With phone calls, texts and handwritten notes, the Massachusetts senator is continuing an unusually determined outreach effort to show party officials she is aligned with them.
As Ms. Warren steadily rises in the polls she is working diligently to protect her left flank, lining up with progressives on nearly every issue and trying to defuse potential attacks from supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “I’m with Bernie,” she responds when asked about what is perhaps the most contentious issue of the primary race: “Medicare for all.”
Yet publicly, and even more in private, she is signaling to party leaders that, far from wanting to stage a “political revolution” in the fashion of Mr. Sanders, she wants to revive the beleaguered Democratic National Committee and help recapture the Senate while retaining the House in 2020.
In phone calls, text messages and small gatherings before her rallies, as well as in one-on-one meetings over hot tea at her Washington condominium, Ms. Warren is simultaneously courting and assuring Democratic town leaders, statewide officials and the chiefs of the country’s largest unions.
The outreach is not just an effort to avoid the confrontational approach Mr. Sanders took in 2016, when he inveighed against party insiders and the committee itself, which he correctly believed was favoring Hillary Clinton. Ms. Warren is also trying to allay concerns among Democrats that, as a progressive candidate proposing sweeping change, she may not have enough mainstream appeal to compete with President Trump in the general election.
Most of the other White House contenders are, of course, also wooing party officials. But the more establishment-aligned candidates like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris of California do not face the same questions about their visions for party politics. And interviews with about two dozen Democrats who have been in contact with Ms. Warren reveal that her style of courtship has been unusually determined.
Troy Price, the chairman of Iowa’s Democratic Party, said Ms. Warren called him the day he was re-elected to his post last year, immediately after the midterm elections and on the day she entered the race.
“All of the sudden the cellphone is ringing and it’s her — not a staffer,” added J. David Cox, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, calling Ms. Warren “the most aggressive” of the Democratic contenders in pursuing him.
Ms. Warren’s wooing could prove important should the nominating contest deadlock at the Democratic National Convention next summer: Many of the officials she is courting are so-called superdelegates, who are able to cast a binding vote should the primary go beyond a first ballot.
Beyond the potential electoral advantages, the relationships Ms. Warren is cultivating could prove just as powerful for symbolic purposes.
While in San Francisco, Ms. Warren met privately with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who in 2016 was one of Ms. Clinton’s most outspoken supporters in the labor movement. Ms. Warren and Ms. Weingarten have developed a close relationship, frequently talking about education issues, and Ms. Weingarten recalled how the senator reached out to her with encouraging words when her union sued Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, over a student loan forgiveness program.
Then there is Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who was Mr. Sanders’s first congressional supporter in the 2016 election but who is now backing Ms. Warren.
So is Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, who last year became one of the first Native American women elected to Congress.
