Elizabeth Warren’s Iowa Pivot: From Her Plans to Her Plan to Win

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — The last time Senator Elizabeth Warren trundled across Iowa in a specially decorated campaign vehicle, an R.V. headed to the Iowa State Fair in August, it was wrapped with a cheeky play on the slogan for her sweeping agenda: “Honk if you’re ready for big, structural change!”

Now, with days before the Iowa caucuses, her bus is plastered with a far more direct and urgent message, as she looks to quell the skepticism that has slowed her momentum here in the crucial final stretch. “Courage over cynicism” it urges on one side; “hope over fear” it says on the other.

Such is the reality of her political comedown from the swaggering heights of the summer and early fall, when she was thought to be the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s left flank and the chief rival to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. These days, it is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who is the liberal topping some Iowa polls and the top rival to Mr. Biden. Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, along with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., is battling to depart Des Moines next week with a mandate as a serious contender, leaning on a political organization she began building here earlier than her rivals.

She and her team have only a few days left to achieve, if not a win in Iowa, then a surprisingly strong finish that gives her momentum heading into New Hampshire. The campaign has said it is in the race for the long haul, warning in a memo last week against “breathless media narratives” that take hold as voting begins. The memo, written by Ms. Warren’s campaign manager, Roger Lau, touted a 1,000-strong staff spread across the country, including in the Super Tuesday states that vote in March. Still, the team now finds itself in the slightly surreal position of working flat out with no real sense of what 12 months of campaigning in Iowa will yield them.

In a late shift in strategy, the campaign has supplemented, if not supplanted, its policy-driven messaging of 2019 with explicit talk about Ms. Warren’s identity as a female politician and her path to beating President Trump. The “I Have a Plan for That” candidate still talks about her big agenda, but with a newfound emphasis on how she’ll win, too.

On Sunday, as Ms. Warren sipped a Michelob Ultra during a meeting with a small group of volunteers at Lucky’s, a sports bar in Cedar Rapids, one supporter asked her what message to deliver while knocking doors in the crucial closing days of the campaign.

“This woman is our best chance to win,” Ms. Warren responded, “And there’s a whole lot of reasons that that’s so.”

“Look, there’s a lot of change we all want to make, but the No. 1 thing is we want to get rid of Donald Trump,” she added. “And I think that’s what holds some people back. They say, ‘Wait a minute, who’s going to have the best chance?’ So it’s not who I think is going to make the best president.”

“We just have to say, ‘We know what’s right,’ and get in there and fight for it,” she added. “And that is how we win.”

On the stump and unscripted, Ms. Warren can be one of her party’s most compelling communicators, delivering a plain-spoken and populist message with potential appeal across the Democratic ideological spectrum. Over the weekend, in Davenport, she comforted a woman who asked about the lack of services available in schools for children with disabilities, like her son. They embraced as the woman fought back tears.

“Why do you think there are no resources? Why do you think there are no resources?” Ms. Warren repeated, with evident emotion. “There are no resources because the folks who are rich want to keep their money, and they don’t want to pay taxes to make sure that all of our children get the education they deserve.”

The crowd thundered in approval.

The focus on beating Mr. Trump, though, represents a sharp shift for a campaign that once prided itself on how little it talked about the current presidential administration. While her rivals were directly appealing to voters about how they could defeat the president, Ms. Warren largely avoided the topic, seeking to motivate voters around ideals rather than the vague concept of electability, which can be hard to define and often disadvantages female candidates.

Mr. Sanders, her fellow progressive, even traveled the country on a “Bernie Beats Trump” tour, and frequently discussed how his call for a “political revolution” would provide the ballot box antidote to Mr. Trump.

Ms. Warren’s rise in the polls provided her campaign allies with evidence that she didn’t need to address electability — she could embody it. No longer.

On Monday, Ms. Warren began running two new television ads across Iowa that were built, at least in part, around her ability to appeal to voters in a general election. One featured her family members, including some Republicans, testifying to her character. The other contrasted her middle-class upbringing with Mr. Trump’s.

