PROGRESSIVE PAIR SPLINTERS AS RACE HEATS UP
Sanders-Warren falling out leads to doubts about Democrat party unity.
For a year, they offered almost nothing but praise for each other in public, he paying tribute to her populism, she initially adopting his health care plan, and each supporting the other against moderates in the Democratic presidential debates and rebuking reporters who sought to stoke any suppressed rivalry.
The alliance between senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders was an extension of their rapport in the Capitol, which was more about mutual interest than personal friendship, but it remained largely intact through 2019 despite highs and lows for each candidate — even as they competed for the same set of voters.
But that relationship has now ruptured in extraordinary fashion, over whether he told her in a private meeting in 2018 that a woman couldn’t defeat President Donald Trump. The breach runs a real risk of damaging liberal hopes of ultimately uniting Democratic Party factions around a progressive nominee in 2020.
A sizeable, loud swath of left-wing activists are now furious at Ms Warren for criticising and challenging Mr Sanders over gender and for employing hardball campaign tactics this week. Meanwhile, some progressive women and backers of Ms Warren are angry at Mr Sanders for disputing her and for not denouncing the #NeverWarren campaign by some of his online supporters.
Both candidates and their advisers have come to believe that the other camp is fighting dirty, according to campaign officials and surrogates. They have not spoken since their postdebate confrontation in Iowa on Tuesday night, and many liberals are starting to feel a painful sense that they’ve been here before.
“We can’t relive 2016,” said Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, referring to the split between pro-Sanders liberals and other Democrats who wanted the party to unite behind his onetime rival, Hillary Clinton.
Sanders advisers believe Ms Warren has hurt herself with the accusations but also put them in a no-win situation, in which they are unable to fully strike back for fear of appearing insensitive but risk incurring damage of their own without rebutting her claims. Ms Warren’s decisions at Tuesday’s debate to openly challenge Mr Sanders’ denial of that remark, and then confront him after the debate and refuse to shake his hand before the cameras, have also led Sanders supporters to believe that she is acting underhandedly.
On Thursday, a handful of progressive groups, distraught over the tensions between the two leading liberal candidates, scrambled to tamp down the tensions, urging the two senators to halt their “crossfire” lest a moderate benefit from the hostilities.
But even if one of them claims the nomination, the rupture between the two senators could be difficult to repair because of the nature of their two coalitions: If Mr Sanders emerges as the nominee, he may find it difficult to energise the female Democrats who were already uneasy with him because of the 2016 race. And should Ms Warren become the party’s standard-bearer, she could find it hard to win back the most fervent Sanders backers, who hardly needed any further evidence to claim the nominating process is stacked against him.
Mr Sanders’ closest adviser, Jeff Weaver, described the two candidates as “senatorial friends, as that term is understood in Washington” and portrayed their recent squabble as a blip. “It’s not the height of their relationship, but I’m sure it will be fine,” Mr Weaver said.
Describing what Mr Sanders had told him about the 2018 conversation, Mr Weaver said they discussed the “challenges of women running in the era of Trump.” And he said it was Ms Warren who broached the subject of whether a woman could run against Mr Trump when the two met in private in December 2018. “She brought it up,” Mr Weaver said.
Yet this week’s report about that gathering, and Ms Warren’s assertion that Mr Sanders had indeed told her a woman couldn’t win, was only the match that sparked a conflagration that had been slowly building. The confrontation at the debate in Des Moines may have crystallised into a few tense moments on camera, but it had been simmering for more than a year. It can be traced to the weeks after a dinner at Ms Warren’s condominium in December 2018, when a decade-long alliance between New England progressives with a shared contempt for political artifice first became strained by their mutual ambition.
Ms Warren and her top advisers believed Mr Sanders might not run for president, and that there was at least a chance the then-77year-old Vermont senator would accept political emeritus status and crown Ms Warren as the new leader of the left. At the same time, Mr Sanders’ supporters viewed Ms Warren as politically damaged, perhaps beyond repair, by her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry.
Yet both of those assumptions, which could have doubled as hopes, turned out to be misguided. By the end of 2019, it was clear these two liberals were both blocking the other from consolidating the left in the Democratic primary — and that their fragile peace could not last long. “This was their frustration boiling over,” said former Rep Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who has known both senators for years. “She’s frustrated by his rigidity and being attacked by his people for her effort to make what they both agree on politically more sellable. And he’s understandably resentful that she comes along and becomes the darling of some on the left for advocating ideas he’s been advocating since long before her.”
Now, after months of Mr Sanders instructing his aides not to be critical of Ms Warren and Ms Warren refusing to utter anything negative about Mr Sanders, the two are feeling upset and betrayed, allies said. Tensions between the two have slowly grown since they entered the White House race, as they both pursue progressive voters and endorsements from left-wing leaders and groups.