For Warren, how far left is too far?
Sen. Warren’s sweeping proposal has some centrist Democrats worried
Presidential candidate’s sweeping healthcare proposal worries some centrist Democrats.
WASHINGTON — Among her many proposals, an interviewer asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, which three would she like to sign into law first?
Her anti-corruption plan, an end to the Senate filibuster, and a wealth tax, the Massachusetts senator responded Thursday to Angela Rye, the liberal activist and CNN commentator.
Notice something missing?
Warren never wanted healthcare to dominate her campaign. After a week in which her detailed, sweeping “Medicare for all” plan has done exactly that, she’d still prefer to focus elsewhere.
The issue threatens significant harm to her presidential ambitions. Her inability to escape it provides a clear lesson in the power that activists wield to box in candidates on issues they care about.
The activist trap
In 2018, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) gave clear instructions about healthcare to her candidates: Put Republicans on the defensive; focus on GOP efforts to wipe out protections for people with preexisting health problems; don’t get drawn into a debate over Medicare for all.
That strategy worked: Democrats swept to a majority in the House, capturing 40 seats — one of the largest electoral waves since World War II — and healthcare played a major role.
That game plan remains available to the Democratic presidential candidates; the Trump administration has given them plenty of ammunition. For example, administration lawyers in July asked a federal court to declare the Affordable Care Act invalid — protections for preexisting conditions and all — and a decision in that case could come any day.
Instead, the candidates have largely done the opposite of what Pelosi recommended. They’ve occasionally attacked Trump over his efforts to take health coverage away from millions of potential voters, but they’ve more often gone after one another on their respective plans to expand coverage.
The path they’ve taken illustrates a key dynamic that shapes primary campaigns, often regardless of candidates’ wishes, says Patrick J. Egan, a political scientist at New York University who studies the way parties define themselves to voters through ownership of specific issues.
“Both parties’ coalitions include single-issue activists” who “propel policy agendas and major legislation that contributes substantially to the party’s brand,” Egan said in an email.
That can help a party cement its position because the public generally trusts each party more on the issues it “owns,” such as “terrorism and crime for the Republicans and the environment and healthcare for the Democrats,” he said.
But that can be a twoedged sword. Activists “wield an immense amount of influence in party primaries” because they can help marshal volunteers, grassroots donors and energy, Egan noted.
At the same time, however, they push policies that are “often more extreme than the public wants” — huge tax cuts for the wealthy, in the case of Republicans, for example, and Medicare for all in the current Democratic debate.
Warren’s challenges
What’s the evidence that Medicare for all is “more extreme” than voters want? Some of the best information comes from a new study of voters in four key electoral battlegrounds — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — that the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Cook Political Report released Thursday.
Trump carried three of those states in 2016 and almost surely needs to win them again for reelection. Currently, he’s deeply unpopular in the states he won: 57% disapprove of him in Wisconsin, 58% in Michigan and 61% in Pennsylvania, the survey found. Across the four states, half of voters say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump.
The poll also found that Democrats have an edge in enthusiasm in those states, and Trump is the biggest motivator for voters.
Another piece of good news for Democrats: Healthcare ranks with the economy as the most important issue for voters in all four states, and a majority of voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the issue.
The bad news? A majority of voters in those states also say that a national Medicare for all plan that would eliminate private insurance — the sort of plan Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders advocate — would be a “bad idea”: 56% in Pennsylvania, 58% in Michigan, 59% in Wisconsin and 60% in Minnesota.
Even among Democratic voters, Medicare for all is not a top priority: About 60% of Democrats in the four states call it a good idea, but that’s notably less than the support for proposals such as a path to citizenship for residents in the country illegally or a ban on assault weapons.
Warren’s a smart politician, and for months she steered as clear of the healthcare debate as she could. Even as her advocacy of highly specific policy ideas fueled her steady rise in the Democratic race, she demurred when pressed on the specifics of healthcare.
“No one’s raised it,” she told reporters early this year when asked why she hadn’t released a specific healthcare plan. The consistent message from Warren’s campaign was that Medicare for all was “Bernie’s issue,” not theirs.
But Warren’s desire to focus on her agenda conflicted with another imperative — securing her position as the favorite candidate of activist, liberal Democrats. While she and Sanders have avoided attacking each other, she’s also carefully avoided any situation in which Sanders could claim ground to her left on a toptier issue.
And on this issue, activists of the sort Egan described have demanded specifics. In Warren’s case, that’s meant unveiling a plan this month that tripled the amount of new federal spending she has called for — going from an already big $10 trillion over a decade to $30 trillion, an amount that would increase the federal budget by 50%.
That’s led to a weeklong panic attack among many in the Democratic establishment who fear their leading candidate has locked herself into a losing proposition.
Democratic strategists believe Trump remains highly vulnerable — many Republicans privately agree. Tuesday’s off-year elections showed continued warning signs for the GOP, especially in suburbs.
But a candidate too far to the left could give Trump the ability to persuade those suburban voters to stick with him, the worry goes.
There’s no way to know currently whether Warren really falls into that “too far left” category, as backers of former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg assert. What we know is that Medicare for all gives her a big burden in those key battleground states, where a majority of independents and about half of Democrats say they prefer “a candidate who works to make moderate changes” rather than one who “works to make bold changes.”
Issue advocates give parties the energy and enthusiasm they need to get voters off their couches and out to the polls. That’s a big upside. They can also produce a major downside. Right now, that’s what a lot of Democrats are afraid of.