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4 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITIONworld
When Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts addressed a few hun-
dred donors last week at a fund-raiser
for the Democratic National Committee,
she called for “big, structural change”
and hurled her familiar populist light-
ning bolts at the forces of concentrated
wealth.
But Ms. Warren did not attend the
event just to recite her stump speech.
She had another, more tailored message
for the Democratic check writers, state
party leaders and committee members
who were gathered at the elegant Fair-
mont San Francisco.
“Last year, I was running for re-elec-
tion, but I didn’t hold back,” she said, re-
minding attendees that in the midterms
she had helped more than 160 congres-
sional candidates and nearly 20 hope-
fuls in governors’ races. “In fact, I raised
or gave more than $11 million helping
get Democrats elected up and down the
ballot around the country” and “sent
contributions to all 50 state parties, the
national committees and the redistrict-
ing fight.”
Her point was easy to grasp: While
her liberal agenda may be further left
than some in the Democratic establish-
ment would prefer, she is a team player
who is seeking to lead the party — not
stage a hostile takeover of it.
As Ms. Warren steadily rises in the
polls she is working diligently to protect
her left flank, lining up with progres-
sives on nearly every issue and trying to
defuse potential attacks from support-
ers of Senator Bernie Sanders of Ver-
mont. “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 revo-
lution” in the fashion of Mr. Sanders, she
wants to revive the beleaguered Demo-
cratic National Committee and help re-
capture the Senate in 2020, while retain-
ing the House.
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 commit-
tee itself, which he correctly believed
was favoring Hillary Clinton. Ms. War-
ren 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 con-
tenders are, of course, also wooing party
officials. But the more establishment-
aligned candidates, including 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 inter-
views with about two dozen Democrats
who have been in contact with Ms. War-
ren show that her style of courtship has
been unusually determined.
Troy Price, the chairman of Iowa’s
Democratic Party, said Ms. Warrencalled 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,” said
J. David Cox, the president of the Ameri-
can Federation of Government Employ-
ees, calling Ms. Warren “the most ag-
gressive” of the Democratic contenders
in pursuing him.
Ms. Warren’s wooing could prove im-
portant, should the nominating contest
deadlock at the Democratic National
Convention next summer: Many of the
officials she is courting are so-called su-
perdelegates, who would be able to cast
a binding vote, should the primary go
beyond a first ballot.Beyond the potential electoral advan-
tages, 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 Federa-
tion of Teachers, who in 2016 was one of
Ms. Clinton’s most outspoken support-
ers in the labor movement. Ms. Warren
and Ms. Weingarten have developed a
close relationship, frequently talking
about education issues, and Ms. Wein-
garten recalled how the senator had
reached out to her with encouraging
words when her union sued Betsy De-
Vos, the education secretary, over a stu-
dent loan forgiveness program.
Then there is Representative Raúl
Grijalva of Arizona, who was Mr. Sand-
ers’s first congressional supporter in the2016 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.
Ms. Haaland attended the San Fran-
cisco fund-raiser, wearing a Warren la-
pel pin, just a few days after she intro-
duced and defended Ms. Warren at a for-
um dedicated to Native American issues
in Iowa. After being sharply criticized
from the right and the left for claiming
Native American ancestry, Ms. Warren
has apologized and taken down a 2018
video from her campaign website in
which she trumpeted the results of a
DNA test examining her heritage.
Ms. Haaland said that Ms. Warren
had helped raise money for her cam-
paign last year and that the two had met
in the senator’s office and over tea in Ms.
Warren’s condominium this year.
“We’re friends. We text each other,”
said the congresswoman, noting that
she and Ms. Warren were also working
together on legislation to establish uni-
versal child care and to provide re-
sources to Native Americans.
While Ms. Warren has been careful to
avoid directly criticizing Mr. Sanders,
she is also quietly taking steps within
the party to make it clear that she does
not want to create a competing power
base, should she become president.
She was one of the first Democratic
candidates to sign a pledge circulated
last month by the Association of State
Democratic Committees vowing not to
create any parallel political or organ-
izing infrastructure that would compete
with the national or state Democratic
parties.
The same pledge, which was shared
by a Democratic official, also includes a
promise “to share all of my data col-
lected during the presidential campaign
with the D.N.C. and with state parties.”The state leaders were trying to en-
sure that the eventual nominee would
turn over his or her fund-raising list and
any voter file that was compiled for fu-
ture races. More broadly, they also
wanted to ensure that the nominee’s po-
litical organization is housed within the
architecture of the party.
