Spartanburg, S.C. — The staff supporting Carly Fiorina is drinking from a fire hose.
Fiorina was the undisputed winner of last week’s presidential debate. Once an asterisk in the polls, she is suddenly a hot commodity. A town hall scheduled in Rock Hill Wednesday night had already been moved once to accommodate hundreds more people than originally expected. And after a similar event in Myrtle Beach drew over 1,200 people on Tuesday, some were speculating that the venue might need to be changed again.
This is the new normal for Fiorina, who has jumped into third place in national polls since her triumphant debate performance. For the first few months of the campaign, Fiorina’s task was to introduce herself to voters who had no idea who she was. The debate raised her name-ID and convinced people she was a viable contender for the nomination. Now, she must make the case that she is not just a flash in the pan or a novelty candidate — that she has the staying power to go all the way.
In part, that will mean proving that she can handle the pressure — logistical and political — of being a top-tier candidate.
The logistics are difficult. The staff that does most of the support work for the events — handing out stickers and signs and collecting the contact information of those voters who attend — isn’t allowed to talk to the people deciding whether to change the venue. Fiorina’s super PAC, CARLY for America (few of the group’s staffers can tell you what the FEC-mandated acronym stands for) is serving as the ground crew that prepares venues for her appearances. But it’s the official campaign that is organizing those appearances, and federal election law bars the two groups from communicating. The division of powers owes in part to money: the super PAC raised $3.4 million in Fiorina’s first quarter as a candidate. Though that’s a small sum for a super PAC, it’s significantly more than the Fiorina campaign’s anemic $1.4 million.
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#share#Conveniently, Fiorina keeps her schedule on a public Google Calendar. But it means the super PAC staffers have to react quickly. The logistics are not always seamless. At a smaller Wednesday afternoon event in Lexington, attendees overflowed the patio at Hudson’s Smokehouse BBQ, and Fiorina was repeatedly interrupted by people yelling for her to speak up so she could make herself heard over the noise.
“You see, contrary to some caricatures, I am a fairly soft-spoken woman,” she cracked, breaking out her go-to line for such situations.
Republicans outside of Fiorina’s orbit say the official side of her campaign needs to beef up its infrastructure if it hopes to capitalize on her success. The failures of Rick Perry and Scott Walker to sustain campaigns, even as each had a super PAC with millions of dollars waiting in the wings, seemed to illustrate that soft money can only take a contender so far.
But both the campaign and the super PAC say they plan to keep doing what they’re doing.
“As long as I read in the paper that they are organizing this great group of supporters, we will keep spending our resources elsewhere,” says deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores. But if for some reason the super PAC stops doing what needs to be done, she said, “we have the resources in place to be able to do it quite quickly.”
The party line in the Fiorina campaign has long been that when people get to meet her and see her talk, they like her. So the contours of the campaign have changed little even as the crowds have grown.
“Of course my name-ID is growing. And as my name-ID grows, as people get to know me, they tend to support me,” Fiorina told reporters at a gaggle in Columbia. “And so we’re seeing a big uptick in crowds, in our fundraising, in interest and support, and obviously that’s really gratifying.”
Fiorina is a disciplined campaigner. She is almost never visibly ruffled, even by the most awkward and baffling of exchanges.
Fiorina is a disciplined campaigner. She is almost never visibly ruffled, even by the most awkward and baffling of exchanges, such as when a young boy stood up at her Rock Hill town hall and asked, “What happens when the government goes down?”
“What do you mean ‘when the government goes down?’” Fiorina asked, managing to modulate her tone as if this were a totally coherent question that she just wanted to clarify.
“Like, if we’re almost going into an anarchy here,” the boy said.
Fiorina, mishearing the last word, tried to sound out “anarchy,” emphasizing the wrong syllable, as the crowd began to chuckle.
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“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” she said in a serious tone after it was cleared up. “It’s my fault not yours. That’s a very thoughtful question.”
The response that followed was not so much an answer to the question as an unrelated recital of her stump speech attacking the “professional political class,” which, in fairness, was probably among the more logical possible responses.
Fiorina sticks religiously to such talking points. Reporters have heard the line about calling her “good friend Bibi Netanyahu” so many times that it regularly elicits snorts from the back row.
She took questions — either from a moderator or the audience — at all of her South Carolina campaign events Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning. Fiorina regularly applauds herself for this practice at campaign events, rolling her eyes at the idea that a candidate answering questions would surprise people.
