Bernie Sanders is winning a third of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the latest polls. Nearly 10,000 people showed up at his Wisconsin rally this week. Roughly 250,000 small donors have contributed to his campaign.

At Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn HQ, it’s as if they’ve never heard of him.


The Clinton campaign is reading straight from the front-runner’s playbook when dealing with the socialist Vermont senator. Her staff insists it’s taking Sanders’ polling bump seriously while showing no signs of changing its long-charted course. There are no new plans to attack Sanders, no alterations of the forthcoming policy rollouts that will dot the summer calendar, and no expected leftward sprints to match him policy-for-policy. She doesn’t even mention his name on the campaign trail.

Instead, the former secretary of state’s political operation is making a show of its organizational muscle and safeguarding its position beyond the early-voting states. Far from sweating over reports of standing-room-only crowds at the Vermonter’s events, the Clinton campaign is breathing a quiet sigh of relief that it’s Sanders — and not a potentially more viable primary opponent like Elizabeth Warren — nipping at its heels this summer. The senator’s name pops up in conversations at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, but he’s not the topic of the day, week or month — not even in the candidate’s chats with donors, who are keeping a close tab on the state of play.

“No one’s hair is on fire about him,” explained Maria Cardona, a national Democratic strategist who remains in close touch with the Clinton camp after working for Hillary’s 2008 campaign. “Not even the nose hairs. Nothing.”

Now that Clinton’s sprint to fill her campaign coffers by the end of the fundraising quarter is finished, the former secretary of state will begin periodically unveiling detailed policy proposals throughout the summer, up to the first primary debate in the fall. Her team has indicated that she will increasingly go after her Republican opponents by name — as she has started doing over the past month — but that she will in all likelihood avoid granting Sanders or any of her other Democratic rivals the dose of attention that would come with a direct barb from the dominating favorite.

That’s been the plan at least since Clinton set the date for her New York City kickoff rally in June, long before a CNN/WMUR poll showed Sanders within 8 points of her in New Hampshire last week and a Quinnipiac poll this week showed Sanders with by far his best showing yet in Iowa — 33 percent.

Clinton allies are quick to point out that they’ve expected a close primary since the start of the campaign — the team’s first memo to its surrogates in April outlined how to project that very message — and, accordingly, there was a broad-strokes plan in place accounting for a rival’s rise, even if many were surprised by its vigor or the challenger’s identity.

The explanation for the Sanders surge, Democrats aligned with Clinton and some who are unaffiliated say, is that he has largely captured the share of voters who had previously expressed a preference for Warren, who’s not running. In that way, he’s consolidated the anti-Clinton crowd.

“Everyone who’s worked in Democratic politics knows there’s a 30 to 40 percent vote that’s the ‘anybody but the front-runner’ share,” explained Chris Lehane, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s campaigns who is now helping Hillary raise money.

And because many Clinton allies inside and outside of Brooklyn dismiss Sanders’ chances to mount a long-term challenge due to his liberal politics and troubles connecting with large portions of the Democratic base — like minority voters — they say they’re relieved Warren’s supporters have swung to him, rather than another candidate.

“The fact that it’s Bernie is fantastic, because Bernie is perfectly wired for this role,” said another national Democratic operative close to the campaign. “Everything about Bernie conveys the opportunity and limitations of his candidacy. It’s perfect for him, it’s perfect for the Clinton campaign, and it’s good for the party. I don’t think Democrats are wringing their hands saying, ‘What if Bernie wins?’”

As such, Clinton has avoided actively antagonizing Sanders or the voters backing him — in fact, some allies were annoyed when Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Clinton supporter, attacked Sanders for his left-wing views on MSNBC last week.

Among campaign fundraisers and surrogates, there is very little appetite for a direct fight with Sanders, whose supporters Clinton would need against a Republican opponent come November 2016.

“Hillary supporters that have run for election often, like myself — I’m 12-2, if I was a pitcher I’d be worth about $15 million a year — we’re saying, ‘Stay the course. Bernie Sanders is not going to be the nominee,’” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

Clinton, whose campaign even declined to publicly promote the endorsement of Sanders’ home-state governor, Peter Shumlin, has shown no signs of deviating from its plan. At her first public appearance after the New Hampshire poll’s release, for example, she refused to mention the Vermonter, instead railing against Donald Trump. Former bank executive Robert Wolf, a Democratic donor, said Sanders’ name didn’t come up once during a two-hour meeting he had with Clinton last week.

There is one insurance policy, however, that belies the idea that the Sanders’ challenge is inconsequential: Last week the Clinton campaign hired Jeff Berman, the consultant who built Obama’s delegate-winning strategy in 2008. It also held a weekend of grass-roots actions across the country — from local meetings to canvasses — to demonstrate its reach in states that could matter if the primary were to stretch past the first four early-voting ones.

But as long as history repeats itself — the Clinton campaign’s refrain is that no non-Iowan has broken 50 percent in that state’s Democratic caucus — early-state supporters insist Clinton should be fine.

“I did this with John Kerry, I did this with Al Gore,” said New Hampshire lawyer Billy Shaheen, the husband of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and a close Clinton friend. “When I was running their campaigns in New Hampshire they both went from 20-point leads to 20-point deficits. Deficits! In December 2003, the whole press had written John Kerry off because he was in single digits, and the election was 35 days away.”

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Bob Shrum, who played top roles in both of those campaigns, agreed: “This could be like Gore-[Bill] Bradley, where Bradley in September ’99 looked like a real challenger. Gore then won Iowa overwhelmingly, New Hampshire closely, and then every other primary and caucus.”

And, he added, echoing the sentiments of Clinton-allied Democrats who refuse to acknowledge Sanders as a serious rival. “Kerry was written out before coming back in Iowa in part because Iowans got serious and said, ‘Who’s a plausible candidate against Bush?’ There’s something about Bernie’s personality that’s attractive to people, and I believe he’ll go to the convention with a reasonable number of delegates. But do I think that means Hillary Clinton should declare all-out war on him? No.”