Warren drops out of presidential race
WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race Thursday after failing to unite the Democratic Party’s left and right flanks behind her progressive policy agenda, the latest shakeup in a fast-moving battle for the 2020 nomination.
Warren said she was not ready to endorse either of the two remaining major candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“Let’s take a deep breath and take a little time with that,” she said outside her home in Cambridge, Mass. “We don’t have to decide at this minute.”
She is the fifth Democrat to bow out in the last week, and her departure leaves the field, which started with six women running for president, with two white male front-runners.
Asked if she believed gender was a factor in her repeated losses, Warren called it a “trap question for every woman” in politics.
“If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’” she said. “And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’”
Reflecting on why she thought her campaign did not end up garnering more support — she failed to win any of the first 18 states to hold primaries or caucuses, including her home state — Warren said she found no political opening between the established candidates of the party’s left and center.
“I was told at the beginning of this whole undertaking that there are two lanes — a progressive lane that Bernie Sanders is the incumbent for and a moderate lane that Joe Biden is the incumbent for, and there’s no room for anyone else in this,” Warren said. “I thought that wasn’t right but evidently I was wrong.”
Warren spoke to Biden and Sanders in separate phone calls Wednesday.
She will face heavy pressure from Sanders’ backers to support him against Biden, who saw his campaign surge into the lead Tuesday after rapid consolidation of support from moderates and African Americans, the Democratic establishment and others who worry that Sanders is too far left to beat President Donald Trump.
Warren has a longstanding friendship and ideological kinship with Sanders. But she is also a pragmatic politician who wants Trump defeated and whose top priority is advancing her ambitious agenda.
Biden was the beneficiary of one of Warren’s most important accomplishments this year. Her evisceration of billionaire Michael R.
Bloomberg in recent debates effectively sidelined one of Biden’s biggest threats, and the former New York mayor quit the race Wednesday.
It is not clear that all of Warren’s backers would go to Sanders if she does endorse him. She has also attracted older, suburban supporters who may be more comfortable with Biden’s calls for more traditional Democratic reforms.
The senior senator from Massachusetts briefly led the 2020 field last year, but she suffered crushing defeats in the first states to vote and could not recover. She ultimately suffered an embarrassing third place finish in her home state on Super Tuesday.
A powerful voice in progressive politics even before she was elected to the Senate in 2012, Warren had courted mainstream Democrats with an impassioned plea for “big structural change.” She offered detailed policy plans backed by a fervent promise to fight for them without apology.
But the soaring cost of her plans, especially her proposal to provide free universal healthcare and eliminate private medical insurance, led to growing concerns that Trump and his allies would portray the former Harvard bankruptcy law professor as radical.
Many of the party’s progressives, in turn, viewed her proposals for phased healthcare plans and her efforts to reconcile the math as signals that she would retreat if elected.
Sanders, who avoided explaining how he would pay for universal healthcare, benefited from Warren’s stumbles, overtaking her as the leading progressive candidate in the race.
Those hurdles were compounded by concerns, which her supporters viewed as sexist, that Warren would repel white working-class voters who helped tip the 2016 election for Trump against another woman, Hillary Clinton.