on grassroots organizing in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first three primary voting states, rather than on TV.
“It’s not timing. We did talk about timing down the road because I guess at some point that would be a different calculus,” she said. “But if you’re a super-PAC looking to support Carly, we don’t have a national primary. I’d start building what you need to in those primary states.”
And in fact, when I followed Fiorina around New Hampshire last month, there were super-PAC staffers with the title of “field organizer” on their business cards. Last fall in Iowa, when Fiorina was first making noises about a possible run for president, her aides were emphasizing their ground organizing in the early states during the 2014 midterm elections, through a nonprofit group called Unlocking Potential.
A Fiorina spokeswoman at the time told me that Unlocking Potential had 24 paid staffers on the ground in Iowa.
But fieldwork and community building at the local level — as much as the Republican Party desperately needs to do more of it to catch up to Democrats — is not enough for a lower-tier candidate like Fiorina trying to move up. A candidate has to be able to break through on sheer talent.
And Fiorina did that Thursday, giving sharp, passionate answers during the debate, then going on MSNBC’s “Hardball” and sending Chris Matthews to the corner for a time-out when he tried to talk over her.
That talent, Isgur Flores said, is what bolstered her confidence this summer that they did not need to blow cash, or have the super-PAC do so, to buy their way into the spotlight.
“For those of us who know her and have watched her for months, it’s not surprising. What we’ve said all along is that she has low name ID and we have to break through that barrier,” Isgur Flores said. “The barrier has never been whether she can stand out in a crowd.”
Of course, Fiorina might have stood out less on the main debate stage Thursday with a host of accomplished governors and senators and their large personalities and egos alongside her, along with the three-ring circus that is Donald Trump.
Fiorina now stands poised to get a real look from Republican voters. It’s still unlikely she will be considered more presidential than some of the first-tier candidates. But she’s saved her cash — as has her super-PAC — and she appears to be investing in the necessary hard work of signing up volunteers and supporters one by one in the key early states.
That means that the impact of a Fiorina candidacy could be bigger than expected — just as her staffers have been predicting all along.
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/fiorina-bet-on-talent-over-tv-ads-and-it-paid-off-126122481956.html
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