Californians are warming up to Warren. Her campaign is ramping up efforts to win them over

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign will greatly expand its California operations heading into the March 3, 2020 primary.

With less than 100 days until early voting begins on Feb. 3, Warren’s team announced on Tuesday that the Massachusetts senator has hired eight additional staff members in the Golden State, bringing the total number of paid California workers to nine. The group will work out of the newly-opened Oakland office and soon-to-be-opened Los Angeles office.

The campaign said it will also search for paid, full-time organizers across the state.

“The organizing team will focus on traditional, digital and data-driven voter contact and dedicated outreach to communities of color across the Golden State,” the campaign said in a statement.

Warren’s team, which already had a state director, will add two senior strategists, two training directors, two organizers, one data director and one voter mobilization leader.

The latest string of hiring serves as a recognition of California’s importance, given the state holds its primary shortly behind Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. The state has 495 delegates up for grabs, about one tenth of those needed to clinch the party’s nomination.

The commitment comes as Warren faces scrutiny from state leaders over her decision to skip a major event in Long Beach with the California Democratic Party. Calling the move “misguided,” Chairman Rusty Hicks slammed her and former vice president Joe Biden for declining the state party’s invitation to appear at a presidential forum hosted on Saturday by Univision, a Spanish-language network.

Warren has made just 10 appearances in the state since declaring her bid for president — the fewest of the 11 Democrats who qualified for the last Democratic debate.

While the campaign’s latest effort to woo Californian Democrats is notable, it pales in comparison to the vast ground game Warren’s progressive counterpart, Bernie Sanders, has assembled.

According to Sanders’ campaign, the Vermont senator has 40 California staff members on his payroll, which is well beyond the five with Pete Buttigieg’s campaign and the 11 Sen. Kamala Harris had in her home state before she directed some of them to move out of the state in an effort to go “all-in on Iowa.” Harris also pulled staff members out of New Hampshire.

Sanders has five offices across the state and plans to open 10 more as the primary nears. Warren will soon open her second office, while Harris has one.

Despite Sanders’ extensive operation in California, Warren has overtaken him and Biden in several statewide public opinion polls. Surveys in California have proven sparse thus far into the 2020 election cycle and riddled with inconsistencies between the different organizations that have conducted them.

Regardless, it’s clear that millions of registered Democrats and voters without a party preference who will cast a ballot in the Democratic primary are largely considering multiple candidates at this point in time.

A UC Berkeley poll conducted online in September found that most likely Democratic primary voters are considering supporting Warren. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they were considering Warren, compared to 46 percent for Biden, 45 percent for Sanders, 43 percent for Harris and 33 percent for Buttigieg. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and then-candidate Beto O’Rourke were the only others above 15 percent in possible support — a key threshold for determining how many delegates a candidate may be awarded.

Under state party rules, a Democratic presidential candidate must get at least 15 percent support in a given California congressional district to be eligible for pledged delegates. With Warren’s growing attention on the state, she is hoping to make a splash.

“The strategy is to get out there and fight for what I’ve been fighting for for pretty much all my grown-up life,” Warren told The Bee in a July interview.

This story was originally published November 12, 2019 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Californians are warming up to Warren. Her campaign is ramping up efforts to win them over."