Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president isn’t just trying to harness the lingering progressive energy behind the failed attempt to draft his fellow liberal senator Elizabeth Warren.
Now they’re hiring the minds behind her grassroots movement, too.
The Guardian has learned that the Sanders campaign has hired Blair Lawton, who served as field director in Iowa for the Run Warren Run effort, which announced it was shutting down last week.
Lawton will serve as political director for Sanders in Iowa, the early primary state where Sanders and Hillary Clinton will both visit this weekend. He previously worked as a regional field director in Iowa for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, then managed Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts in Alaska in 2014.
Sanders long positioned himself as a leading progressive voice in the Democratic party, and has declared he is “in this race to win” as a liberal alternative to Clinton.
The grassroots efforts to recruit Warren, however, put up a road block among the party’s left-leaning base – until Run Warren Run gave in to the Massachusetts senator’s repeated insistence that she would not challenge Clinton for the nomination.
“To be sure, Warren – and grassroots economic populism more broadly – was already a rising force well before our efforts began,” the group’s organizers wrote in preparation to fold last week. “Although Run Warren Run may not have sparked a candidacy, it ignited a movement.”
Warren has long been an icon on the left, but an Iowa poll released earlier this month showed Sanders jumping ahead in the caucus state as he began to draw crowds at double capacity.
The hiring of a top staffer from the Run Warren Run effort signals an opportunity for the Sanders campaign to tap into both the enthusiasm for Warren and the organizing already done in the state on her behalf.
Sanders has also hired several other staffers to fill key positions in Iowa, including Justin Huck to serve as the campaign’s state field director and Tara Thobe to oversee logistics.
