DOVER, N.H. — Kurt Ehrenberg spent three hours one day last week trying to convince people to try to convince Elizabeth Warren to run for president.

Republicans in the Granite State, with its first-in-the-nation primary early next year, are telling their nearly 20-strong glut of candidates, will-be candidates and would-be candidates to not beat up on each other too bad. The Democrats, meanwhile, have the opposite problem. They just want Hillary Clinton to have to run hard against somebody other than herself.


Hence the scene, sunny and breezy, outside the children’s museum here on Wednesday, up from the west bank of the brown water of the Cocheco River — Ehrenberg, 56, this state’s boss of the grass-roots initiative called Run Warren Run, dressed in khaki pants and sensible shoes, approaching mothers carrying babies, mothers pushing strollers, mothers herding toddlers.

“Would you like to sign a card to ask Elizabeth Warren to run for president?”

“No, thank you.”

“Would you like to sign a card to ask Elizabeth Warren to run for president?”

“Not right now.”

“Would you like to sign a card to ask Elizabeth Warren to run for president?”

“Maybe on the way out.”

“I know you have your hands full …”

Still no.

More than a year and a half before Election Day 2016, this is Democratic presidential politics: Clinton is “ un-running,” Martin O’Malley is about a month away from running, Jim Webb, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders continue to think about running, and the assiduous backers of Warren are out canvassing for their noncandidate — who’s generally outpolling all of them except Clinton. If the Clinton campaign is trying to make big seem small, the Warren campaign, such as it isn’t, is trying to make nothing become something.

Warren, the poor kid from Oklahoma turned Harvard professor of law turned populist freshman senator from Massachusetts, is the anointed leader of the most progressive portion of her party. The 65-year-old who grew up on what she calls the “ragged” edge of the middle class is Washington’s loudest critic of a system she says is “rigged.” Her signature issues are more and more at the fore of the national conversation — income inequality, swelling student debt, the outsize sway of the financial industry at the expense of the shriveling middle class.

Last week, in the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, she sparred with Barack Obama. The president said Warren was “wrong.” Warren returned fire with fire: “… it’s time to say no,” she said.

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She insists, though, she has no desire to be his successor, and she has been steadfast in her declarations of disinterest.

“I’m not running for president,” she said in a news conference in Boston in December 2013, barely more than a year after getting elected to the Senate.

Since then, she has said more or less the same thing the same way on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and NPR, in USA Today, and so on.

Only in People did she alter the language and tone. “I don’t think so,” she said in an interview with the magazine last October. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

On Thursday, Lacey Rose, a spokeswoman for Warren, reiterated to POLITICO that Warren’s not running for president, adding that she “does not support the draft efforts.”

The people behind Run Warren Run aren’t deaf. They think they can change her mind.

“We wouldn’t be running this campaign,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, “if we didn’t think it was very possible.”

“This is our priority,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org, “and we don’t have plans to stop.”

Run Warren Run, founded and funded by Democracy for America and MoveOn.org, launched in December. The group has nine paid staffers in Iowa and two paid staffers in New Hampshire. It is about to hire two more in New Hampshire. It has offices in Iowa in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids and in New Hampshire in Manchester, in a small, drab building catty-corner from a pizza place, the windows plastered with placards.

So far, according to Chamberlain and Wikler, Run Warren Run has spent approximately $1.25 million, on staff, signs, shirts, cards, stickers and rent. The tally of names who have signed up on the cards or online asking her to run: 325,000. Next up? Maybe more staff in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe staff in other states, maybe ads on TV.

Even if they ultimately fail to get her to run, they say, they feel their efforts already are contributing to the cause. What Warren talks about is increasingly what others are talking about. Clinton has prioritized “ everyday” people. Jeb Bush has said “the opportunity gap is the defining issue of our time.” They say there’s time for Warren to get in; Bill Clinton, after all, didn’t announce his 1992 candidacy until October 1991. They point, too, to precedent: The one time Warren ran for public office, she initially didn’t want to.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is not a part of the draft effort now, led a draft effort then, raising more than $1.17 million for her 2012 Senate campaign and signing up some 70,000 potential volunteers and donors.