This was done partly out of concern
over Mr. Sanders, who has refused to
share his 2016 supporter list with the
party. (The senator’s aides are quick to
note that he has raised nearly $10 mil-
lion for Democratic candidates and com-
mittees dating to his first presidential
bid.)
But party leaders are just as con-
cerned about the actions of former Pres-
ident Barack Obama: The Democratic
National Committee wants to ensure
that its nominee has no designs on creat-
ing a competing political entity in the
mold of Mr. Obama’s Organizing for
America, which aimed to push his
agenda as president. Many Democrats
fault it for weakening the party infra-
structure because it diverted money
and focus from the committee.
Ms. Warren’s outreach, though, ex-
tends well beyond the committee.
Armed with call sheets compiled by her
staff, the senator spends much of her
time in transit on her phone, dialing up
lawmakers, local party leaders and lib-
eral activists. If she is not talking on the
phone, she is often texting or writing
personal notes.
Claire Celsi, an Iowa state senator
who has said she is considering support-
ing Ms. Warren and Ms. Harris, recalled
receiving a note and an inscribed copy
of Ms. Warren’s book “This Fight Is Our
Fight” this year.
Ms. Warren’s campaign events often
begin out of public view, when she meets
with a small groups of Democratic offi-
cials in gatherings, called “clutches,” for
pictures and a few minutes of conversa-
tion. While the size of her crowd last
week in St. Paul, Minn. — roughly
12,000, her campaign said — drew head-
lines and attention on social media, her
meeting beforehand with a few state
lawmakers may have been even more
memorable for them.
That was the case for Lisa DeMio, the
chairwoman of the Democratic town
committee in Hampstead, N.H., who
met with Ms. Warren before the sena-
tor’s town-hall-style meeting in Derry
last month. “It was a little more inti-
mate,” said Ms. DeMio, adding that,
while she cannot officially endorse in
her capacity as chairwoman, Ms. War-
ren is her first choice personally.
There are other Democrats like Ms.
DeMio who can’t, or probably won’t, en-
dorse Ms. Warren but who nevertheless
have been on the receiving end of her
personal touch.
The senator has emailed with Tom
Vilsack, a former Iowa governor and ag-
riculture secretary who has a longstand-
ing relationship with Mr. Biden, to ask
about agricultural policy, according to
Democrats familiar with their ex-
changes.
Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a state represent-
ative in South Carolina, said even
though she had made clear that she
would not endorse in the primary race,
Ms. Warren had reached out to her sev-
eral times. “She’s persistent but not
pushy; she doesn’t do the real hard sell,”
Ms. Cobb-Hunter said. “Her staff does
the soft follow-up.”
That is sure to happen again next
week, when Ms. Warren heads to South
Carolina State University for a town-
hall-style meeting as a guest of one of
the university’s most famous graduates,
Representative James E. Clyburn, to
discuss a bill they have jointly intro-
duced related to student loan debt. Mr.
Clyburn has long been an ally of Mr. Bi-
den.Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts speaking in Los Angeles this month. She is trying to reassure Democrats that she wants a revival and is not staging a hostile takeover.PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESInsurgent with team spirit
SAN FRANCISCOElizabeth Warren is telling
party leaders her candidacy
is no ‘political revolution’BY JONATHAN MARTINJOSHUA LOTT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESMs. Warren privately reached out to key figures, including Randi Weingarten, above, of
the American Federation of Teachers, and Troy Price, top, Iowa’s Democratic Party chief.ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGESIn outreach efforts, the senator is
sending a signal that she wants to
help recapture the Senate in
2020, while retaining the House.- Because of an editing error, an article
on Friday about projections that the
budget deficit will surpass $1 trillion in
the 2020 fiscal year misstated whom the
government must repay when running a
deficit. It is lenders, not borrowers. - An article in the Saturday-Sunday edi-
tion about WesternJournal.com and dis-
information referred imprecisely to the
timing of Patrick Brown’s hiring of expe-
rienced copy editors; he had hired expe-
rienced editors in the years before 2018,
not only last year. It also misstated Mr.
Brown’s height; he is 6-foot-6, not 6-
foot-3.CORRECTIONS
Heat-related deaths have increased
sharply since 2014 in Nevada and Ari-
zona, raising concerns that the hottest
parts of the United States are struggling
to protect their most vulnerable resi-
dents from global warming.
In Arizona, the annual number of
deaths attributed to heat exposure more
than tripled, from 76 deaths in 2014 to
235 in 2017, according to figures ob-
tained from the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. Heat-related
deaths in Nevada rose almost fivefold
during the same period, to 139 from 29.
