Elizabeth Warren, once a front-runner, drops out
MASS.» Sen. Elizabeth CAMBRIDGE, Warren entered the 2020 presidential race with expansive plans to use the federal government to remake American society, pressing to strip power and wealth from a moneyed class that she saw as fundamentally corrupting the country’s economic and political order.
She exited Thursday after her avalanche of progressive policy proposals, which briefly elevated her to front-runner status last fall, failed to
attract a broader political coalition in a Democratic Party increasingly, if not singularly, focused on defeating President Donald Trump.
Her departure means a Democratic field that began as the most diverse in U.S. history — and included six women — is now essentially down to two white men: former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Warren said that from the start, she had been told there were only two true lanes in the 2020 contest: a liberal one dominated by Sanders, 78, and a moderate one led by Biden, 77.
“I thought that wasn’t right,” Warren said in front of her house in Cambridge as she suspended her campaign, “but evidently I was wrong.”
Although her vision energized many liberals — the unlikely chant of “big, structural change” rang out at her rallies — it did not find a wide audience among the party’s working-class and diverse base. Now her potential endorsement is highly sought. Sanders and Biden have spoken with her in the days since Super Tuesday losses sealed her political fate, although she revealed precious little of her intentions Thursday.
“I need some space around this,” she said.
Warren’s impact on the race was far greater than just the outcome for her own candidacy. Her policy plans drove the agenda. She effectively pushed former Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York, a centrist billionaire, out of the race with a dominant debate performance last month.
And her ability to raise more than $100 million and fully fund a presidential campaign without holding high-dollar fundraisers demonstrated that other candidates, beyond Sanders and his intensely loyal small-dollar donors, could do so in the future.
Warren’s political demise was a death by a thousand cuts, not a dramatic implosion but a steady decline. In the fall, most national polls showed that Warren was the national pacesetter in the Democratic field. By December, she had fallen to the edge of the top tier, wounded by an October debate during which her opponents relentlessly attacked her, particularly on her embrace of “Medicare for All.”
She invested heavily in the early states, with a ground game that was the envy of her rivals. But it did not pay off: In Iowa, where she had bet much of her candidacy, she had to take out a $3 million line of credit before the caucuses to ensure she could pay her bills in late January. She wound up in a disappointing third place.
Warren slid to fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada, and to fifth in South Carolina. By Super Tuesday, her campaign was effectively over — with the final blow losing her home state, Massachusetts.
The California results strikingly laid bare the demographic culde-sac her candidacy had become as Warren struggled to win voters beyond college-educated white people, in particular white women. She was poised to win delegates in only a handful of highly educated enclaves such as San Francisco, Santa Monica and West Hollywood.
Although the campaign failed to generate the widespread backing necessary to win the nomination, Warren retained a core of fierce loyalists dedicated to her promise of wholesale change.
Her selfie lines were filled with well-wishers — young girls seeking her trademark pinkie promise (“I’m running for president because that’s what girls do”), cutouts of Warren’s likeness, and tattoos of her adopted slogan: “Nevertheless, she persisted.” When her staff gathered Thursday, many were clad in liberty green, the color her campaign adopted to symbolize its togetherness.
“One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinkie promises,” a visibly emotional Warren said, describing the “trap” of gender for female candidates.
“If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ ” Warren said. “If you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’ ”