Bill Clinton is getting nervous.

With polls showing Bernie Sanders ahead in New Hampshire and barely behind, if at all, in Iowa, the former president is urging his wife to start looking toward the delegate-rich March primaries — a shift for an organizing strategy that’s been laser-focused on the early states.


Bill Clinton, according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the situation, has been phoning campaign manager Robby Mook almost daily to express concerns about the campaign’s organization in the March voting states, which includes delegate bonanzas in Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Texas.

Many Clinton allies share the president’s desire for more organization on the ground; they see enthusiasm that’s ready to be channeled, but no channel yet in place. “Iowa matters a ton, but it seems to be the campaign’s only focus," said one person close to the campaign's operations in a March state — one of nearly a dozen Clinton allies with whom POLITICO spoke for this article. "It’s going to be a long primary, and the campaign seems less prepared for it than they were in 2008.”

Bill Clinton’s involvement has been growing as he campaigns and raises money for his wife in March states like Ohio and Illinois, in addition to his public events in Iowa and New Hampshire. Wherever he goes, he shows his famous penchant for sponging up granular nuggets about local politics, people who have spoken with him say.

“The president was in town, and I had a nice conversation with him by phone,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporters in the state. “He gathers as much information as he can and shares it with other key players in the campaign.”

Ryan said Clinton wanted “to know a little bit about everything” during his two most recent visits to Ohio, including details about the state of his wife’s organization in the crucial state, which sends 93 delegates to the Democratic convention in July, awarded proportionally.

Ohio doesn’t vote until March 15 and has not yet become a priority for the campaign, which in recent months has begun to bring staffers into the 11 states that vote on so-called Super Tuesday, which is March 1. And while Ryan speaks enthusiastically about the grass-roots support and network of Clinton volunteers eager to pick up where they left off eight years ago, some of what he had to report to Bill Clinton may have only increased the former president’s agita.

The campaign's organization in Ohio is, so far, nonexistent — there are no campaign offices or staffers on the ground yet — and the Democratic front-runner needs all the support from big statewide African-American leadership that she can get, a local source said. Eight years ago, she had the backing of political powerhouse Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a close friend who served as the campaign's national co-chairman and was the first African-American woman from Ohio to be elected to Congress. She died in 2008. This time, she has Rep. Marcia Fudge behind her. But at least one African-American who once backed Clinton, Ohio state senator and minority whip Nina Turner, has shifted to the Sanders camp.

“They don’t have a whole lot here,” Ryan acknowledged. “We have people calling my campaign office because they don’t know who else to call. We just track it, and when the time is right, we’ll activate those people.” (Bernie Sanders’ campaign — which says it has hired 90 staffers in Super Tuesday states so far — is currently interviewing staffers for Ohio and said it plans to have them in place in the next 10 days.)

But Ryan said supporters have been active on their own. "Some of it is self-organized," he said. "We've done a bunch of meetings with Hillary supporters across the state. It's about time to start thinking about it, but I don't think earlier than this would have been useful. They're really trying to strike the right balance."

As a tightening race against a well-funded opponent threatens to drag on into spring, Bill Clinton’s increased interest in the ground operations of the campaign is emblematic of his widening role in the absence of a dominant chief strategist. And it marks a shift from the first eight months of the campaign, when he largely stayed away from the daily operations of his wife’s White House bid and kept up a heavy travel schedule related to the Clinton Foundation.

Longtime Clinton aides aren’t exactly surprised at the change. In 2008, Bill Clinton became so involved in his wife’s campaign after her stinging third-place finish in Iowa that he started showing up for work regularly at the campaign's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There, he would conduct conference calls with state directors, veterans of that campaign recalled, and became obsessed with the state of her organizations in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. “He felt in 2008 that we didn’t have a ground operation in the early states,” recalled one 2008 veteran.

This time, the dynamics of the race are flipped. Mook’s mantra, since the April launch, has been to build a strategy around the first four nominating states — it’s part of his overarching philosophy of taking nothing for granted and always running from behind.

And if there is a sense among Clinton allies that there is too little going on in the states that vote deeper into the calendar, it is partly because that’s the way the campaign wanted it to appear. Clinton operatives have studiously avoided making what many see as her biggest mistake in 2008 — seeming to look over Iowa’s shoulder instead of being fully committed to winning there.