#related#“What a low bar,” she said here Thursday morning, though she tends to answer the question she wants to answer, and not always the question she is asked. She concluded an answer to a question about whether or not she would support the fair tax, something she said she is not prepared to do, talking about her plan to have people text politicians and pressure them to listen to the voters — something she brings up at almost every stop.
Her campaign likes to think of such events as the best debate prep. There are few topics she hasn’t been asked about, and few ways in which she hasn’t been asked about them, by one voter or another. Though her campaign did work to prepare her for the debate, her most successful remark of the night — her pointed response to Donald Trump’s attack on her looks — was not pre-scripted. The campaign had worked to ready her for the expected confrontation with Trump, but they hadn’t anticipated the moderator would ask her about his derogatory remark quite so directly. Luckily, Fiorina had heard a similar question before.
Though the comment had the feel of a carefully choreographed political move, like much of Fiorina’s campaign, it was the result of a sequence of events more or less beyond her control. That she was on a stage with Trump at all was more a stroke of luck than the result of any intricate political machinations. When it became clear that Fiorina would not make the cut for the primetime debate, her campaign reached out to CNN and the RNC, but neither discussion got Fiorina any closer to the main stage. So a couple of weeks before the event, deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores sent out a public memo calling the decision stupid.
Thus far, Fiorina has benefited in no small part from the fact that many Republicans — even those supporting her opponents — wanted her to do well.
“We were frustrated,” Flores explained. But there were no back-room negotiations following the release of the memo. The Fiorina campaign learned of the rule change when CNN informed all the campaigns.
Thus far, Fiorina has benefited in no small part from the fact that many Republicans — even those supporting her opponents — wanted her to do well. Fiorina is a strong communicator and early on proved herself an effective attack dog against Hillary Clinton, unencumbered as she is by the appendage that makes some of her opponents watch their words for fear of being called sexist.
What’s more, many Republicans really like the idea of having a woman on the stage and in the conversation. Supporters and operatives working for rival campaigns speak highly of her — back in July, New Hampshire resident Paul Clark told Yahoo he planned to host an event for her even though he was working for Chris Christie. “It’s hard not to root for her,” says a Republican consultant affiliated with a rival campaign. Fiorina’s opponents even publicly supported her push to get on the debate stage this month.
Unsurprisingly then, other campaigns say they are unconcerned with her rise at this point. To them, at least, she has not yet proven that she is more than a passing fad. That would likely change if they start to believe she’s a real threat.
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A big moment will come next month, when her campaign releases its fundraising numbers for this quarter. Her first quarter in the race, Fiorina’s fundraising was anemic — she raised a sum befitting a candidate for the Senate, not the presidency. Her haul this quarter will be a big test of her staying power. Though her staff is relatively small, and the campaign says it is built for the long haul, no candidate can stick around without money.
“Depends how much money she’s got,” media magnate Stan Hubbard tells National Review, when asked if he thinks she can bear the long haul. Hubbard and his wife maxed out their contributions to Fiorina after the debate — but they also gave the maximum to Christie, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio, hedging their bets.
If Fiorina starts to look increasingly like a threat, the gloves will come off of her opponents. Already, the opposition research has started in earnest, most of it regarding her oft-maligned tenure as CEO of Hewlett Packard.
At every stop, Fiorina recounts her personal American Dream story: how she rose from secretary to CEO. But she avoids delving into the specifics of her time at Hewlett Packard, unless someone else brings it up. When she does get asked about her business record, she has a pat response to attacks, which she brushed off Thursday as coming from “Democrats and Donald Trump.”
Fiorina frames her downfall at HP as a kind of credential, evidence that she would challenge the “professional political class” if elected.
“I got fired,” she declares proudly. “I got fired in a boardroom brawl that lasted for about two weeks. Why? Because when you lead and challenge the status quo, you make enemies.”
It’s a clever response to the line of attack that was used against Fiorina to such devastating effect in her 2010 Senate campaign. If her opponents can convince voters of her failures as a CEO, it will undermine a basic argument for her campaign: that she knows how to run a very large entity, and is prepared to do the job of president.
It’s not yet clear which version will cut through the noise, though.
Hubbard observes that some stories painted her record as bad, others as good. “I don’t know what to think,” he says.
— Alexis Levinson is a senior political reporter for National Review.