She may be out of the race, but Warren isn’t finished
I resigned from the Prognosticators Union at about midnight on Election Night 2016, but if you had asked me in mid-October who was going to be the Democratic nominee for president, my answer would have been Elizabeth Warren.
For a time, the liberal Senator from Massachusetts was ahead in the polls and, perhaps more importantly, had begun to gather support from all wings of the Democratic Party. Yet by the end of November, her standing had collapsed and would never recover.
What happened? Yes, sexism certainly happened. But so did health care and Warren’s mishandling of this issue.
And both undercut what had been a promising and often inspiring campaign rooted in problem-solving and reform.
The sexism that mattered was as much indirect as direct, of the “Well, I would vote for a woman but ... “variety. All along, there was an undercurrent of worry among many Democrats that President Trump would weaponize sexism against Warren just as he had against Hillary Clinton. Some also fretted that Warren’s Harvard/ Cambridge side would loom far larger to voters than the Oklahoma roots she invoked regularly and eloquently.
Even when she soared to the lead nationally, a mid-October Quinnipiac survey revealed a clear gender gap, and Warren couldn’t hold onto her lead.
As the “I have a plan for that” candidate, Warren felt obliged to respond by laying out her proposal’s costs and savings in great detail. This only brought further challenge, so she tried to tamp down the controversy by announcing she would not move to pass a single-payer health plan until the third year of her term. She alienated people left and right.
By Thanksgiving, the bottom had fallen out. Quinnipiac had Biden back in the lead at 24% in late November, with Buttigieg surging to 16%, Warren crashing to 14% and Sanders at 13%. The extent of the damage to Warren is underscored by the fact that her share among women was cut in half, to 16%. Her support among very liberal Democrats fell from 50% to 33%, and among the “somewhat liberal,” the party’s center of gravity, from 34% to 17%.
She tried to come back as the unity candidate, standing between Sanders and Biden, but she could never undo the damage done by a policy that, in truth, was never a key weapon in her arsenal.
Yet it would be a shame if Warren’s failure obscured what her candidacy actually achieved. When she was riding high, her popularity reflected something important: a widespread appreciation for her as a solutionist.
She was willing to build a candidacy on detailed initiatives aimed at solving problems voters care about.
Her political reform proposals were state-of-theart and dovetailed well with HR1, the big voting rights and campaign finance bill passed by the Democratic House. Her plan for universal access to child-care answered an enormous need. Her bill of rights for gig economy workers spoke to radical changes in employment. Her emphasis on the dangers of monopoly and the need for new approaches to antitrust were part of a larger trend toward challenging economic concentration. And while her wealth tax aroused controversy, it changed the tax debate.
Yes, sexism hurt Warren and so did her mistakes. She proffered “big structural change” to a party that mostly just wants to beat an abominable incumbent. But her agenda is not going away. And neither is she.
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