“2020 is our chance, people talk about the unwinnable fight,” she said Sunday night. “Boy, they don’t know what’s coming their way.”

LEBANON, N.H. — Her poll numbers are slipping. Some of her rivals are drawing bigger crowds. But when Senator Elizabeth Warren took the stage here, she insisted she knew a thing or two about “unwinnable fights,” going so far as to repeat the phrase at least eight times.

Warren was talking about Democrats’ nagging worries about being unable to beat President Trump, but she might have been talking about her own struggles here in New Hampshire, where she’s been stuck in third or fourth place in the polls despite this state’s proximity to her home and its high number of well-educated white liberals who make up her base of support.


Her remarks here, which cast her biography as a series of “unwinnable fights” like becoming a teacher after dropping out of college or founding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, represented a rare change to a stump speech that has been remarkably consistent over the past year.

It is a sign of a small shakeup as Warren looks for a way to win the Democratic nomination even if she cannot win any of the early nomination contests, and the latest in a series of new catchphrases her campaign has tried recently, like “hope over fear” and “unite the party,” which have both appeared on campaign signs.

For now, Warren and her allies are stressing the long game, suggesting she can use her extensive national ground operation to prevail over a fractious and divided field whether or not she notches a win in the early states.

“There are 55 more states and territories after this,” Warren said on Sunday. “It looks like it is going to be a long battle to the nomination.”


But her focus on the contests to come risks leaving voters with the impression that Warren lacks urgency now. After an earlier event on Sunday in Concord, where some in the crowd of about 750 voters trickled out while Warren was giving the usual version of her stump speech, reporters repeatedly asked if she planned to change her strategy or engage more directly with rivals who spent the weekend ripping into each other’s other’s resumes, politics and electability.

But Warren sought to steadfastly hover above the fray.

“We’re going to have to bring our party together in order to beat Donald Trump,” Warren said. “And the way we do this is not by launching a bunch of attacks on each other and trying to tear each other down.”

It is a strategy that deprives her of the headlines that typically come with a new attack, but one that fits into her efforts to pitch herself as the single candidate best equipped to unify the Democratic Party, her supporters say.

“As other candidates beat each other up, and Biden collapses before South Carolina, Warren will be in prime position to pick up support,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports Warren.

Instead of focusing on her fellow Democrats, Warren made a foil out of Republicans.

On Sunday night, a voter in Lebanon asked if she ever thinks, “Who is going to be my Mike Pence, who is going to look at me with adoring eyes?”


“I already have a dog,” Warren shot back, to a gasp of delight from the crowd.

She also spoke of another opponent who is familiar to New Hampshire voters: Scott Brown, the Republican incumbent she defeated in Massachusetts in 2012 who went on to lose his challenge to Senator Jeanne Shaheen in this state two years later. Warren cast her race against him as another “unwinnable fight.”

“People started calling me and said, you should get in this fight,” she said, imitating a person ticking off the reasons Brown would be hard to beat, “even though he has a high approval rating, had plenty of money in the bank, had a great story, was very telegenic.”

It is a strange twist that Warren’s electability pitch requires her to heap compliments on her formal rival, who is now the ambassador to New Zealand.

Brown does not have anything to say about it.

“The Hatch Act prohibits me from commenting on politics,” Brown said in a text message to the Globe, referring to the law that limits political activities of federal employees. “Sadly, I won’t be able to comment.”

















Jess Bidgood can be reached at Jess.Bidgood@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessbidgood.