On Sunday, Sanders reassigned his New Hampshire director Joe Caiazzo to hold the same position in Massachusetts, which has scheduled its presidential primary on Super Tuesday, three weeks after New Hampshire’s primary on Feb. 11, 2020.

On Saturday, the campaign let go Kurt Ehrenberg, a longtime Sanders adviser in the state who has worked for decades in Granite State politics.

The Bernie Sanders campaign shuffled out its top two New Hampshire aides over the weekend, less than five months before the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

The moves come at a critical period in the race and in the most important state in Sanders’s pursuit of the White House.


Replacing Caiazzo as New Hampshire director is Shannon Jackson, who ran Sanders’s 2018 Vermont US Senate reelection campaign and has been a presence in the New Hampshire office for months. He had been serving as the campaign’s Northeast political director.

Given that Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by 22 points in 2016, he is expected to win the state’s primary again in 2020. If he doesn’t, he will face serious questions as to whether his campaign is viable in later contests, analysts say.

At the moment, the Sanders campaign’s ability to win again is being threatened by former vice president Joe Biden, who has led most polls in the state, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has surged in the state partly by eating into Sanders’s vote among progressives. In recent weeks, polls have found Biden, Sanders, and Warren statistically tied for first, and two dozen insiders have told the Globe that Warren has the momentum.

But the change at the top of the Sanders campaign in New Hampshire had less to do with Warren or anyone else and more to do with a feud between Caiazzo and Erhenberg that began almost the first day Caiazzo was hired six months ago, according to interviews with Sanders staffers and supporters.


“From the start Mr. Caiazzo and I had fundamental disagreements on how to wage a successful campaign for Senator Sanders in New Hampshire,” said Ehrenberg in an interview.

After one clash this summer, Ehrenberg was officially given a less active role with the campaign and a September date was set for his role to be reviewed. Then, as Labor Day passed, the campaign reviewed the situation and decided to part ways with him.

This inflamed an already disgruntled New Hampshire Sanders steering committee — a group of Sanders’s most prominent and active supporters. Ehrenberg largely created the committee four years ago and has met once a month, even in 2017 and 2018 when there was no formal Sanders campaign.

“Joe was not working well with the base of supporters Sanders had and he wasn’t even reaching out to people who were very significant in the 2016 win,” said former state senator Burt Cohen, one steering committee member.

As the steering committee gathered in the Sanders campaign office in Manchester Sunday, many of the 50 or so people there were ready to defend Ehrenberg and go on the offensive against Caiazzo. But the meeting began with the news of Caiazzo’s reassignment.

Caiazzo did not respond to messages seeking comment Sunday and Monday. He most recently ran the reelection campaign for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in 2018, and in 2016 he was the Sanders presidential campaign’s political director in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.


Sanders’s national campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, acknowledged the changes in New Hampshire, but suggested that moving Caiazzo to Massachusetts, where he has long worked, was part of a buildup in Super Tuesday states.

“We’ve built a great team in New Hampshire and are in a really strong position there,” said Shakir in a statement. “The campaign is now building out our operations to include Massachusetts and Maine state directors as we increase our focus in Super Tuesday states.”

It is true that Caiazzo moving to the Massachusetts role comes at a time when the campaign has hired new state directors in Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.

This weekend’s episode highlights how structurally different today’s Sanders campaign is from four years ago.

Then, it started out with few resources and was waging a longshot battle against Hillary Clinton. Eventually Sanders’s “people-powered” message caught on. He exceeded expectations in the polls, his fund-raising took off, and the momentum allowed the campaign to paper over staff issues.

Ahead of the 2020 campaign, Sanders fund-raising has been robust, and he’s expected to succeed in the Granite State and elsewhere. But this time, his campaign began with a large bureaucracy and expectations not to just win a few states, but the nomination. Debates over campaign strategy have had higher stakes and more people initially at the table to debate them.

James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his Ground Game newsletter on politics:http://pages.email.bostonglobe.com/GroundGameSignUp