NEW YORK — Facing a tougher-than-expected challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is preparing for a primary fight that could stretch into late April or early May and require a sprawling field operation in states and territories from Pennsylvania to Guam.
With the Iowa caucuses in two weeks and Sanders’ insurgent candidacy chipping away at Clinton’s once-formidable lead there, Clinton aides are acknowledging that the road up to the party’s July convention could be an expensive slog. “Remember, I campaigned all the way into June last time,” Clinton told CNN last week.
Even though the Clinton team has sought to convey that it has built a national operation, the campaign has invested much of its resources in the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa, hoping that a victory there could marginalize Sanders and set Clinton on the path to the nomination. As much as 90 percent of the campaign’s resources are now split between Iowa and the Brooklyn headquarters, according to an estimate provided by a person with direct knowledge of the spending. The campaign denied that figure.
The campaign boasted in June, when Clinton held her kickoff event on Roosevelt Island in New York, that it had at least one paid staff member in all 50 states. But the effort did not last, and the staff members were soon let go or reassigned. (Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said they had been hired as temporary workers to sign up volunteers at the start of the campaign, an effort he said had paid off organizationally.)
The focus on Iowa, which still haunts Clinton after the stinging upset by Barack Obama there in 2008, has been so intense that even organizers in New Hampshire, which holds its primary Feb. 9, have complained to the campaign’s leadership that they feel neglected.
On a call with supporters last week, Clinton’s aides laid out a scenario in which the race against Sanders stretched through April, a prospect that they said would require about $50 million for a national ground operation and other expenses.
“It’s not just a question of the first two states or the first four states,” Mook said in an interview at Sunday’s Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C. “We’re going to keep going into the map as long as it takes.”
For all its institutional advantages, the Clinton campaign lags behind the Sanders operation in deploying paid staff members: For example, Sanders has campaign workers installed in all 11 of the states that vote on Super Tuesday. Clinton does not, and is relying on union volunteers and members of supportive organizations such as Planned Parenthood to help her.
“It would be good to have the momentum story the day after the caucus of ‘Oh, Bernie won,’ ” Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said, “but it’s really about grinding out the delegates, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.”
Asked about the discrepancy between the campaigns and whether Clinton’s team planned to put staff in all of the Super Tuesday states, Marlon Marshall, her director of state campaigns and political engagement, declined to comment specifically, and instead repeated this line three times: “We’ve had folks in states for a while.”
The scramble after the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire will be intense. If Clinton fails to win either state and her campaign seems to be stumbling, her donations could dry up. But a loss could also motivate donors who had viewed her nomination as a foregone conclusion.
Even if Clinton wins in Iowa, where she maintains a slight lead in most polls, Sanders could receive an outpouring of small donations if the outcome is close that would help him compete in subsequent states. Sanders, a small-state senator who has never run for national office, has shown surprising fund-raising muscle. Many of his donors have yet to give him the maximum individual contribution of $2,700, meaning they could be tapped repeatedly if the contest remains close. His campaign raised $33 million in the final quarter of 2015, just $4 million less than Clinton.
Clinton’s aides say they expect to win Iowa and New Hampshire and are ready for the grind. A giant white board on the wall of the campaign’s headquarters maps out where staff members would be sent depending on the outcomes in the early states.
“We just game out a bunch of different scenarios,” Mook said. “It’s kind of like ‘choose your own adventure.’ ”
Clinton has many strengths to exploit: In a Democratic primary, candidates are awarded delegates based on their vote totals, so Clinton and Sanders can get close to the approximately 2,200 needed to secure the nomination by racking up a combination of victories and solid second-place showings.
Clinton has deep support among blacks and Latinos. Sanders has struggled to connect with minority voters and trails Clinton by double digits in Nevada and South Carolina, which vote later next month.