Most of those deaths were in the
Phoenix and Las Vegas areas, according
to state records.
The long-term health effects of rising
temperatures and heat waves are ex-
pected to be one of the most dangerous
consequences of climate change, caus-
ing “tens of thousands of additional pre-
mature deaths per year across the
United States by the end of this century,”
according to the federal government’s
Global Change Research Program. The
effect could be even more severe in
other parts of the world, potentially
making parts of North Africa and the
Middle East “uninhabitable.”
Still, the fact that deaths have already
increased so rapidly in Nevada and Ari-
zona is surprising, according to David
Hondula, a professor at the School of Ge-
ographical Sciences and Urban Plan-
ning at Arizona State University. He
said heat deaths have generally been
declining in the United States, thanks to
changes like better health care, more
air-conditioning and improved weather
forecasting.
The latest data — which the C.D.C. has
compiled for all 50 states — suggests
that climate change could be starting to
outweigh those advances in the South-
west, at least for some parts of the popu-
lation. Other states haven’t yet shown
such significant spikes, but Dr. Hondula
warned they might eventually see more
deaths as temperatures keep rising.
“Phoenix and other cities of the
Southwest are the canary in the coal
mine,” Dr. Hondula said. “We really
need to figure out what piece or pieces of
the system are lacking.”
Afternoon highs in Phoenix last sum-
mer averaged 106 degrees Fahrenheit,
almost 3 degrees hotter than the aver-
age for the second half of the 20th cen-
tury, according to data from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion. Las Vegas recorded its hottest
summer to date, with average daily
highs reaching 105 degrees, more than 5
degrees above the 1950-2000 mean.
Nighttime lows have warmed up, too,giving residents less chance to recover
from the heat.
“There’s only so much our bodies can
take,” said Rupa Basu, chief of the air
and climate epidemiological section for
the Office of Environmental Health Haz-
ard Assessment in California, where the
number of heat-related deaths doubled
between 2015 and 2017. As heat waves
become more severe, she said, “I think
we’re going beyond that temperature
threshold.”
The increase in deaths also illustrates
how climate change can exacerbate
other challenges. Experts say the death
toll is likely to reflect the growing ranks
of vulnerable groups, and the failure to
protect those groups from global warm-
ing.
A particularly vulnerable group, ex-
perts say, are the homeless, especially in
Maricopa County, which includes
Phoenix.
“The unsheltered homeless popula-
tion in Maricopa County has risen every
year by about 25 percent since 2014,”
said Lisa Glow, chief executive officer of
Central Arizona Shelter Services. “We
have been turning away hundreds
monthly who need shelter.”
Data compiled by the county’s public
health department show that the home-
less represent a fast-growing share of
heat deaths. In 2014, the county re-
corded seven homeless people who had
died from heat-related causes. By last
year, that number had increased to 61
deaths, more than one-third of the total.
Cara Christ, director of Arizona’s De-
partment of Health Services, said she
didn’t know why heat-related deaths
were rising. She said her office had been
focusing on increasing public aware-
ness about the risks of extreme heat.
In Nevada, public health officials
were similarly unable to explain the
jump in deaths. “We’re trying to figure
out what it is that needs to be done,” said
Rebecca Cruz-Nanez, a health educator
with the Southern Nevada Health Dis-
trict’s Office of Epidemiology and Dis-
ease Surveillance.
Data suggest the number of homeless
people in Las Vegas has fallen since- A better explanation for the in-
crease in heat-related deaths may be the
rising number of older residents, ac-
cording to Erick Bandala, a professor of
environmental science at the Desert Re-
search Institute in Las Vegas.
Not only are older adults more sus-
ceptible to the physical effects of heat,
they’re also more likely to live alone
with no one to check on them.
In a paper published this year, Dr.
Bandala examined the ages of all 437
people who were determined to have
died from heat-related causes in Clark
County, which includes Las Vegas, be-
tween 2007 and 2016. He found that 76
percent of those who had died were old-
er than 50.
As temperatures rise,
so do deaths in 2 states
WASHINGTONBY CHRISTOPHER FLAVELLE
AND NADJA POPOVICHA morning walk near Phoenix. Afternoon highs in Phoenix last summer averaged al-
most 3 degrees hotter than the average for the second half of the 20th century.MATT YORK/ASSOCIATED PRESS200 deaths15010050Arizona
Nevada
1999 2002 2006 2010 2014 2017235
139
THE NEW YORK TIMESIn 2 U.S. states, heat deaths soar
Deaths reported by local coroners as caused by or related to high heat. Data is
excluded for years during which fewer than 10 heat-related deaths were recorded.
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