“We wanted to make sure we erased any doubt she had about whether she had grass-roots support,” PCCC founder Adam Green said.

“A petition made the rounds on the Internet,” Warren later wrote in her book, “A Fighting Chance,” “and seventy thousand people signed on, urging me to run …”

And she did.

“Which is another reason we believe we have a chance of convincing her to run. It’s happened before,” Ehrenberg said on Wednesday, walking from the children’s museum up Central Avenue, looking for people who weren’t all harried mothers.

He was joined by the other paid New Hampshire staffer, Diego Hernandez, 24, tight blue jeans, tight green shirt, black cap-toe boots and whiskers and shades, a “gypsy-esque” idealist who moved from Southern California to New England in January to work to get Warren to run. He wants her to run because she doesn’t want to run. “Hillary Clinton wants to be president,” he said, “and she’s wanted to be president for a long time.”

They settled on a spot on the Central Avenue sidewalk across from the Cocheco mills building, the kind of long, hulking, red-brick structure seen in so many towns around this region and state — old lifeblood factories, sites of the sorts of jobs that all but no longer exist, now mostly lofts, shops and empty space.

The early spring breeze kicked up a stubborn winter nip. Goose flesh showed on Hernandez’s bare upper arms.

Ehrenberg cited labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez and his adage about organizing: “First you talk to one person, then you talk to another person, then you …” He and Hernandez started asking passersby.

“Would you …”

“Would you …”

“Would you …”

Some people stopped long enough to look at the cards.

“DEAR ELIZABETH WARREN,” they read in bold capital letters. “THE ECONOMY AND THE GOVERNMENT ARE RIGGED TO FAVOR WALL STREET AND BIG CORPORATIONS. WE NEED YOUR LEADERSHIP MORE THAN EVER. PLEASE RUN FOR PRESIDENT AND PLEASE COME VISIT US IN NEW HAMPSHIRE!”

Brandon White signed a card.

“I feel like a lot of people think it’s a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee,” said the 23-year-old from Dover wearing a black “Big Lebowski” T-shirt. “I think it’s important to raise issues in a primary. And I think you should have to fight for it.”

Peter Thompson signed a card.

“I feel that the conversation will be enriched by having more candidates,” the 68-year-old from nearby Barrington said. “As much as I like Hillary Clinton, and I think she would be an excellent president, and she may well win, I think it will help her hone her ideas. It will sharpen her.”

One woman with a cane signed. She said she was a lifelong Republican from Dover and in her 70s and didn’t want to give POLITICO her name because she didn’t want her neighbors to know she was considering changing her party affiliation before voting in 2016.

“The tea party, the right-wingers, I find all of that objectionable,” she said. “I find it corseting, as in a corset being too tight; as a person who’s on the liberal side of the Republican Party, I resent it.”

Hernandez flagged down a woman with red hair. She signed a card while telling him that one of her daughters has $85,000 in student loans from nursing school at Saint Anselm College in Manchester and another one of her daughters has $90,000 in student loans from the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “As a parent, you feel bad, you know?” she said, saying she was a registered independent who typically voted Republican, but that Warren was piquing her interest by talking about the injustice of bailing out banks instead of helping young adults who are left saddled with debt because they tried to get ahead. She didn’t want POLITICO to name her because she didn’t want to embarrass her daughters.

Others kept walking. Even two men who called themselves Warren fans.

“Would you …”

“She’s not going to!” said Michael Azevedo, 50, visiting from Massachusetts.

“Would you …”

“You don’t have to convince me,” said Dennis Sullivan, 69, from Dover. “You have to convince her.”

Clouds moved in. The blue sky turned gray. Three hours was sufficient for now, and Ehrenberg and Hernandez ducked into a luncheonette.

Ehrenberg counted the cards with the new names.

“Nineteen,” he said.