Elizabeth Warren has been on a hiring spree. In the three months since launching her presidential campaign fresh with the new year, the Massachusetts senator has put 160 people onto her payroll — nearly two a day through the end of March.
That puts her well ahead of her rivals in staffing. It's an advantage that also brings challenges. Some personnel came over from her Senate and political operations, including campaign manager Roger Lau, chief of staff Dan Geldon, senior advisor for planning Kaaren Hinck, communications director Kristen Orthman, and digital director Lauren Miller.
Warren has added plenty of new faces as well; among them, Tess Simonds, from the Democratic National Committee; Brendon Summers, who was Iowa caucus director for Bernie Sanders in 2016; and Richard McDaniel, who most recently helped Doug Jones win a special Senate election in Alabama.
But that’s just the top levels. What separates her from other presidential candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic field are the dozens of organizers, researchers, designers, media professionals, and operations aides she’s already put on staff. They are hard at work every day making the voter impressions and laying the groundwork that could pay off when Democrats ultimately decide who has earned their support.
Many are located in the campaign’s Boston headquarters, but Warren also has a virtual army of 50 staffers in Iowa, where the critical caucuses are nearly 10 months away, and smaller numbers populating other early-voting states. It added up to nearly $2 million in salaries, payroll taxes, and insurance in the first three months of her presidential campaign, according to my analysis of the Warren campaign’s quarterly report to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), submitted early this week.
The campaign is now burning through roughly a quarter-million dollars every week on staff, and another quarter-million on other costs. That's pretty much eating up contributions as fast as they come in — meaning there's none being stored away for mail and TV advertising later in the campaign.
By comparison, the two biggest fundraisers for the three months, Sanders and Kamala Harris, had just 87 and 44 staffers on their payrolls, respectively, according to their FEC reports. Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, who also raised more than Warren, are just starting to staff up due to their later starts.
It was a strategic decision of the campaign to invest early in staff. Warren had $10 million available from her Senate campaign account, and the presumption, based on her political history, of strong fundraising to come. So, she could get the advantage on other campaigns by announcing early and building a top-notch team while they were still trying to get their bearings.
Although her fundraising has lagged expectations, it has been enough to cover the hefty costs: she raised $6 million over the three months, mostly from small donors, while spending a total of $5.2 million. That still leaves Warren with that $10 million stake from her Senate war chest, so even with the growing payroll she should have no trouble staying flush through the end of June. That’s when the first televised debates are scheduled.
Different Campaigns, Different Costs
In many ways, the 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns need to spend money the same way they always did, and the same way as each other. They need to pay for staff, rent, computing, web design, and lots of travel and food.
It also still costs a lot to make a splash with a big, attention-getting rally. Harris got high marks and big momentum from her late-January campaign launch — which included a rally in Oakland that cost her campaign north of a half-million dollars.
Sanders, who campaigns primarily via large rallies, spent more than $850,000 on them in roughly six weeks after opening his campaign in mid-February.
But there are differences.
These are driven partly by technology, but mostly by the party’s attitude toward political campaign funding. It used to be openly assumed that these early stages of a presidential campaign were largely about coaxing money out of the party’s donor class. Campaigns signed up wealthy people for their finance committees or as informal “bundlers”; either way, they were expected to wring large contributions from their wealthy compadres.
That required campaigns to spend on fancy fundraising events, often at expensive venues or catered at a well-heeled patron’s home, where bundlers and donors could ensure themselves access to the candidate, at a level commensurate with the dollar amounts. Campaign staffs also included extensive, well-paid staffs to recruit and coddle all of these needy big-money givers.
Such pandering was in vogue, for both parties, as recently as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Almost overnight, that approach has become taboo for Democrats. Sanders never bothered with it, and now Warren has sworn off the practice. Others still squeeze them in, but even the modern hawkish press corps rarely catches wind of them.
The result has been a shift toward spending intended to bring in large numbers of small-dollar donations. That’s not new: it’s been standard practice, along with big-donor culling, since Howard Dean became the top fundraiser of the early 2004 cycle.
But it’s not cheap — especially now that it’s expected to comprise the bulk of the campaign funding for Democrats, and since the Democratic National Committee decided that huge numbers of donors will guarantee a coveted spot in the first televised debates.
Warren, who already had an enviable fundraising network in place, spent more than $1 million on internet advertising and list rentals in the three-month period, primarily to reach Democrats and prompt them to donate.
Sanders spent $1.5 million on digital ads; O’Rourke spent $1.2 million; Harris spent $1 million; Cory Booker and Jay Inslee close to a half-million. Amy Klobuchar spent more than $600,000 — a third of her total spending for the quarter — just on contact list rentals.
The shift to digital giving, which now includes most of the big donations as well as the tiny transactions, is also taking a toll in the form of transaction fees. The vast majority of contributions to the Democrats’ campaigns go through ActBlue, the Somerville-based non-profit.
Fortunately for the campaigns, which are now taking thousands of token single-digit contributions in the race to qualify for debates, ActBlue doesn’t assess a flat per-transaction fee. Nevertheless, the 3.95 percent ActBlue takes from the contribution amount is no pittance. It meant $678,291 from Sanders — more than the campaign’s total payroll during that period.
Buttigieg, Harris and O’Rourke each saw more than a quarter-million dollars eaten up by those fees. Every time a fat cat clicks to submit their max $2,800 contribution, instead of handing over an old-fashioned paper check, more than $100 slips away. Nobody's complaining about the convenience behind those fees, but it does take a bite.
Salaries: Women Outstrip Men
Harris’s FEC report lists 44 staffers on the payroll. Twenty-four of them are women, including the two top earners during the period: Angelique Cannon, national finance director, and Lily Adams, communications director. In all, 49 percent of the wages went to women, and 51 percent to men.
That’s nothing: on the Kirsten Gillibrand campaign, the 26 women made more, on average, than the 16 men. Women on Inslee’s campaign earned more on average than the men too, led by campaign manager Aisling Kerins. Ditto for Klobuchar, Booker, John Hickenlooper and Julian Castro.
These earning breakdowns, using total pay received during the three-month period, are somewhat crude at this stage, since staff were coming on piecemeal during that time. But in the aggregate, they give a peek into how quickly gender parity is arriving to Democratic politics.
There have long been plenty of women on Democratic presidential campaigns. Decades ago they were mostly volunteers. In more recent cycles they have been plentiful at lower staff levels, with some breaking into the top levels. Today, they’re getting the high-paying jobs, too.
Nearly two-thirds of Warren’s 160 staffers are women, including half of the 20 top earners for the quarter. The women on the campaign took home, on average, nearly as much as the men on the campaign did.
The Bernie Sanders campaign, although a bit less balanced — including senior advisor Jeff Weaver, campaign manager Faiz Shakir, and political director Josh Orton — is still close to overall parity. In fact, according to my analysis, 56 percent of all the payroll staff on the 12 major Democratic presidential campaigns were women, and they earned on average 96 percent of what the average male staffers earned.
That certainly seems like a big change from past election cycles — one that fits the tenor of the times and the mood of the party, and is likely to continue.