But quietly, the campaign over the past few months has taken its first steps toward fleshing out a March plan. On New Year’s Eve day, Clinton staffers working from the Brooklyn headquarters conducted a phone bank into the March primary states to start identifying supporters and building organizations there. And senior spokeswoman Karen Finney, a longtime Clinton veteran, spent the majority of November and December on the road holding events and rallying troops in Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, North Carolina, Arkansas and Alabama, signing up volunteers and letting people know the Clinton campaign train is coming.

"One event in Denver had 100 people; another in Aurora on a cold night had about 200 people,” Finney recalled of her road trip. “In all of these places, the people that I talked to were very excited that we were starting up our outreach, and they were excited to get involved and to be part of this campaign.” She said the campaign was “a little bit quiet about it because the focus is on the first early states, but we wanted to start ramping up in the March states.”

The campaign now has at least one paid staffer in each of the 11 Super Tuesday states, a campaign official said. “We’re a campaign, and we’re here to win, so we obviously don’t want to telegraph our game plan,” Colorado organizer Brad Komar wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “I live in a place that isn't Brooklyn, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada and I work for Hillary Clinton … and I'm not the only one. … Across the country, we’ve got more than 100,000 volunteers who have made more than 8 million voter contact attempts nationwide.”

But Bill Clinton is not the only one wondering aloud whether the ramping up is a little too quiet. On a recent conference call with allies from March states, the campaign’s director of grass-roots engagement, Adam Parkhomenko, did not have any answers for surrogates who wanted to know when to expect the arrival of Clinton troops en masse.

“That question was raised,” said Oklahoma state Sen. Kay Floyd, who is backing Clinton. “They said they’re looking at it, and that they’re going to have to get closer to the caucuses. They said it’s fluid.” A full-time staffer started organizing supporters on the ground a few weeks ago, Floyd said, adding that “there’s a strong get-out-the-vote plan and there’s a lot of excitement here.”

In Illinois, which also votes on March 15, the focus has been primarily on holding fundraisers in Chicago. Other than big-money gatherings, one ally noted, the operation has consisted of “inconsistent debate watch parties driven by volunteers and anemic phone banking.” A member of Clinton’s leadership council in Texas, one of the Super Tuesday states, said that “neither campaign is where Clinton or Obama were in Texas in 2008.”

Campaign veterans counter that ramping up is easy once the campaign moves past the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus and the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary — staffers from those states are redeployed quickly and en masse to the next state in play. “One day, Hillary had zero people here; the next day she had 100,” recalled one Ohio operative of 2008. Barack Obama, too, sent his Des Moines team straight to Columbus after the caucuses. And that year Mook, who served as Clinton’s Nevada state director, didn’t move to his position overseeing Ohio until after the caucuses there.

Another key difference from eight years ago: While the March calendar that year favored Obama, this time it plays to Clinton’s advantage. Campaign officials expect that after the snow-white states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton will do better than Sanders with the African-American and Latino voters casting ballots in March — groups the Vermont senator has yet to win over with his message about a rigged economy.

She also has the majority of big union support, as well as the elected officials the campaign is counting on for help. In Virginia, for instance, where the campaign has only a bare-bones staff of its own, it is bolstered by a wide network of Gov. Terry McAuliffe-linked groups and operatives who have been quietly gearing up for a Clinton White House bid since early last year. McAuliffe's leadership PAC, Common Good Virginia, has served as a skeletal campaign-in-waiting, according to two commonwealth operatives familiar with the situation. The PAC is run by a former aide to Mook — and McAuliffe's hand-picked state Democratic chairwoman, Susan Swecker, is a fellow longtime Clinton supporter.

An official with the Service Employees International Union said Tuesday the union has been in discussions with the campaign for months about how it will deploy its muscle in states like Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and Florida. The official said the SEIU has been meeting with locals in Ohio, where labor unions are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and is planning to move to recruitment and real operations in the coming weeks.

For now, however, the March state plan is driven heavily by volunteers and sounds, when allies describe it, more Sanders than Clinton in nature.

“This is going to be a grass-roots, organic campaign,” said Texas state Rep. Justin Rodriguez, who sits on Clinton’s leadership council there. “You’ll see a lot more visible signs of a campaign in Texas after they get through Iowa.”