“He grew up in a mansion in New York City. She grew up here in Oklahoma,” the narrator says in the second ad. “He got millions from his dad’s real estate empire. Her dad ended up a janitor.”

Over the weekend, when a voter in Davenport asked Ms. Warren whether a more moderate candidate would be better positioned to defeat Mr. Trump, she acknowledged that the focus now is more on getting to the White House than what she would achieve once in office.

“We’ve got to win. That’s what this is all about, right?” she said. “You don’t get to do good things if you don’t win.”

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers showed Ms. Warren faced a challenge in making her electability case, even among her supporters. Only 51 percent of Iowa Democrats who said she was their top choice believed she was the candidate with the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump. In contrast, 82 percent of Mr. Biden’s backers and 79 percent of Mr. Sanders’s supporters believed their candidate was the best candidate.

Complicating matters further for Ms. Warren is a Senate impeachment trial that has forced her off the trail, an extra challenge for a campaign that has leveraged the crowds she draws as critical organizing tools.

Since the October debate, when Ms. Warren’s rivals attacked her policy vision, arguing that she had not adequately explained her health care proposals and that “big, structural change” was too politically risky, her campaign has yet to fully recover. And quietly, a campaign that has made few drastic changes over the course of a year has overhauled its message as caucusing and voting approaches.

It started late last year, when Ms. Warren shortened her stump speech to include fewer policy details and leave time for more audience questions, and it continued in a speech on New Year’s Eve in Boston. “Imagine an America where the lived experience of women is reflected in committee rooms and corner offices and yes, even that really nice oval-shaped office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said.

Now Ms. Warren has adopted a new closing to her stump speech, speaking of the need to “fight back” for big changes to society and framing her pitch in historical terms.

“Fighting back is patriotic,” she said in Muscatine on Saturday. “It’s true. We fought back against the king in order to build this country. We fought back against slavery in order to preserve this country. We fought back against a Great Depression in order to rebuild this country. We fought back against fascism in order to protect this country. We are at our best when we take on big problems, and when we fight back.”

Ms. Warren’s allies, surrogates and advisers have touted her as the Democratic “unity candidate”: liberal enough for the progressive wing and reasonable enough for the moderate wing. She got a boost over the weekend from the endorsement of The Des Moines Register, and on Monday, allied groups such as the Working Families Party and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee released a list of more than 3,000 progressive activists backing Ms. Warren. The supporters have tweeted under the hashtag “#AllOfUs4Warren.”

Many of the endorsers made a point to name-check Mr. Sanders, but go on to explain why they were backing Ms. Warren instead.

“I voted for Bernie in 2016, and continue to admire and appreciate his fierce advocacy. But 2020 is not 2016,” one of them, Susheela Jayapal, the commissioner of Multnomah County in Oregon, said in a statement. “We need bold policy and advocacy — and we also need a president who can actually govern. A president who understands and can operate the levers of influence. A president with the skills and temperament to push, to pull, to exercise power and to build power around her.”

Her campaign is also hoping that the fact that Ms. Warren is the second choice of so many Iowans could lift her in the state’s unique caucus system, where the supporters of candidates who do not reach a 15-percent viability threshold in a precinct are free to back another candidate in the second round of caucusing.

Those are people like Ronald Whitehorn, 70, of Wapello, who came to her Muscatine event leaning toward Andrew Yang, the New York entrepreneur whom polls show well shy of 15 percent. He was checking out Ms. Warren to see if she would be his second choice.

“She’ll clean the system up and make it work for everyone,” he said.

Steve Sovern, a precinct captain for Ms. Warren in Cedar Rapids who recently hosted Representative Katie Porter of California, a Warren campaign co-chair, in his home, said he was frustrated with the continued speculation about how Ms. Warren would do against Mr. Trump.

“The resistance is one that pisses me off: electability,” he said.

But he felt the tide was turning, citing the endorsement from The Register and her 900-strong crowd at a Sunday rally in Cedar Rapids as proof. “Momentum is everything in Iowa,” he said, “and I think she’s finished her slight downhill slide.”