Mary Catherine Johnson skipped class to sound out Carly Fiorina and left convinced she’ll be the next president. Randy Sperling drove about an hour to hear the Republican speak and left more unsettled than ever over whether she’s fit for the White House.
The former Hewlett-Packard chief executive has rocketed to second or third place in national polls with strong debate performances and vigorous attacks on front-runner Donald Trump. But her rapid rise also brings new scrutiny to her business background and her bare-bones campaign as she tries to sustain the momentum into the barrage of votes that begin in February.
The rapid rise from the “kids’ table” debate to the top tier of presidential contenders has already brought rewards. Fiorina has raked in new contributions and endorsements. Dozens of reporters record her every move. And crowds have followed, packing luncheons and town halls in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina.
That also means a freshly painted target on Fiorina’s back. She’ll face new attacks from rival campaigns, whether they be overt or covert, and mounting pressure to build her threadbare campaign operation and boost her fundraising if she hopes to outlast the other 14 Republicans maneuvering for the GOP nomination.
Already, her role as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard is squarely in the spotlight. She laid off about 30,000 workers during her tenure at the company, and attacks on her leadership at the tech firm helped tank her race for a California U.S. Senate seat in 2010.
Trump has led the charge, saying that the "company is a disaster and continues to be a disaster" and that her decision to merge Hewlett-Packard with Compaq was a "terrible deal, and it really led to the destruction of the company."
Fiorina is reminded of that criticism even at campaign stops with largely friendly crowds. At a town hall event in Spartanburg last week, Fiorina bristled when a man who worked for a local tech firm asked her about her stormy tenure, saying that Democrats and Trump were the only ones to question her time at Hewlett-Packard.
“My track record speaks for itself. I was recruited by the board of HP to save a company that was falling further and further behind,” she said. “I led through the worst technology recession in years. Many of our strongest competitors literally disappeared. We saved 80,000 jobs.”
From ‘token bimbo’ to presidential candidate
Fiorina connects with audiences with a mix of self-deprecating humor and sharp-elbowed jabs at the Obama administration.
She tells audiences of her rise from secretary to CEO, a journey she says began when two male colleagues challenged her to push herself to management. It was an often bumpy road. She was called a “token bimbo,” she tells crowds to gasps. Her first business meeting, she says, was in a strip club. But it left her with an unforgettable lesson.
“The highest call of leadership is to unlock potentials in others,” Fiorina said. “And I now believe that it’s time to unlock potential (of) others.”
Amid the crowd-pleasing rhetoric, though, her prose can be short on specifics. At one recent event, she pivoted a question about the cost of mental health drugs to an attack on the Affordable Care Act. She transformed a later query about reducing the national debt into a broadside at the Internal Revenue Service.
“The 73,000 pages on the federal tax code needs to get down to three,” she said, offering up a favorite applause line. “It’s crazy that we need to hire experts to prevent the government from taking money away from us.”
That earned her a rousing ovation. But it also left some would-be supporters grasping for more.
“She didn’t get into any specifics — about what she would do to improve health care, what she would do to reduce the national debt. She didn’t say anything to me that hit me,” said Sperling, a Charlotte, N.C., Republican who now favors Trump. “I came here prepared to be dynamically impressed. But she didn’t say anything to make me change my mind.”
Still, others found the broad strokes appealing. Sara Souler, a Greenville student studying to be a special education teacher, said she believed Fiorina’s pledge to forge solutions to seemingly intractable problems such as the debate over illegal immigration.
“I’m just as frustrated as she was that we’ve been told the same things over and over again with no solutions. For as long as I’ve lived, we’ve heard the same from politicians,” said Souler, who is 21. “I like that she wasn’t talking in specifics, that she kept to broader themes.”
An abortion fight
Fiorina began her rapid rise in the polls with her passionate attack on Planned Parenthood on Sept. 16, when she urged President Barack Obama, in vivid detail, to watch the undercover videos circulating of a meeting involving the organization.
“Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” she said.
Abortion rights groups accuse Fiorina of misrepresenting the videos. Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement last week that “there is no polite way to say this: Carly Fiorina is lying.”
“There is no video showing anything like what she claims,” he added. “It’s just totally false, no matter how many times she repeats it.”
Fiorina has continued to press the attack. In Spartanburg, she visited a Christian pregnancy center to thank doctors and nurses caring for patients, telling reporters that Democrats who spend time and resources “protecting fish, frogs and flies” are hypocrites for not also protecting the unborn.
About an hour later, she recounted that trip to a banquet hall in Greenville packed with more than 300 people. As she spoke, Lynn McKay nodded and murmured encouragement. McKay, who owns a janitorial supply company in nearby Anderson, complained about stifling regulations that hamper her firm’s growth.
“There’s still time to make a decision, but this certainly helped sway me,” McKay said. “She’s logical. And she can actually get something done.”
Now that Fiorina has vaulted into the upper echelon of GOP contenders, though, she faces a different sort of concerns.
The few staffers she has spread out across the nation will be severely tested in the next few months, and the super PAC backing her bid is trying to fill in the gaps. It has six staffers in South Carolina and recently hired an Atlanta politico to handle press operations.
Fiorina's sluggish fundraising is another growing concern. She reported raising $1.7 million for her campaign in her most recent disclosure this summer, and her super PAC — CARLY for America — took in about $3.5 million. Jeb Bush and his allied super PAC, by comparison, raised about $120 million over the same period.
They will need to hunker down to keep voters such as Mary Catherine Johnson in the fold. Johnson skipped her biology course at Converse College to catch Fiorina’s town hall meeting, and she left with a new favorite candidate.
"I came in undecided. But her speech changed my mind," Johnson said. "And we're all proud a woman's running for president. Beyonce says, 'We run the world.' And we need a woman in charge."
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